A Movie Nearly Every Night: Poltergeist

Poltergeist (1982)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Starring: Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight

image courtesy of www.paranomaland.com

I don't have any solid screen shots of this one because it was on Bluray and the cousin/roommate had never seen it before. It was better to let him watch it straight than watch it while fussing with the Nikon. I borrowed the above picture from someone else (http://paranormaland.com/Poltergeistthecurse.html).

Spoiler alert -- although if you haven't seen this yet go rent it now and then read on. It's good. Really good. And here's why:

I've seen this a number of times -- one very memorable time on Halloween with my mom -- and every time I see it there's some new layer to discover. I mean, sure, it's a scary ghost movie and it works that way, but the weird family dynamic and the crazy set design (what's with those stairs?) and the strange ambient sounds just make it so much more than a simple fright flick.

You need a Point A? Start with the obvious birthing of the mother and daughter and work out from there. What's going on with the levels of motherhood -- the mom, the parapsychologist, the medium? What's up with the men? Steven is both a tool that brings about the destruction and a helpless victim of it. The women do everything -- except the teenage daughter whose only purpose seems to be to show that Steven knocked up Diane in high school (mom - 36; daughter - 16) and that they've spent the last 16 years working up to the dream home and the respectable life. But they still roll their own joints, drink and cry a lot, and after the son gets eaten by the tree they leave him standing there alone while they freak out about Carol Anne. What exactly are their priorities? And when the son later rips into that clown, isn't he just doing what his father was unable to do?

There are comments on violence, death and war, generational sexual mistakes, men requiring the use of remote controls and women using the television set controls (why can they just manually change the channel to watch the football game? Why do they have to fight with the remotes?), and really creative uses of light.

Sure, yeah, if you want to get scared, there's plenty of that too. But if you want to make a study of the social structure of a suburban community, I recommend it.

In the end you've got to wonder what the other neighbors are hiding.