Poltergeist (1982)

Movie: Poltergeist (1982), directed by Tobe Hooper

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 8.19 miles, 8’55”/mile, 01:13:03 (recovery run)

 

Nostalgia trip! After having watched two very new movies, I had a hankering for something a bit longer in the fang. Poltergeist isn’t exactly old (I’m ten years older than it is, which means SHUT UP), but it holds a special place in my heart because I’m pretty sure it’s the first horror movie I ever saw.

 

And I’m aware that some horror fans might argue that Poltergeist isn’t even a horror movie, despite the legendary Tobe Hooper at the helm—which is a fair point, actually, because there’s nary a whiff of Hooper’s classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in a Poltergeist sniff test. If I didn’t know he directed it, I might well have thought Poltergeist to be a Spielberg flick, given the budget, the score, and the Spielberg-penned story. The plot is simple: there’s this perfect American suburban family of five, they start experiencing Weird Things™ around the house, eventually the youngest gets taken by bad things on the other side, and the rest of the family works with paranormal investigators and cinema’s most awesome psychic to bring her back. Poltergeist is ultimately a feel-good film about the bonds of family. It’s far more heartwarming than bloodcurdling. It’s rated PG, for cryin’ out Pete’s sake.

 

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t at least a half-dozen solid scares in it, ranging from the creepy (( [spoilers] )

, for example) to the gory (( [spoilers] )

). I would posit that—and this image has been so profoundly entrenched in popular culture that I cannot possibly be spoiling it for anyone—a five-year-old girl sitting in front of a TV set tuned to static and having a conversation, answering personal questions that no one else can hear, is one of the single ookiest moments in scary movie history. And that’s how this movie opens.

 

So yeah, when I saw this on HBO or ONTV or whatever at my grandparents’ house at the ripe old age of, say, eleven, it scared the freakin’ PANTS off me. Prior to Poltergeist, I think my only exposure to elements of cinematic horror would have been the impaled dude, the screaming mummies, and the melting Nazi faces from Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite movie when I was eight or nine and one I saw maybe a dozen times in the theater. The actual horrific bits of Poltergeist aren’t all that much worse when taken out of context, but when presented along with a compelling ghost story, yep, you better believe I was scared.

 

How does it stack up some good-lord-nearly-40-odd years later while running on a treadmill? It’s less scary. And it’s scarier. Because I’m coming back to Poltergeist as a dad (you know I’m a dad, right? This entire blog is literally a dad joke taken to unreasonable extremes) and seeing anew that the reason Poltergeist is not necessarily a horror flick for horror fans is because it’s a horror flick for middle-aged parents in suburbia. It’s all about how maybe the perfect and safe life you painstakingly built WILL NOT PROTECT YOU. And it does that by tapping into a specific vein of fear that many people probably never experience until they have a kid. Poltergeist tries to be the cinematic equivalent of checking to see if your sleeping baby is still breathing and, for just that fraction of a second, not being sure.

 

If you’ve never seen it, it deserves a couple of hours of your time. If, like me, you haven’t seen it in a while (and especially if you had kids in the meantime), it’s well worth a revisit. There’s plenty to like, even—or especially—for people who don’t usually dig horror films. It’s genuinely funny. It’s heartwarming. It raises some interesting points about the perception of safety in suburban life—and who suffers to afford others that illusion. And it’s got the scariest clown I’ve seen outside of Art the Clown in Terrifier, and maybe Pennywise.