Editorials
‘Poltergeist’ at 40: How the Classic Film Changed Haunted House Horror Forever
Poltergeist was released forty years ago, on June 4, 1982, and successfully earned a spot in the top ten grossing movies of that year. The horror classic, directed by Tobe Hooper with a story by producer Steven Spielberg, earned Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects. Poltergeist even tested the MPAA, prompting an appeal that bumped its R-Rating to a PG, paving the way for the addition of the PG-13 to the MPAA’s rating system. These distinctions are demonstrative of a gamechanger, but Poltergeist also narratively changed the face of haunted house horror in many ways.
The Freeling family lives in Cuesta Verde, an idyllic planned community in suburban California. Steven Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) is a successful real estate developer working for the company behind the community. His wife Diane (JoBeth Williams) is a stay-at-home mom to their three children, sixteen-year-old Dana (Dominique Dunne), eight-year-old Robbie (Oliver Robins), and five-year-old Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). However, shortly after introductions to this quintessential American family in Poltergeist, strange things begin to happen around their house —furniture moves on its own; Carol Anne converses with TV static; and the gnarled tree in the backyard seems to spring to life mid-storm.
Then the paranormal activity goes into hyperdrive, and Carol Anne goes missing.
It’s not just the variety of scare tactics employed or the showy, breathtaking effects by Industrial Light and Magic that signals a departure from the haunted house blueprint. It’s in the house itself. Up until this point, horror’s unspoken rule for haunted houses is that the haunting is intertwined with the house’s history. Ghosts represent a tragic or grim past; they’re anchored to the spot where they died, usually in a violent fashion. But Cuesta Verde is a brand-new development. The community is comprised of newly built homes that lack any history.
Enter the iconic lines cried out in anguish by Steve to his boss: “You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies, and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones! Why? Why?”
This unsettling epiphany contains layers. The developer’s greed and corner-cutting in costs set the entire community of Cuesta Verde up for failure at best and peril at worst. The rows of pristine suburban homes could get inundated by paranormal problems that could lead to financial ruin. While Carol Anne’s openness and sensitivity to the other side make her vulnerable to the dark entity called the “Beast,” Poltergeist offers up one simple, unspoken reason why the Freeling home seems to be the only one affected so far by their foundation of dead bodies.
Their terror begins when they break ground in their backyard to install a swimming pool. It starts right around when Diane notices the contractors catcalling her teen daughter before school. It comes full circle in the climax when the Beast unleashes a full-scale bid for Carol Anne and traps Diane in a muddied pool of emerging corpses. Rot hides beneath the idyllic suburban life.
Poltergeist isn’t the first haunted house nestled in the suburbs, but it is an innovator in widening the scope of fear. There’s no bargain deal on a sprawling estate here; a haunting could occur anywhere for any reason. Even that brand-new construction nestled in a bustling middle-class neighborhood.
Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg captured the anxieties of suburban parenthood, bringing the horror closer to home than ever before. Its ghosts resembled something far more monstrous, and they preyed upon deeply personal fears.
In Cuesta Verde, conventional hauntings aren’t possible. Instead, Poltergeist widens the scope and scale and latches its malevolent spirit onto a young girl unable to escape its grip. A haunted house is only the beginning of Carol Anne’s nightmare. That unique approach was – and still remains – a gamechanger for haunted house horror.
[Related] Mediums, Mothers, and the Miraculous Women of ‘Poltergeist’
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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