Photo courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The original Poltergeist is kind of dull. It’s not overtly scary by today’s standards, until the end at least. However, the Steven Spielberg written, produced and possibly directed film has a strong family focus. Where a lot of recent horror movies had been about a group of shitty teenagers in an obviously haunted house, Poltergeist moved to an average suburban home and plagued a splintering but otherwise normal family.
The Freelings, father Steven (Craig T. Nelson), mother Diane (JoBeth Williams), teenage daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne) and elementary-aged son Robbie (Oliver Robins) and daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) live quietly in the first homes in the suburb Steven helped build. They don’t talk or listen to each other, and the early scenes go out of their way to show the family’s disconnect and general careless attitude toward each other. All that changes when Carol Anne literally vanishes into the TV. The Freelings begin to live in fear as they must share their home with an infestation of paranormal beings, and call in all manner of investigators to cleanse the house and return their daughter to the plane of the living.
It was scary because it attacked viewers at home, where they hadn’t been before, raising questions about who your children are really listening to on TV and whether or not you’re really safe in your own home and legitimizing the idea that there really is a monster in your closet and/or under the bed. It became one of the most widely recognized scary movies of all time, even though it’s not that scary.
