Poltergeist Revisited

In which I revisit a previously explored topic with fresh eyes and an open mind.

I was at a meeting the other week and actually got into an interesting conversation with my boss about Poltergeist.  I wasn't surprised by her willful insistence that the remake was going to suck.  Statistically speaking, that's already a foregone conclusion (even if I'm heading into it a bit more optimistically than she is).  What took me by surprise was her insistence that the original film was hands down the greatest horror movie of all time.

While I've always been a fan of the original movie, I would hardly rank it among the better horror movies out there.  Other than a face-rippingly memorable scene or two, the whole thing actually always struck me as pretty tame.  It's a great, not especially scary introduction to the genre for children.  It's relatively mild execution and decidedly happy ending assure kids that monsters can be beaten while giving them a jolt of excitement along the way.

There's nothing too graphic for them to handle (even a scene where a man hallucinates ripping off his own face).  Nobody dies (which is a genre rarity).  The family unit is preserved with typically Spielbergian romanticism.  I was wasn't shocked for a second to find out that it was rated PG.

Looking back on it, it's actually a pretty standard haunted house story.  A well to do, nuclear family moves lives in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood where nothing could possibly go wrong.  Even when spooky stuff starts going down - like invisible conversations between their young daughter and the people living inside their TV, or furniture moving around and rearranging themselves on their own - it's nothing to worry about.  That is, however, until their daughter is stolen from them by the ghosts haunting their property, and they desperately reach out to anybody who's willing and able to help them get her back.

While the idea of non-R horror movies actually being good has been around for a while, it rarely extends to American horror films.  R's where you get your heavily horrific themes, your amped up violence and your big scares.  PG-13 (and below) is where you get jump scares and teenagers.  Let the Right One In and The Grudge worked, while Ouija and Drag Me to Hell most certainly did not.

So why does Poltergeist - which has the brazen audacity to be rated only PG - work?  A lot of that can probably be attributed to Spielberg's oversight.  The man knows how to make a good movie regardless of genre.  He knows what works and what doesn't.  What's more, he knows that the emotional core of any movie will be in its characters, not in the window dressings you add on top of it.

Poltergeist is foremost about the preservation of one family: an inherently good, inherently decent group of people that we honestly care about getting through the end credits.  We see them interact together long before we see them tormented by ghosts, giving us time to understand who these tormented people are and seeing them as more than chattel lining up for the slaughter.

And when the ghosts do come out to play?  We're not entreated to a listless series of jump scares and "gotcha" fake outs.  The movie, light as it is, relies on tension and its characters rather than trick lighting or camerawork.  The characters work through their horrific scenario with intelligence and reason like actual people would, rather than blindly running into danger and screaming.

It doesn't matter if the special effects are dated or the scares don't really hold up.  The story and the characters are just as genuine as the day the movie debuted.  The climax is just as shocking as it was in 1982 and the kids - often the death knell of otherwise good movies - actually held their own against the film's more veteran performers,

So yes, Poltergeist is a perfect gateway horror movie.  It's just scary enough to be a new kind of fun for unindoctrinated children, but not too terrifying as to scare them away from similar movies.  While it is at times icky, it's neither gory nor grotesque.  It scares them into thinking that this could happen to them while at the same time reassuring them that the family will endure and that monsters can be defeated.  It's not a perfect horror movie - and probably wouldn't even make my top 100 of the genre - but it continues to thrill more than 30 years later, which is something profoundly special.

Rating:  7/10

Buy on BluRay:  If you have children, yes.

So what do you think of Poltergeist?  Are you planning on watching the remake this weekend?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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