The combination of raw horror legend Tobe Hooper and cinematic titan Steven Spielberg is a recipe for something special.
Poltergeist is the story of a suburban family living on a housing development. Youngest child Carol Anne talks to the untuned static on the televisions and soon things become overtly paranormal and threatening.
This movie does several things that I love.
First, it escalates while cutting out the tiresome beat of the horror being disbelieved or explained away for an extended time. The ghosts are proven early in the film and they make themselves clear to any who will witness them, but there's much more to see after the characters clue in. All of the paranormal experts called in are well-intentioned and helpful, even though the first team has never seen anything as certifiably haunted as the Freelings' house and the psychic is small and high-pitched. Despite their initially disconcerting vibes, they know their work—the latter is genuinely badass. The scares have everything you want and then some—ghost effects, gore, monsters, surrealism, and huge-scale catastrophic terror. It's a haunted house taken to a very satisfying blockbuster extreme.
I love the film's emotional rawness. The family dynamic fuels the pain and terror the characters go through once Carol Anne is trapped in the spirit world, able to speak to her family while neither can see each other. It's perfect that we never see the other side, as being stuck with the helpless family makes it urgent, tragic, and frightening, especially when Carol Anne is frightened.
The film does a good job building up, too. The ghosts' source is foreshadowed in stages and some scares are set up over time. Like The Exorcist, the film plays with the haunted bedroom by keeping it unseen for long enough to make you fear its next scenes. Still, the film also subverts things nicely when the climax is undone by the real climax—it feels surprising but correct. It wasn't really finished, and what we get next is more thrilling and complete so the fakeout doesn't feel unwanted.
There's not much I can criticize beyond some dated visual effects. This film is a classic that delivers a thrilling horror show with human emotion running through.
A real movie of a movie with horror and heart to spare.
The combination of raw horror legend Tobe Hooper and cinematic titan Steven Spielberg is a recipe for something special.
Poltergeist is the story of a suburban family living on a housing development. Youngest child Carol Anne talks to the untuned static on the televisions and soon things become overtly paranormal and threatening.
This movie does several things that I love.
First, it escalates while cutting out the tiresome beat of the horror being disbelieved or explained away for an extended time. The ghosts are proven early in the film and they make themselves clear to any who will witness them, but there's much more to see after the characters clue in. All of the paranormal experts called in are well-intentioned and helpful, even though the first team has never seen anything as certifiably haunted as the Freelings' house and the psychic is small and high-pitched. Despite their initially disconcerting vibes, they know their work—the latter is genuinely badass. The scares have everything you want and then some—ghost effects, gore, monsters, surrealism, and huge-scale catastrophic terror. It's a haunted house taken to a very satisfying blockbuster extreme.
I love the film's emotional rawness. The family dynamic fuels the pain and terror the characters go through once Carol Anne is trapped in the spirit world, able to speak to her family while neither can see each other. It's perfect that we never see the other side, as being stuck with the helpless family makes it urgent, tragic, and frightening, especially when Carol Anne is frightened.
The film does a good job building up, too. The ghosts' source is foreshadowed in stages and some scares are set up over time. Like The Exorcist, the film plays with the haunted bedroom by keeping it unseen for long enough to make you fear its next scenes. Still, the film also subverts things nicely when the climax is undone by the real climax—it feels surprising but correct. It wasn't really finished, and what we get next is more thrilling and complete so the fakeout doesn't feel unwanted.
There's not much I can criticize beyond some dated visual effects. This film is a classic that delivers a thrilling horror show with human emotion running through.