Poltergeist opens on a Sunday in your run of the mill suburb in California. It's one of those sub divisions where the houses all look alike and the neighborhood flows from one day into the next. We finally stop at the Freeling house with the typical '80's nuclear family: Steven (Craig T. Nelson) is the patriarch, driving the station wagon to and fro to bring home the bacon,his wife Diane (JoBeth Williams), trying to run a household with their three kids, teenage Dana (Dominique Dunne), Robbie (Oliver Robins), and Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke). This is suburbia at its finest.
But Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper aren't going to leave it that way. You see, weird things are going on. First Carol Anne talks with the television in the middle of the night. Should it be strange? Kids sleepwalk. Hell, I once hovered over my cousin in the dead of the night for no reason other than I didn't know I was doing it at the time. Next the chairs start to move by themselves, prompting more excitement than terror over this unique gift. It's a parlor trick, tried and true. The thing is that things deteriorate quickly to the point that an old tree outside tries to eat Robbie in a ruse for whatever spirit has infected this house to take Carol Anne to another dimension and use her has their guide into the "light". The remainder of the film revolves around bringing Carol Anne back to the cul de sac.
The question is does Poltergeist classify as a horror film. Or is it a thriller? Or is it social commentary? Maybe it's a hybrid of all those things. Maybe it isn't. The great thing about Poltergeist is that it uses a formula similar to Night of the Living Dead fifteen years before it. It takes the most typical and comfortable situation, this time being the families own home, and sends it plummeting into hell. The supermarket groceries and Star Wars toys are all set dressing as the family is dragged from suburban bliss to pure terror. Poltergeist achieves this desired effect. Your comfort zone is shattered. There is no safe place to go anymore. Hell has entered the front door and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
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