The 80s classic gets a Halloween re-release for its 40th anniversary: a supernatural chiller and anti-gentrification satire that came out the same year as ET – Mr Hyde to that film’s Dr Jekyll, perhaps – and one of the most Spielbergian films not actually directed by Steven Spielberg. It is also a movie with its own particular flavour of sadness, owing to the early deaths of two of its stars: Dominique Dunne, daughter of author Dominick Dunne and niece of Joan Didion, killed in the year of the film’s release by her violent ex-boyfriend, and Heather O’Rourke, who died in 1988 at 12 years oldafter suffering cardiac arrest and septic shock connected with a bowel condition.
It was directed by horror maestro Tobe Hooper, who claimed to have had the basic story idea himself; nonetheless, the credited lead screenwriter and producer is Spielberg. Spielberg’s auteur fingerprints are all over Poltergeist, but some of the residual creepiness and brashness must be Hooper’s – particularly the scene in which one of the “ghostbusters” rather gratuitously claws his own face off. Yet there is a key moment where these two film-makers’ sensibilities fuse.
The story takes place in a new suburban housing estate in California, a classic Spielbergian habitat of kids Edenically riding around on their bikes, making mischief with their remote-control toy racing cars. Steve Freeling, played by Craig T Nelson – later to be the voice of Mr Incredible – is an employee of the property company that has been putting up these homes on the site of a former 19th-century settlement. He has evidently been rewarded with living in one of these state-of-the-art houses. Go-getting salaryman Steve is bit of a Ronald Reagan fan (he’s seen reading the president’s biography in an early scene). His fresh-faced wife, Diane, played by the excellent JoBeth Williams, has maybe has more of a Carter-era hippyish background, and is seen smoking a joint while the couple loll around on the marital bed. (Post-coitally?) They have a smartmouthed teen daughter Dana (Dunne), a younger son Robbie (Oliver Robins) and a blonde-haired angelic infant daughter Carol Anne (O’Rourke).
It is young Carol Anne who is to sense something strange in the TV which (in that distant broadcasting era) stops transmitting after the national anthem is played last thing at night and the screen goes to a fuzzy white noise. Reassuring patriotism is replaced by evil. Approaching the TV screen, putting her face right up close to the set, she senses something there, something which only she can see and which invades their happy home.
There are some classic moments in Poltergeist. When Steve invites the three paranormal specialists to his home and shows them up the stairs to the closed door of his haunted bedroom, he listens dumbly to one of these experts frowningly explaining how some objects can move by millimetres over hours – then opens the door to reveal furniture flying wildly around the room. And it gives us one of the great creepy moments of 80s film history when Diane takes her eye off the kitchen for a second, then looks back to see all the chairs suddenly piled in a heap on the tabletop.
The keynote of the film is O’Rourke’s eerie, ethereally pale face, illuminated by the unearthly light of the haunted TV. Her expression, with its faint and worrying smile, gives us a very Spielbergian close-encounters-type awe. But there’s something else as well: a disturbing hint that she has in some sense been seduced by the forces in the TV. There is a tiny, ambiguous touch of the devil child in her toothpaste smile: a coming together of Spielberg and Hooper. Poltergeist would be nothing without O’Rourke. The movie builds to two separate outrageous exorcism climaxes and a horrible disclosure about how Steve’s property company has been ruthlessly maximising profit from the land and cutting costs. Poltergeist’s special effects may look a little hokey now, but this film can still throw the furniture around.
• Poltergeist is in cinemas from 21 October.
• This article was amended on 21 October 2022 to replace the main picture, which was from the 2015 remake.
