The Curse of POLTERGEIST’S Curse: One Final Bonus Spielberg Article

It’s funny how much suburbs freak people out.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the argument against them.  Rows of houses that all look the same, built in the relative nowhere on top of land that previously contained who-knows-what, filled with people who admittedly can be kind of recluses and pains in the asses….okay, well, maybe it’s not that funny how much suburbs give some the heebie-jeebies. But, it must be said that, having grown up in a very middle of the road suburb, there often isn’t much to them.  They’re mostly a little boring, if anything.  

But the fascination with them in visual media remains, with their supposed representation of the American dream; they’re great places to have 2.5 kids; you might even luck out and get a white picket fence.  Of course, just like America itself, that dream can often cloud sinister secrets, or dastardly deeds.  In the 80’s and 90’s, this fascination reached a fever pitch.  Movies like THE ICE STORM, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, and the granddaddy of them all, BLUE VELVET, make these homogenized communities a place of dread.

However, there’s a major player from the 80s that seems to not get the same amount of shine, possibly because it has a different legacy all its own, the “cursed film”, a moniker I’m going to scream about by the end of this.  But it’s also heavily associated with Steven Spielberg, the man who wrote and produced the damn thing, and only isn’t considered the director by technicality.  Thus, it seemed only right to extend Spielberg Summer 2 just one more time, a whole month into autumn, in order to cover the other “non-Spielberg Spielberg movie with dicey behind-the-scenes stories”.

I speak, of course, of POLTERGEIST.  It’s here!

POLTERGEIST (1982)

Starring: Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke, Dominique Dunn, Zelda Rubinstein

Directed by: Tobe Hooper

Written by: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor

Released: June 4, 1982

Length: 114 minutes

POLTERGEIST tells the story of the Freeling family, residents of Cuesta Verde, California.  They live a relatively normal life; dad Steven is a thriving real estate agent, while mother Diane stays at home to raise their three children Dana, Robbie, and Carol Anne.  Everything starts going to pot when little Carol Anne starts becoming fascinated with the static in the television.  At a certain point, a hand reaches out from the TV, and an earthquake hits their suburban neighborhood, leading to the iconic moment where Carol Anne turns to her family and simply states “they’re here…”

It’s not long before Carol Anne is pulled through the TV by the titular poltergiest (although, may there be more than one poltergiest in the house?), and the Freelings find themselves in a mad race to get her back, by any means neccessary.  Along the way, we meet the memorable Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein), learn just what sin was committed on this land to cause this poltergeist intrusion, and and see just what “the Beast” looks like up close.

As mentioned, POLTERGEIST is officially a Tope Hooper Joint.  Yes, it was Spielberg’s idea from the beginning, having started developing the idea for it all the way in the late-70’s.  Alas, a contractual technicality kept him from actually manning the director’s chair while still working on E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, which is where Hooper started getting involved.  How much Hooper really got to direct, though, depends mainly on your point of view, as well as who you believe.  I don’t know that I have a particular dog in this fight, necessarily, but…the more you look at it, the more undeniable it becomes that this really is a Spielberg movie being pushed through a Hooper filter.  

Let’s take a look at the tape: we have a movie about a missing child, starring a family that is mostly figuring out how to hold together through adversity, being haunted by something ethereal (or at least not precisely of this world), taking place in a true Anywhere, USA.  I’m not sure you get any more quintessential 70s/80s Spielberg than that.  Yes, POLTERGEIST undoubtedly has a harder edge than anything we’ve seen in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND or E.T., which is where the dude who gave us THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE comes in, but you can’t deny how neatly this fits into Spielberg’s filmography up to this point.  Hell, the neighborhood this takes place in feels functionally identical to the one in which the Taylors reside in E.T.

Speaking of, I find both movies’ unique view on the suburbs to be rather telling.  In both, the neighborhood is a place where intensely personal emotions reside.  In E.T., the sobering sadness of divorce permeates the air at the beginning, before a friendly, child-like alien is able to show everyone the light.  In POLTERGEIST, there’s not so much a sadness as there is a persistent, steady fear of what’s just outside, a perspective tailor-made for the inherently isolating nature of the remote suburbs.  The scariness of what’s just outside our grasp, what we can’t quite see….that kind of energy is what probably freaks people out about these kinds of neighborhoods in the first place.

Obviously, POLTERGEIST’s fascination with (and light condemnation of) television is one of the more well-known things about it (please see: the aforementioned iconic “they’re here” scene).  And, man, does all of that stuff hit super hard forty-plus years later.  The concept of losing a small child inside of an electronic screen…eerily prescient, borderline on-the-nose, imagery!  But the specific type of television the movie seems to fixate on is that hyper-specific, defunct kind of TV: the “sign off” broadcast that networks would do at the end of the night, when the schedule ended.  The images of Mount Rushmore and fighter jets flying across the sky!  The playing of the Star-Spangled Banner!  Then…test patterns!  It’s a reflection of a simple time.

Here’s my simple proposal: let’s bring the “sign off” broadcast, but for social media.  This feels like a reasonable compromise to the issue of Facebook and TikTok destroying our brains, but all of us also being beholden to the phone in our pocket.  Keep it all, ban nothing, but at midnight, the X app starts playing the national anthem and gives you a video of Grand Canyon stock footage, then it just shuts off until 6 am.  Would anyone besides the country’s biggest degenerates have an issue with this?

Anyway, POLTERGEIST.

I sometimes get uncomfortable with people’s fascination regarding movies that have a lot of unfortunate backstory to them, especially when those movies get branded as “cursed”.  In POLTERGEIST’s case, yes, it’s true, it features two child actors who reached very sad and very abrupt ends to their life.  Heather O’Rourke’s death in 1988 at the age of 12, essentially due to cardiac arrest, was tragic enough, but Dominique Dunne’s 1982 murder at the hands of her boyfriend is even more chilling.  They’re both impossibly sad outcomes to the lives of two people who should still be here.

But the whole “POLTERGEIST is cursed!” narrative has always driven me a little crazy.  It’s a thing people insist upon, and O’Rourke and Dunne’s demises get constantly pointed to as proof that the movie was filmed on an ancient burial ground or something.  But…to be blunt, I don’t know that an actor dying six years after a movie’s release constitutes a curse to me.  There are other things people point to in order to bolster the whole “the movie is cursed!” thing; evidence includes Julian Beck, an actor from 1986’s POLTERGEIST II (most well known for being a completely different movie) dying as a result of stomach cancer, an affliction he had been diagnosed with three years prior, as well as a rumor that Spielberg had *gulp* real skeletons on the set, instead of plastic ones.  Holy fuck, this movie is cursed!

Yet, the perception of a curse remains, even earning POLTERGEIST a spot on the first season of Shudder’s docu-series Cursed Films.  And, I’m not here to crap on anyone’s belief systems; if curses are real to you, who am I to say you’re wrong?  But I’m not exactly sure why people glomb onto this particular case so much, especially since the actual events that happened are so sad.  My only real theory is that the idea that a movie was cursed is an easier thing to deal with than the fact that sometimes kids get sick and die for no reason, and teenagers get murdered for no reason.  But the end result of trying to grapple with that is a narrative where we seem to be blaming the vicious slaying of a teenager on the movie she was in. 

 It’s a shame, especially since there’s much more interesting things to talk about with this.  The suburban setting is sufficiently creepy in its seeming innocuousness, and the way that benign objects in and around the house are used against its inhabitants may stay with you (the aforementioned television being the most predominant example, but how about that giant fucking tree outisde Robbie’s room?) POLTERGEIST is also a movie filled with memorable performances, with the eccentric Zelda Rubinstein and the wunderkind O’Rourke getting most of the shine.  However, I’ve always been taken with what a presence Craig T. Nelson is in this.  This isn’t ultimately a movie about a family trying to come back together, so much as they are just trying to hang on.  His calm and steady performance helps sell that so well.  I’m not sure it would have worked with someone else in his shoes.

It’s also interesting to see where Tobe Hooper is able to make his mark, even if it’s around the edges.  His most obvious influence is in some of the gorier moments; stuff like the investigator’s face getting ripped off feels distinctly un-Spielbergian, to say the least.  But I also think simple moments of building dread, like the set-up and payoff of the clown toy that eventually comes to life and starts attacking the kids, has a harder edge to it than similar moments in other Spielberg movies up to that point.  Spielberg movies can sometimes be distressing, yes: E.T. dying, the opening of the Arc of the Covenant…but genuine horror isn’t something he normally trades in.  You can probably look to Hooper, the man who brought us THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASACRE, at least a little bit for POLTERGEIST’s legitimate scares.

At the end of the day, though, POLTERGEIST is an essential part of Steven Spielberg’s legacy, while remaining just a curious blip on Hooper’s.  Its release (June 4th) a week before E.T. (June 11th) caused enough of a rumble at the box office that both Time and Newsweek felt comfortable declaring 1982 “The Summer of Spielberg”.  And when you take the macro view on American culture from that point forward, it’s an assessment that’s difficult to argue with.  These two movies, plus the rise of Amblin Entertainment putting out films like GREMLINS, BACK TO THE FUTURE, THE GOONIES, and all your other favorite 80’s childhood treasures, seemed to have forever altered what we expected from blockbuster family entertainment.  Science fiction and adventure would become in vogue, with tons of imitators rising from the muck to try to cash in on the Spielberg machine.  How many movies in the 80s and 90s centered around some kind of creature?  Or normal, middle-American coded family?  CRITTERS, MAC AND ME, HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS, STAR KID, FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR, THE LAST STARFIGHTER…..the list goes on and on ad infitium.  You almost certainly have the one-two punch of E.T. and POLTERGEIST to thank for all of that.

It’s too bad the movie is cursed, though.  You can only imagine what its influence and power would have been without that.