1982@40: POLTERGEIST

Young family in edge of town housing development is attacked by supernatural forces after strange phenomena appear and one of their own, five year old Carol Ann, is swallowed into the para-ether by the television. Experts are called and investigations made but it will be up to stronger bonds to vanquish the uncanny captors.

This film is among a very few of its vintage where the contemporary effects which it frequently depends on do not embarrass it. A fine cast of character actors perform a solid screenplay with high level lensing and a score by Jerry Goldsmith (no adjective needed there, considering greatness before and after). Poltergeist throws a lot of recognition humour about suburban family life, makes sharp points about greed-first business, and offers some respectable, if mild, scares and eeriness along the way. It was and is thoroughly enjoyable.

This high gloss entry into the horror of a new decade came at the end of a knotty string trailing back to 1973's The Exorcist whereby the horror is set in the normally comfortable suburban home. Neighbours fight over tv reception while the kids outside prank passersby. And then the horror. This time it was lifted into the influential dollar power of the father of the summer blockbuster, Stephen Spielberg, and the wielder of the Texas Chainsaw, Tobe Hooper. It's not the quality of the movie that gets questioned with this title, it's whodunnit.

The nitpicking on this topic can suck strong taxpayers into lightless rabbit holes but a shallow online investigation will reveal a workable solution. It was both and looks and plays like it. However, it is sorely tempting, given its gloss, pointedly every-family observations on life in the middle of the social strata, to leave it squarely at Spielberg's feet. Considering how all of Spielberg's productions of other directors' work ended up looking like his own, it's not so surprising, but here it looks like a hostile takeover. That is, until you start noticing things that he would never do if there was a choice. The mystic Tangina's stark Christian fundamentalism reeks of Hooper's southern upbringing and would return in later sequel to his own Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The face tearing scene is all Hooper. The use of the tv set as portal to a malevolant outer world, though, really could be either and possibly served as a starting point for the collaboration. The rest is probably just a history of compromises and/or personal politics. The more I see the film, though, the more firmly I think of it as a collaboration: Spielbergian themes and identikit look and sound (see also Gremlins, Back to the Future, or a host of others) but an undercurrent of darker and nastier thoughts from a Hooper who'd bargained with the mob to get his damn movie on screens.

I very happily watched this in 4K. The bizarre jump cut between the kitchen and neighbour's house scenes remains (look it up, there's a funny story to it) and the cover art throws decades of high recognition into the bin by putting a hard to visually read image on the cover instead of Carol Ann at the tv. Come on, folks, it's an iconic image for a film that was only ever intended to be mainstream; why the obscurity? Anyway....