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Why Poltergeist is my favourite ever horror movie
Poltergeist was made in 1982. I was ten. It was probably two or three years later when I saw it for the first time: it would have been a video rental. Horror movies were a staple of my childhood. I started watching Hammer House of Horror when I couldn't sleep at nights when I was about seven. We got our first VCR in the days before video rentals required an age-related certificate and I saw most of the old classics: Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, The Exorcist as well as a couple of the movies that were later banned when the BBFC started certificating video releases.
Very few films from those days frightened me. There are not many I even remember. I remember one Hammer film featuring an African fetish (doll, not sexual); I remember An American Werewolf in London mostly for the bad joke the guy in the pub tells before everything goes bad ("Remember the Alamo"); and I remember Nightmare on Elm Street as the movie that made me give up on the genre for good...or so I said at the time.
Poltergeist is one of the few horror movies of my childhood that actually scared me. Over the past couple of years it's been shown regularly on Film Four and I keep missing it. So I finally bought it on Blu Ray DVD (bringing my total Blu Ray collection to three - it's huge!).
Rewatching over the past couple of days, I was struck by how completely outside the usual conventions of the genre this film is. Read a summary and it sounds like a typical haunted house movie. It's even got a couple of sequels which, as is traditional, are not especially good. It's got the usual quota of screams and special effects and made-you-jump moments. And yet...
1. Nobody dies.
No, really. There is one very gory scene where a man's face is torn off, but it's an hallucination. He is fine. In other scenes nasty things happen to people and there are some minor injuries but the only actual fatality in the movie is Tweety the canary, who apparently died of natural causes. Even the obligatory money-loving-boss who is nominally the bad guy is still alive and unhurt at the end.
You don't need a high body count or tortuous deaths to make a scary movie. Here's proof.
2. The ordinary things are the most frightening.
The boy's toy clown does nothing threatening until the very end, yet the scenes of it just sitting there in the dark, the way inanimate toys usually do, is seriously creepy. The tree is more directly threatening, but still: by day it's just a tree for the kids to climb. And then there's the TV set.
Making ordinary objects frightening will always scare an audience more. You don't go home to a house full of ghosts. But you've probably got a closet at home, or a toy that looks really spooky when the light is just-so. You've certainly got a TV set and a kitchen. If you don't have a tree outside your house you've most likely got trees around somewhere.
It's a film that turns the real world creepy.
3. It's a movie in which women are people.
Not only does the film include multiple women characters who are capable of having a conversation that's not about men, it's these women who carry the film. Even better, the sixteen year old girl explicitly has a sex life, but this is not prominent on screen, just there in dialogue. The lead role is an attractive woman but she is not displayed like a sexual object. She and her husband clearly have a healthy sex life but there are no sex scenes, and she doesn't run around in her lingerie. Her hair and makeup are not always perfect (although I'll admit she has the best bed-hair I've ever seen).
It's difficult to explain how hugely refreshing this is, particularly in the horror genre. If you get it, I don't need to explain.
4. It's about love.
Fundamentally, the film is about a family who love each other, not the disfunctional relationships that so many film makers thing essential to drama. Mom and Dad have a healthy, loving relationship. They are good parents. The teenage sister isn't overly rebellious. Okay, maybe it's sickeningly whitebread, but I don't find it unrealistic. I saw families like this all around me when I was a teenager falling in love with this film.
In the film it's the mother who puts herself most directly in danger to save her daughter, and there's a strong emphasis on maternal instinct. But her love for her daughter isn't the only love in the story: we see her with all three children, we see the father with the kids and there's a marriage at the centre of it all. Most of all there's a sense of how completely out of their depth these people are, the reluctance to rely on the experts, a healthy scepticism, and real fear of the strange things happening, yet it's love that holds them together and keeps them going through it all to save the little girl.
After so many horror movies in which the marriage is falling apart or the couple are estranged or there's infidelity - all cheap efforts to inject tension where it's not needed - it's fantastic to see a film that puts the dramatic tension where it belongs.
5. There's a very slow build up to the actual horror.
Here's something modern horror films have forgotten how to do. Nowadays a horror movie has to be as short as possible, and pack in the maximum amount of gore and scares. They lose the perfect pacing of a film like this one. Stuff begins slowly. It's a bit weird, but it's fun. Special. When things turn into horror, the change is abrupt and shocking, all the more so because the slow start gives us a chance to care about this family. Once the horror begins, new stuff keeps on coming.
Yet, with very few exceptions, it's all very realistic. You'd think a movie like this would have dated in 25 years; instead I think the modern paranormal "reality shows" like Most Haunted have given Poltergeist an even deeper sense of reality than it might have had when it was first released. Much of what happens may or may not be "real": for example, when the tree crashes through the window and tries to swallow the boy, is that really happening, or is it the terrified child's perception? The face-stripping scene is as gory as it gets, but is clearly an hallucination, and many other events have an unreal quality. The things the paranormal investigators do in the movie are just what real paranormal investigators would do and there's an outstanding attention to detail: for example, when the ghosts come down the stairs and it's captured on film, the film playback does not show exactly the same thing as "we" saw the first time.
The result is that when the story reaches its climax, the unreality of what's happening doesn't register. It just seems like a natural progression and all the more frightening for it.
Lastly: the print of the film was remastered for Blu-Ray and it really shows. I don't think the effects were re-done but there's probably some digital enhancement. The quality of this new print is fantastic. I can't comment on the sound so much as there's too much ambient noise in my house for me to judge properly, but the picture is pin-sharp and has real depth, and the special effects are actually just as good as modern CGI. Totally recommended...and just what I needed this week.
Very few films from those days frightened me. There are not many I even remember. I remember one Hammer film featuring an African fetish (doll, not sexual); I remember An American Werewolf in London mostly for the bad joke the guy in the pub tells before everything goes bad ("Remember the Alamo"); and I remember Nightmare on Elm Street as the movie that made me give up on the genre for good...or so I said at the time.
Poltergeist is one of the few horror movies of my childhood that actually scared me. Over the past couple of years it's been shown regularly on Film Four and I keep missing it. So I finally bought it on Blu Ray DVD (bringing my total Blu Ray collection to three - it's huge!).
Rewatching over the past couple of days, I was struck by how completely outside the usual conventions of the genre this film is. Read a summary and it sounds like a typical haunted house movie. It's even got a couple of sequels which, as is traditional, are not especially good. It's got the usual quota of screams and special effects and made-you-jump moments. And yet...
1. Nobody dies.
No, really. There is one very gory scene where a man's face is torn off, but it's an hallucination. He is fine. In other scenes nasty things happen to people and there are some minor injuries but the only actual fatality in the movie is Tweety the canary, who apparently died of natural causes. Even the obligatory money-loving-boss who is nominally the bad guy is still alive and unhurt at the end.
You don't need a high body count or tortuous deaths to make a scary movie. Here's proof.
2. The ordinary things are the most frightening.
The boy's toy clown does nothing threatening until the very end, yet the scenes of it just sitting there in the dark, the way inanimate toys usually do, is seriously creepy. The tree is more directly threatening, but still: by day it's just a tree for the kids to climb. And then there's the TV set.
Making ordinary objects frightening will always scare an audience more. You don't go home to a house full of ghosts. But you've probably got a closet at home, or a toy that looks really spooky when the light is just-so. You've certainly got a TV set and a kitchen. If you don't have a tree outside your house you've most likely got trees around somewhere.
It's a film that turns the real world creepy.
3. It's a movie in which women are people.
Not only does the film include multiple women characters who are capable of having a conversation that's not about men, it's these women who carry the film. Even better, the sixteen year old girl explicitly has a sex life, but this is not prominent on screen, just there in dialogue. The lead role is an attractive woman but she is not displayed like a sexual object. She and her husband clearly have a healthy sex life but there are no sex scenes, and she doesn't run around in her lingerie. Her hair and makeup are not always perfect (although I'll admit she has the best bed-hair I've ever seen).
It's difficult to explain how hugely refreshing this is, particularly in the horror genre. If you get it, I don't need to explain.
4. It's about love.
Fundamentally, the film is about a family who love each other, not the disfunctional relationships that so many film makers thing essential to drama. Mom and Dad have a healthy, loving relationship. They are good parents. The teenage sister isn't overly rebellious. Okay, maybe it's sickeningly whitebread, but I don't find it unrealistic. I saw families like this all around me when I was a teenager falling in love with this film.
In the film it's the mother who puts herself most directly in danger to save her daughter, and there's a strong emphasis on maternal instinct. But her love for her daughter isn't the only love in the story: we see her with all three children, we see the father with the kids and there's a marriage at the centre of it all. Most of all there's a sense of how completely out of their depth these people are, the reluctance to rely on the experts, a healthy scepticism, and real fear of the strange things happening, yet it's love that holds them together and keeps them going through it all to save the little girl.
After so many horror movies in which the marriage is falling apart or the couple are estranged or there's infidelity - all cheap efforts to inject tension where it's not needed - it's fantastic to see a film that puts the dramatic tension where it belongs.
5. There's a very slow build up to the actual horror.
Here's something modern horror films have forgotten how to do. Nowadays a horror movie has to be as short as possible, and pack in the maximum amount of gore and scares. They lose the perfect pacing of a film like this one. Stuff begins slowly. It's a bit weird, but it's fun. Special. When things turn into horror, the change is abrupt and shocking, all the more so because the slow start gives us a chance to care about this family. Once the horror begins, new stuff keeps on coming.
Yet, with very few exceptions, it's all very realistic. You'd think a movie like this would have dated in 25 years; instead I think the modern paranormal "reality shows" like Most Haunted have given Poltergeist an even deeper sense of reality than it might have had when it was first released. Much of what happens may or may not be "real": for example, when the tree crashes through the window and tries to swallow the boy, is that really happening, or is it the terrified child's perception? The face-stripping scene is as gory as it gets, but is clearly an hallucination, and many other events have an unreal quality. The things the paranormal investigators do in the movie are just what real paranormal investigators would do and there's an outstanding attention to detail: for example, when the ghosts come down the stairs and it's captured on film, the film playback does not show exactly the same thing as "we" saw the first time.
The result is that when the story reaches its climax, the unreality of what's happening doesn't register. It just seems like a natural progression and all the more frightening for it.
Lastly: the print of the film was remastered for Blu-Ray and it really shows. I don't think the effects were re-done but there's probably some digital enhancement. The quality of this new print is fantastic. I can't comment on the sound so much as there's too much ambient noise in my house for me to judge properly, but the picture is pin-sharp and has real depth, and the special effects are actually just as good as modern CGI. Totally recommended...and just what I needed this week.