Poltergeist (1982) Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] You're part of a bunch of useless comedians that can let the body get you. You're only worth their asses. Good question. What is happening in Poltergeist?

[00:14] Well, here are over 100 details to break it all down. Welcome back to New Rockstars. I'm Eric Voss, and this is a breakdown of 1982's Poltergeist. It's spooky season here at New Rockstars, and we are looking back at classic horror and creepy titles for our weekend watch series.

[00:29] Poltergeist has always been on my Mount Rushmore of classic movies to revisit ever since I started analyzing movies on YouTube. It is the perfect blend of Amblin era supernatural horror and family drama, the movies that I used to watch every year, but this is actually the first year I've watched the movie since becoming a father,

[00:44] and damn, I've never been more afraid of my own health and my own blonde haired child around a screen. So here I'm going to do something I've wanted to do for years. Break down Poltergeist, scene by scene, for details you missed, completely new Easter eggs you never spotted,

[00:58] and really the deeper meaning that still rings true with us today. 1982's Poltergeist opens with the National Anthem and extreme close-ups of the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, a.k.a. the Iwo Jima Memorial, dark shadows, and the pixels of a TV screen.

[01:10] For audiences in 1982 and anyone now who can remember, this was the sort of sign-off broadcast that TV networks used to air at the end of the night to be followed by several hours of static until around 6 a.m. Yep, you'd have something like,

[01:22] It's 11 o'clock, do you know where your children are? And then around midnight, the Star Spangled Banner over some patriotic images and then static nothingness. You may remember in Pixar's Toy Story 2, toy collector Al dozes off to a recording of a rerun of Woody's Roundup

[01:34] that was played late into the night and then went into a similar broadcast that went into static. As a movie about toys that come to life at night, it was filled with Easter eggs to the films of this era. Actually, the Pixar 80s Amblin ties are pretty strong.

[01:46] They would bring back the patriarch of this movie, Craig P. Nelson, to voice Bob Parr, Mr. Incredible, in those films. Networks would phase out these types of sign-offs in the mid-80s when 24-hour programming with late-night infomercials and reruns and other shows would play instead.

[02:00] For my generation, the even more terrifying equivalent of this would be dozing off in front of the TV and then waking up at 2 a.m. and then... Imagine all the world's greatest love songs. But for audiences at the time, opening Poltergeist this way wasn't just a patriotic message.

[02:14] It was a kind of foreboding spooky trigger that the horrors of this film will creep into our safe households during these chaotic static twilight windows that everyone has in our living room. These souls of the past will always appear through this glowing window.

[02:27] But at least in the case of the Marines of Iwo Jima, America didn't dishonor their memorials the way those buried at Cuesta Verde were dishonored. Truly, this whole film is a reckoning on the way suburban America so willingly paid over those who died to make our fortunes and our comforts possible.

[02:42] As the family dad, Stephen Frehling, doses off, the family's golden retriever, E-Buzz, goes in for a snack and begins his journey from room to room looking for some snacks. E-Buzz is named after E-Buzz Miller, a recurring character played by Dan Aykroyd on Cyberman Night Live in the 70s,

[02:55] and really starting the horror movie off with a very well-trained dog was something summer 1982 moviegoers also were able to see in John Carpenter's The Thing, which, crazy to think, came out the same month as Poltergeist and E.T. Poltergeist premiered on June 4th, 1982, E.T. on June 11th, 1982,

[03:11] and The Thing on June 25th, 1982. You could see all three of those classics in a movie theater at the same time, in the same days you wanted. This movie's release alongside E.T. the Extra Threshold is part of the lore of the film.

[03:23] Poltergeist was directed by Tony Hooper, director of the 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the film is widely believed to have been at least co-directed by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg at the time was under contract with Universal to direct E.T., while Poltergeist was a project that he was producing at MGM with co-writers Michael Grace and Mark Victor.

[03:40] But Spielberg was prohibited from directing two movies at the same time, so many who worked on Poltergeist claimed that Spielberg was often on set along with Toby Hooper, directing actors and approving prop designs. Co-producer Frank Marshall claimed Steven Spielberg was the creative force of the movie

[03:54] and said that Steven Spielberg designed every storyboard, something that Tobey Hooper refuted. In May 1982, Steven Spielberg told the LA Times, quote, Tobey isn't a take-charge kind of guy. If a question was asked and an answer wasn't immediately forthcoming,

[04:06] I'd jump in and say what we could do. Tobey would nod agreement, and that became the process of collaboration. The DGA investigated whether Hooper's credit was being challenged by Spielberg's statements there, resulting in MGM being forced to pay Hooper a $50,000 fine

[04:19] because MGM had given Spielberg a bigger credit than Hooper in trailers. And to make peace with Hooper, on the week of the release, Steven Spielberg ran an open letter in The Hollywood Reporter praising and crediting Hooper. In nearly all the interviews since, particularly in the 30-year retrospective in 2012,

[04:34] cast members all recalled Tobey Hooper doing most of the directing. I find it interesting from my research that the actors seem to recall Tobey Hooper directing while certain crew people recall Steven Spielberg being the final authority for their approval. But I just think it speaks to the unusual creative collaboration that made this film great.

[04:49] You had the great horror filmmaker behind Texas Chainsaw giving the authentic, desperate terror from the cast, or you had the wizard of visual spectacle establishing the look and feel of the frights in this movie and coming up with the things that would most gross out and rattle these characters.

[05:02] E-Buzz goes up the iconic S-shaped staircase of the film. The interiors of the film were shot on Roxbury Street in Simi Valley, California, but the interiors of the house were largely recreated on the soundstage, including this very impractical staircase.

[05:15] Like, imagine carrying a bed frame up this thing, but it was deliberately designed this way to maximize the visual spectacle of the ghost shots that we would later see on it. This opening music from composer Jerry Goldsmith might remind you of the opening music of the horror movie that he composed before this,

[05:28] 1979's Aliens. The opening shots of that film are actually similar to what we see here, a dormant haunted house with all of its occupants sleeping as the camera creeps through each part of it to give us a sense of the spatial geography,

[05:40] while we get the feeling that we are really seeing this through the invasive presence that's going to be haunting this space. E-Buzz goes from the master bedroom to sniff around the mother, Diane, played by Jo Beth Williams, at the time the biggest name of this film and top build following her appearance in Kramer vs. Kramer.

[05:54] E-Buzz sniffs around a bag of chips in the bed of the daughter, Dana, Dominique Dunn, and drags them across the seat, and then into the younger kid's room. The dog finds another snack behind the bed of Robbie, played by Oliver Robbins, and sniffs Carol Ann, Heather O'Rourke.

[06:06] Actresses Dominique Dunn and Heather O'Rourke both suffered tragic early deaths in this decade, leading to many over the years claiming this movie and its sequels are cursed. Dominique Dunn was murdered by her boyfriend, John Thomas Fleeney, on November 4, 1982, months after the film released.

[06:20] There were some sad coincidences pointed out in the 2002 Eat Your Hollywood Story documentary on Poltergeist that Dominique Dunn's friend, David Packer, was inside the house at the time of the strangulation and playing and turned up the volume of Jerry Goldsmith's Poltergeist soundtrack record to drown out the screaming.

[06:35] And most tragically, the killer was released from prison after only four years. Heather O'Rourke would go on to appear in the next two films in the series, but then she became ill in 1987 after drinking well water at Big Bear Lake and was diagnosed with Crohn's disease.

[06:48] The cortisone injections that she had to take made her feel subconscious about her facial swelling while she was shooting Poltergeist 3. She collapsed in January 1988 and was hospitalized and then died on February 1st, 1988 from congenital stenosis of the intestine and septic shock.

[07:01] She was only 12 years old when she died. I find any serious arguments about the curse of this franchise to be in somewhat poor taste when it comes to these young women. And no, I do not think these movies are cursed. But I do think that the story this first film tells does speak to the curse of our society.

[07:17] And whenever I revisit it, I think both actresses' performances are just so perfect and incredible and bring a warm light into what could otherwise be a very dark film. On Carol Ann, Goldsmith's score activates and we push in on her as she awakens,

[07:29] lured by the static of the TV downstairs. All the TV lights in this movie flicker like lightning through the whole house. As is later explained in the film, the residence sits atop a cemetery whose headstones were moved, but not the body. A disturbance that allowed a demonic presence to break through this mortal plane,

[07:44] entrap the confused souls of that cemetery in an ethereal plane that's linked with the house. These entities see Carol Ann as a source of life that reminds them of the lives they no longer have. Steve tells his boss, Mr. Teague, that Carol Ann was the one member of this family actually born in the house.

[07:58] So that birth is why these spirits imprint on her. Carol Ann converses with the presence in the TV. What do you look like? Five? Yes? I don't know. As Sanjina later explains, the beast deceives Carol Ann by presenting itself as a child.

[08:14] She seems only to Carol Ann to understand him. Because of her, she seems to be another child. I always wondered what questions the beast was asking Carol Ann to get those answers.

[08:27] Here's what I think it asks. How old are you? Are you a good girl? Yes. Do you love your parents? Yes. Which parent do you love more?

[08:41] I don't know. Are your parents good people? I don't know. On that second I don't know, notice how Carol Ann sounds more hesitant and scared and that the voice is asking questions she's worried she'll get in trouble for answering. It could speak to why Tangina later asks Diane and Steve which parent Carol Ann is more drawn to

[08:57] and which one she's more afraid of. and as to whether they're good people, Steve is his company's top realtor, selling 48% of the houses in the valley that were all built atop this sacred land. Carol presses her hands on the screens and we hear the crackle of the static

[09:10] that used to hover over TV screens like this. It's her way of hugging a kid that she thinks is on the other side of the screen. We cut to this view of the Cuesta Verde Valley, with two menacing-looking trees on the hillside. Based on the way the shots of Steve and his boss Mr. T are later framed,

[09:24] we may be actually seeing all this from the point of view of the additional cemetery up on the ridge. So despite Goldsmith's sweet music here, we are really seeing these souls staring down in judgment at the subdivision that is stopping their souls from crossing over. Production shot all of the exterior footage for this film in City Valley, California, about a 20-minute drive from the Porter Ranch Northridge area where Spielberg was shooting E.T.

[09:43] City Valley itself was really only developed as a suburb 20 to 25 years before this, and these opening shots paint an overly staggering picture of the comforts of suburbia that almost feels protected by these surrounding hills. But the truth of America, and the truth that Hooper and Spielberg showed by their earlier works,

[09:57] is that there's no such thing as a safe community in this country. No such thing as true providence blessed from God, and every homestead was really built on soil that was soaked in blood in order for us to clean it.

[10:09] Much of this movie's opening notes are spent on suburban gags. Kids using RC cars to trip up a dad peddling a kid's bike to rush beers back to the guys watching the football game. He doesn't even have time to yell at the kids or explain himself to Dana as beer sprays everywhere in the house.

[10:22] The game that the dads are watching isn't a daytime Sunday game. It was actually the Monday Night Football game on November 24th, 1980, between the Los Angeles Rams and the New Orleans Saints. These Cine Valley dads would obviously be rooting for the Rams.

[10:34] Robbie has a Rams helmet in his bedroom that Carol Ann later wears. And here they're watching Jim Youngblood intercept Saints quarterback Archie Manning for what would eventually be a 27-7 win for Los Angeles. Diane changes Robbie's bedsheets.

[10:46] Star Wars sheets showing C-3PO. as an industrial light and magic production, there are just so many Star Wars sightings. Roddy also has a Kenner Yoda hand puppet, a Tauntaun figure, Kenner action figures of Tatooine Luke Skywalker,

[10:59] a Ha Han Solo, an FX7 medical droid, an R2-D2, he has a TIE fighter and a Probot turret. On his walls are a folded original Star Wars A New Hope movie poster. Insane, but pretty accurate that a kid would have folded it like this instead of rolling it.

[11:14] There's a Kenner 1980 Darth Vader action figure carrying case, because you had to keep your fingers in something. There's a poster for 1979's Alien, a movie that would have been way too scary for Robbie if the kids were afraid of clowns and trees.

[11:26] He also has a poster of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and a Darth Vader poster by the closet. And this badass even has Star Wars character life switch plates see 3PO by the door. And he has a jacket with an iron-on Chewbacca patch. That's the one that he throws over the clown doll.

[11:39] But the oddest detail that's been the subject of many conspiracy theories is this football poster. It says 1988 Super Bowl XXII Rookie of the Year. Whoa, what the hell? This movie was shot in 1981 and released in 1982.

[11:51] What's going on here? Well, the wild coincidence about this is Super Bowl XXII was held on January 31st, 1988. The same day Heather O'Rourke would be hospitalized, a day before she died. So online theorists who believe in the curse pointed this as evidence that the movie somehow predicted the young star's death six years early.

[12:08] But the thing is, this is not an actual printed poster that you would have bought anywhere. It's a poster that Robbie drew. In fact, the exact look of that football player appears to be traced from the cover of this 1981 kids book by Rob McKay, How to Draw Funny People.

[12:21] Now, Robbie is only 8 years old, so how could he be a Super Bowl Rookie of the Year in 1988? Well, he couldn't, and that's the point. He's an 8-year-old who thinks he's going to be so good at football at age 14 in his freshman year of high school

[12:33] that the NFL is going to draft him and he's going to be the star of the Super Bowl. I mean, that's just how some 8-year-olds think, and I think it's very sweet. Diane finds Carol Ann's bird tweeting, dead in the cage. Oh, shit. Tweety, couldn't you have waited for school, Danny?

[13:12] in this neighborhood were just built too close together, showing how Steve's company, the T-Group, are just cheap and trying to get as much money as they can out of this real estate that they built on grave sites. And when Steve talks to Ben, you can see how the Freeland house is just up a bit higher

[13:25] by a few feet than Ben's house, showing how there's something still buried under that particular plot of land, and that the developers didn't really dig deeper, and then by when they dig the pit for the swimming pool, bodies just start to float up. Robin hears this hideous tree in the backyard and tries to conquer it by climbing it, a

[13:39] that will later attack and try to eat him. That's an old tree. It's been around here a long time. I think it was here before my company grew up in the neighborhood. In the 2002 E2 Hollywood Story documentary,

[13:52] Steven Spielberg's sister Sue Spielberg talked about his childhood fears of clowns and a particular tree in their backyard. And not only clowns, but trees. Steven was very much afraid of a tree,

[14:04] a particular tree that grew in our backyard. And this tree, when it would storm, or there'd be wings which would crash on his window. He was just deathly afraid of his tree. And in Poltergeist, there's an incredible image of the tree coming and grabbing the little boy.

[14:18] And when I saw that I said oh my gosh he captured the fear that he had and really put it into the film Later when Steve and Mr Seed tour the Phase 5 area there a dead sinister tree there too This is just what trees look like here when y leave the bodies and y leave those headstones

[14:34] I assume Steve was smoking a King Edward Imperial cigar because it's that box that Diane and Carol Ann buried tweety inside of. The respect young Carol Ann shows this simple bird in its burial is an indicator of how she is a beacon of light that these restless souls all gravitate toward.

[14:48] But even this 80s suburb kid has limits to her grief. That night, the storm Robbie saw rapidly surging in arrived. Robbie reads this comic book and, hey, my time to sign. This is Captain America number 259 from 1981, where Cap battles Doc Ock.

[15:03] Not exactly a fun read for a kid haunted by a clown doll with long arms and a tree with long branches. Everything is reaching in as this kid tries to strangle him. Caroline insists that Diane leave on the closet lights. When the paranormal activity begins, there will be nothing but lights coming out of this closet.

[15:18] In Steve and Diane's room, they watch a clip of Spencer Tracy in the 1943 film A Guy Named Joe. This is one of Spielberg's favorite films from his childhood, and he actually remade it as a 1989 film always. This is the scene where the pilot, Pete, realizes he's a g-g-ghost.

[15:32] Steve has another open cigar box where they keep their marijuana. He fumbles with the rolling paper. perky mistake, bro. He licks the lower rolled part of the joint, the part that has the weed in it, rather than the upper part where the sticky strip is that you use to seal the joint.

[15:44] Dude's reading too many of those Reagan books. And then he just leaves the marijuana all over the bed that his kid will later jump up on. Meanwhile, Diane reads Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung to suspect that Carol Ann might be a nocturnal

[15:56] somnambulist, a sleepwalker. Carl Jung was particularly interested in the occult and the whole idea of poltergeist, a term that comes from the German compound now translating to noisy ghost or knocking spirit.

[16:08] Diane, who at this point is pretty big, raises the paranoid concern that Carol Ann might sleepwalking to the pit that they're planning to dig for the pool, setting up their later fear the next night and an even scarier possibility for the pool that Diane will have to later face.

[16:20] Steve reassures her with some bullshit from his days on the diving team and then starts talking dirty to her with a Donald Duck impression. Robbie gets scared by the storm and how it seems to activate the clown doll and the tree outside, so Steve teaches him to count after seeing the lightning flash

[16:33] to know by the thunder sound whether the storm is approaching or moving away. While Robbie and Steve count to three the first time, Robbie's able to count to four the next time, and then five on the last time, we suddenly cut to lightning clashes right outside the window behind the tree with simultaneous thunder clashes,

[16:46] meaning this evil storm started to move away when the dad was in the room and then came back when the kids were alone. So now we cut to Robbie and Carol Ann just leaping in this marijuana-covered bed with the parents. I like how Carol Ann's hand is just draped right on Diane's chin.

[16:59] The National Anthem broadcast plays again for the sign-off. An odd detail here, the TV clock says it's 2.37 a.m. That's a random time, and way later than sign-off broadcasts like this would play. But considering they shot this in 1981, the biggest horror movie from the year before

[17:15] was Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, so this is probably a nod to Room 237 in that movie. The static kicks in, and now we straight up hear whispers. Light appear on the TV and Carol Ann reaches out, but

[17:31] Wah! The ghostly claw of the beast reaches back and floats around the room before dipping into the wall above the bed. And remember, because we saw Steve carrying Robbie back to bed and then walk back through the hallway, we know from that scene in geography that this wall joins with the back of the closet in the kids' room.

[17:45] According to Starlog's 1984 Special Effects Volume 4 Photo Guidebook, ILM, supervised by Richard Edlund, created this effect by testing a number of different ways. First by trying to use a real hand, a mold from VFX artist Rene Holtz,

[17:57] with very long, thin fingers that they stretched further and actually added an extra joint, and then put a flashlight behind the silicone mold of that to make it look like it glows from within. They didn't fully use that, but that idea suggested their ultimate solution, to make the hand look like it was the light of the TV itself come to life,

[18:12] that they fully animated frame by frame with pieces illuminated from behind the screen, with fingers and a wrist that were able to now move in a liquid fashion. ILM animator John Bruno described the TV ectoplasm as requiring multiple passes through the camera,

[18:25] with each pass photographed at a different density, so they effectively built up layers of animated length until it resembled this translucent smoke. Now the whole house quakes, probably from the graves of the souls beneath the house, becoming restless and populating the ethereal plains now opened up by the beasts punching the hole in the house.

[18:41] It's definitely more than one spirit now because Carol Ann drops this iconic line. This disturbance is paralleled by the next shot of the constructed caterpillar digging the pit for the pool, specifically unearthing Tweety's grave from the flower bed the day before.

[18:55] This is literally the same crew that worked for Speed's company, the Tea Group, that disturbed all of the graves here in this neighborhood. I don't know why, but the month of September always feels like a major transition for me. Like, I haven't been in high school since high school,

[19:07] but because I spent so many of my formative years treating September like the start of some big new adventure, it's just hard to flip that switch off. And it's not just the residual inertia of going back to school. A lot of the patterns I developed before I had the right context or self-awareness to appreciate them still linger.

[19:22] Something my therapist is reminding me of that's really helpful is that now I can apply adult context and agency to some of those feelings. So yeah, it's September, and if I'm feeling geared up for a big new adventure, why not just lean into it?

[19:34] Maybe you feel the same way, maybe you've been thinking about therapy yourself, and maybe now is the time to embark on that adventure. BetterHelp, the sponsor of today's video, makes starting therapy easy. You take a short quiz, then get matched with a licensed therapist quickly.

[19:46] You can communicate however you feel comfortable, phone, video, or text. If your therapist isn't a good fit for you, you can switch at any time with no additional cost. Over 6 million people to date have gotten help through BetterHelp, earning a 4.8 out of 5 rating on the App Store.

[19:59] Click the link in the description or go to betterhelp.com slash new rockstar to get 10% off your first month of therapy. Signing up using our link helps support our channel and lets us keep making videos like this and the next one and all the others.

[20:11] Let's get back to it. Pun-loving movie critic Gene Shalit came to those on the kitchen TV in a Critics Corner segment of NBC's The Today Show. Shalit actually gave a negative review of this movie when it came out. Pull the gates made me want to pull my things apart.

[20:24] That way, that's just my impression of him. The kids speculate what caused the earthquake under the house, and as they bicker, Robbie's milk glass explodes. The crew used a specially rigged prop glass designed with a fake detachable bottom. underneath the table a thin wire was threaded up through this tiny hole in the tabletop

[20:39] and attached directly to the bottom of the glass, and then a crew person under the table pulled it. More background humor in this scene. The pool diggers in the background are often just sitting in the grass, smoking, and Steve ties a tie around the phone cord, getting it caught in his loop.

[20:51] Carol Ann listens to the TV people in the static while Robbie realizes his fork and spoon are bent and twisted. When Dana gets catcalled by the workers, she handles it by flipping them off, with Diane just laughing. Remember, Diane's only 31,

[21:03] and she would have been super young when she had her kids. This iconic scene with the kitchen chairs is part of an incredible scenic magic trick that Hooper and Spielberg stage here. It begins with the pledge. Diane reminds her kids to push in the chairs.

[21:15] But since some paranormal stuff has already begun happening, this is the last thing we really pay attention to. So we go upstairs and E-Buzz is starting to bark on that exact spot on the wall where the agency formed the portal and we're creeped out by that. And then the scene eases our attention

[21:27] with this gag of the worker in the window eating his family's food. By the way, this actor was also murdered in 2009. So then we get to the turn of the trick. The chairs are all pulled out again. And we wonder, who did this?

[21:40] Was it that worker coming through the open window? Was it Carol Ann? Actually, where is Carol Ann? And then... Jesus, don't do it, Carol Ann. Fake-out jump scare. A creepy little ant reaches up in the frame and it gets me every time I watch this movie.

[21:54] But this is the perfectly staged shot that we stay in for the prestige of this trick. A perfectly executed Texas switch done in one take. With Carol Ann sitting on the counter, the camera turns to follow Diane into the cupboard, and then back, and...

[22:08] Now the execution of this was quite simple as far as Texas switches go. When the camera turned, the breakfast milk was now off screen, so a crew could come in quickly to remove all the chairs,

[22:21] and then at the same time set on top of the table one already glued together pyramid stack of chairs. So the real genius of this magic trick is the sound mixing and the foley work. Like there would have been a lot of shuffling sounds of the crew, so they had to mix every footstep, the cabinet open, the sounds of Diane shuffling the cleaning supplies around,

[22:36] and then the cabinet close, all in post-production.

[22:49] And because the room sound is silent other than the sounds of the earth, the final reveal just comes off as completely paranormal. and 9chamalon would pay homage to this shop with another more ambitious version of it in the sixth sense. And I love this transition from Diane and Carol Ann looking up at the shared, cross-dissolving,

[23:05] in-your-kitchen-that-looks-exactly-the-same-but-in-another-house that Steve is now selling. All of the houses built by the tea group are exactly the same, so the transition makes the wife and child look ghostly, disappearing into an empty kitchen, and reminds us that there is no soul or personality in these cookie-cutter houses.

[23:20] This team serves to establish the Freelanes as one of the first families in Cuesta Verde's phase one, showing how the restless spirits would blame them and their household for their current state. Steve also explains how their construction policies are quite liberal,

[23:32] and there's a neighbor who built a running aqueduct from the inside to the outside. I mean, policies like that are designed to keep communities secure and minimize environmental impact. I mean, no shit, nature's pissed at Cuesta Verde. As another evil storm approaches, Diane pulls Steve into the kitchen to show the furniture path that she chalked on the floor

[23:46] and makes him watch as the chair moves by itself. How did they pull this off? Well, notice how one of the chair's legs drags exactly along one of the tile lines, the grout lines, that's slightly thicker and darker than the others. Well, the crew attached a wire to this leg of the chair and ran that wire under the floor through this line,

[24:03] so they were able to yank the wire to wobble the chair, and then pull the whole chair via that wire exactly on that line. And it's the same line and wire system that they used to slide Heather over, wearing the ram's helmet. It was attached to a harness hidden under her overalls that pulled her along the line,

[24:17] and then they heavily wax the linoleum to reduce friction. JoBess Williams is just so great here as she emotes this unhinged certainty. It's like there's a tickling, you know, right in here, and it starts to kill you. That tickling feeling are the spirits trying to connect the life force that Carol Ann, Diane,

[24:32] and the chairs they dine together on all represent. Now, there is a famous abrupt jump cut here. And you're getting totally on your feet. So, reportedly, this awkward edit came from a last-minute removal. Earlier in the scene, remember, Diane suggested they go to Pizza Hut instead of her making dinner,

[24:46] Which would be an odd detail, because we definitely saw her cooking some sauce earlier on that stove when the worker leaned in to eat it. I assume that she let that burn while she was getting distracted by the chairs. But as Diane rambles here, the scene was going to end with Steve just saying,

[24:58] I hate Pizza Hut. Reportedly, this line got back to Pizza Hut, and then GM hastily removed the line to appease the brand. Steve and Diane are attacked by mosquitoes that don't bother neighbor Ben and his son at all. Another sign of all the nearby nature beginning to turn on the family.

[25:10] Diane in the next scene says that these mosquitoes got a pint of blood, which might be an interesting reading, into things, but it is the kind of phrase that he would use to suggest culprits having to pay a price or a penance for some kind of misdeed. We get this terrifying countdown as Robbie counts the distance between the lightning

[25:24] and the thunder, and each time he counts, the number gets lower until... As the tree branches crash in, notice the clown doll is right there next to Carol Ann.

[25:36] Robbie being devoured by a tree while a black tornado rages through just remains one of the most disturbing things I think I've ever seen in a movie. I mean, even after they save the kid, he's coated by this slimy, muddy tree stomach acid.

[25:49] No, the Beast was not trying to use the tree to suck Robbie into another dimension, because this ends with the tree itself sucked into the cyclone and sent to Oz, I guess. This was actually a cruel diversion to separate the family from the Beast's true target, Carol Ann.

[26:01] Now, this suction of everything into the open closet was accomplished by recreating this set of the kid's room on a soundstage with a rotating set mounted on a gimbal that could turn 360 degrees. In this case, they tilted it 90 degrees and filled the room with the sparkling glitter pieces to sell the illusion.

[26:16] The shots of Carol Ann hanging from the headboard and Y used a dummy to avoid the danger of a young child in this rotating set, intercut with poor Hedda O'Rourke screaming with a wind machine on her. Reportedly, after she did this take, she kind of broke down in tears and Steven Spielberg had to hug her and tell her that he'd never make her do another take.

[26:31] Carol Ann hauls into a closet and then two beds pile on top of the doorway. Diane and Steve dig through the closet and think for a moment that Carol Ann is dead under that blanket, but then... Ah, there's some momentary relief, but then after searching the house,

[26:47] Diane's paranoid fear of Carol Ann drowning in the pool pit returns. It's fully irrational. They were just all outside right next to the pool when Carol Ann went missing somewhere inside the house. But, you know, when a tree starts to eat your son, after a day of furniture flying around, nothing's really that crazy anymore.

[27:02] Robbie alerts Diane to the TV. As Diane puts her hand to the TV, we hear whispering, as if warning her to stay away from its prey.

[27:16] Steve goes to the nearby university's parapsychology department and meets Dr. Martha Lesch, Dr. Marty Casey, and Dr. Ryan Mitchell. He gives the ages of the family. This is Diane, my wife. She's 31.

[27:28] I'm 32. I'm sorry. And my oldest daughter, Dana. 16. Oh wait, what? Diane got pregnant with Dana when Diane was 15? There have been some explanations for this over the years. Reportedly in James Caan's

[27:41] novelization of this movie, Diane is Steve's second wife, and Dana is Steve's daughter from a previous marriage. Some point to the fact that Steve says that Dana is my oldest daughter, but he also says my son for Robbie. I also think this just could

[27:53] have been a thing in the early 80s Spielberg movies. Like in Raiders of the Lost Ark the previous year, ending at a past romantic history with Marion when he was a grad student and she was, in her words, a child, JoBeth Williams was really against her this task.

[28:05] And she was 31 to 32 at this time. And maybe the filmmakers felt they kind of served this story to have a younger mom for the moments that she would be in particular danger. But also, looking back at the film, why include this older teenage daughter in the story to just sideline

[28:17] her for much of the movie? And I guess Dana does get the best line of the movie. And again, the early 80s were just filled with stuff like this. A very sleep-deprived Steve tells Dr. Lex We don't care about the disturbance.

[28:29] The power of the flesh. Screams. The music always creeps me out. It's either spirits singing in this other realm, or just the spirits fucking with them by playing the kids records like we see in the next scene.

[28:41] Ryan brags about getting footage of a matchbox car moving 7 feet over 7 hours, and I love Steve's reaction to this. This cursed room is filled with floating spinning magnets animated by ILM We see an incredible Hulk figurine riding a horse and then a geometry compass slides right at Dr Lesh but then it used as a needle for the record

[29:00] It kind of feels like the beasts and spirits are just showing off here. As a teapot slides around the table, Dr. Lesh nervously explains the difference between poltergeists, entities connected to an individual, usually short-term, and haunting, associated with a location and lasting years.

[29:12] Interestingly, this movie is kind of a story of both. While this quest of Verde House being built on a cemetery was part of the disturbance, it wasn't a haunting or any kind of issue until the beast took advantage of Carol Ann's life force and punched a hole into the physical plane and used it to snare all of

[29:26] these confused souls. At that point, it became both a poltergeist story and a haunting story. The family demonstrates for the investigators how they talked to Carol Ann, and it's such a sweet and tragic moment as they cling to the only presence they have of their daughter right now. Eva barks at the spot on the ceiling that we soon realize is the exit portal for this dimension.

[29:41] Old watches and belongings spew out of it, belonging to the souls who were buried beneath this house. Dr. Les urges Diane to tell Carol Ann not to go into the lights. That would be the exit to the afterlife, and we don't want Carol Ann going that far, Carol Ann asks.

[29:59] So this is probably the Beast, who often takes the form of a child, to deceive Carol Ann, but in the novelization, there's a mention of a benevolent spirit known as the Waiting Woman, who protects Carol Ann in this dimension. But then, as they hear Carol Ann screaming

[30:11] and running from the Beast, this happens. The family just completely loses it, smelling Diane's scarf as Dana prays and nods.

[30:29] Jo Beth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, and Dominique Dunn just playing the show authentically as beleaguered religious fanatics. It's what completely sells this scene. Like, we don't need any special effects at all. But then the beat follows, flashing a red light through the living room and blowing them all off their feet.

[30:43] Despite so many special effects, this movie really accomplishes so much with just flashing lights, wind, sound, and incredible performances by the actors. This movie also smartly establishes why the family can't initially just leave the house. They're worried if they leave, they'll lose Carol Ann forever, and Steve doesn't want any of them to be alone.

[30:58] Ryan explains to the other two investigators why the static is receiving Carol Ann's voice. The absence of a signal on a channel without a broadcast opens it up to receive noise from short ways, solar disturbances, outer space, or inner space. I mean, part of the charm of this movie is that due to changing telecommunication technology,

[31:12] Poltergeist really can't be made the same way today. No offense, 2015 Sam Rockwell relink. Before digital signals and Wi-Fi, there was a certain eerie magic to TV signals where conspiracy theories could live, like the Max Headroom signal hijacking incident.

[31:25] Even as a 90s kid, I had a kind of TV in my bedroom with rabbit ears, and I would see things happen on TV sometimes when I was in the room by myself, and I would just have to wait until the next day at school to ask if anyone else just happened to see it at that exact moment. Poltergeist still feels relevant today for the way our kids can still get sucked into their screens.

[31:40] Screens of a more nefarious nature. Screens that are only becoming more and more sophisticated and unholding by the minute. So the reason Poltergeist is a lasting, nostalgic charm is that families used to gather around TVs like this. It was a kind of American hearse.

[31:52] But for the smaller screens of the modern age, a child will sink into it and no one will have any idea what they're experiencing. And I think that's why 90s kids like me are more likely to lean back to the 80s for our horror rewatches. because they kind of long for a time when the horror seems just more manageable.

[32:06] But, trapped in their time, these characters in 1982 felt as helpless as we feel now. I feel like a poor human. Coming out of the forest, I need one of these. I'm going to go for the bird. I'm going to rock that. Yeah, I kind of sense another Stanley Kubrick reference in there to 2001 A Space Odyssey.

[32:22] Robbie wakes up and proposes that maybe he should die so he can go save his sister, and that they should tie a rope around him so they can pull them both out. This is, in effect, what they'll do with Diane to rescue Carol Ann. Beatrice Strait gives this incredible monologue here, explaining, like we're five, to Robbie, ghosts in the afterlife, whispering it in a way that makes it all feel beautiful and magical.

[32:39] How death reveals the answers to all of life's questions as we become part of the light. But some souls get lost along the way to the afterlife and linger, watching their loved ones grow up and feeling jealous, sometimes angry. One cannot help but see that Steven Spielberg influences in this scene.

[32:51] This nighttime scene with everyone sleeping and whispering and dropping important truths gives me a trial run for Spielberg's nighttime church scene in Steven Private Ryan. There it was Giovanni Ribisi monologuing about the trick to falling asleep is trying to stay awake, and how he would try to stay up to see his mom come home late from work but never could,

[33:06] and then the times he could stay up, he would still pretend to be asleep, and he couldn't understand why he did that. This moment in Poltergeist kind of lives in that same little, authentic, messy, real place that only Anne Boleyn movies could really do. But here, being straight delivers us with a kind of sadness

[33:19] of someone who seems like her own loved one might have gotten lost on the way to the afterlife. My headcanon is that that's Dr. Lesch's daughter. I mean, you don't fall into parapsychology and drink from a flask the way she does unless you've had your own personal haunting.

[33:31] I just appreciate how this movie brings in two experts for the paranormal. You have Dr. Less, the investigator, and then Zelda Rubinstein's incredibly iconic Tangina Barron, an even more ethereal war commander. It takes one woman to comfort the family and another woman to mobilize them to battle.

[33:45] Together, they kind of represent the exorcist, old priest, and the young priest of this house's exorcism. And it ultimately amounts to a very feminine and non-religious approach to the crisis. Now, it's hard to hear in the whisper, but Robbie's theory is hilarious.

[34:04] This kid really thinks that his bullies might have died and turned into Stretch, Stinky, and Fatso from Casper. Another Amblin production. I love how this movie lets Ryan and Marty be imaginative freaks in their own right. We see Ryan sketching a drawing of Diane crying as her hair turns into this insane S-shaped staircase.

[34:18] A creative sketching like this being really the only way you could properly record the emotional truth of her experience. Marty breaks the fridge and takes out a whole freaking steak that I guess he's going to grill on the stove top in the middle of the night, not caring about the noise or the smoke, and he plops that raw steak directly on the counter surface?

[34:34] I mean, the Beast probably bewitched all this food just to teach him a lesson in cooking etiquette. This crawling steak is great. It was accomplished by using the same ingenious technique as the chairs and caroling sliding on the floor. They used the tile separated by grout to create a line, and notice the line the steak moves along is thicker and darker than the other grout lines.

[34:50] They fastened two wires to the steak and ran them through this line, and then a special effects operator dropped under the countertop, moved the wires to make the steak inchworm across the counter. Now the steak burst open with rotting innards.

[35:02] Special effects makeup artist Craig Reardon created this effect and said in the E! True Hollywood Story documentary that the script called for the whole steak from the beginning to be cancerous. He said that he made a tumor-covered steak that Toby Hooper approved,

[35:17] but then when Steven Spielberg dropped by the prop area and saw the prop, he said that it needed to start by looking like a normal steak that then would burst open, because otherwise people wouldn't register it as a steak to begin with. And at that point, Reardon said that he would need to run everything past Spielberg when they were on the set.

[35:30] The chicken drumstick that was just in Marty's mouth, covered in maggots, another detail that this year's obsession would call back. With Bear realizing what was in his sandwich, Spielberg fresh off the melting bases in Raiders of the Lost Ark grosses us out here with a similar bit of body horror,

[35:43] which we can't fully show in this video because of YouTube, but the hands on screen pulling apart the prosthetic face are actually the hands of Steven Spielberg himself. After a childhood of scaring his sisters by pulling wet toilet paper off of his face like it was his skin, he just kinda had a lifetime training of knowing exactly how to make it look the gnarliest,

[35:58] to do it slowly, and then quickly in a panic tear apart all the flesh off of one's face. So at this point I think we can see the beast entity of this movie as Spielberg himself, needlessly terrorizing these people just for the fun of it. Ryan's activity meter goes haywire and his camera turns on its own

[36:12] to point at the staircase as a light and mist manifests to the top. Now the SH staircase really pays off as it draws the eye in a surreal way to the female spirit that slows down the stairs toward them into the room, accompanied by light. When they watch back the footage, they see distinct ghosts,

[36:26] wearing hats and looking confused. This is all changed from the original version of the scene in the script, which would have shown the evil beast entities surrounded by smaller good spirit lights from different historical eras. There would be a woman from the 20s, men wearing burlap-type coats and floppy hats, a girl with a ball,

[36:40] but then the evil entity would melt into a ghastly face of a very creepy old man. A vision of madness and murder, the script called it. Apparently, the trailer for this movie had Diane screaming in reaction to this moment, so they did shoot it before replacing it with what we see here.

[36:53] But the idea was, this was the ultimate evil entity, and in Poltergeist 2, The Other Side, the screenwriters brought back the idea by making this character Reverend Henry Kane, who led the 19th century cult who buried themselves alive in the grave that would be beneath his house,

[37:06] thinking that the end of the world was coming. The sequel suggested that's who these ghosts were, but the King character doesn't yet exist in the continuity of this movie alone. Robbie and Eva head off to Grandma's, and Mr. Teague drops by to check in on Steve. Looks like we've got some cable problems here.

[37:19] I love how the piano continues to chase Mr. Teague out of the house, as a spirit seems to recognize this fucker as the big culprit. Teague takes Steve up to the top of the hill overlooking Cuesta Verde. We spend several minutes in the scene looking from their point of view of this spot that T promises would be the Freelane's new house in Phase 5,

[37:34] and only after T offers to make Steve a partner does the camera pull back to reveal the obvious truth that these two men could see, but the audience couldn't. Graves. The sudden reveal of a huge, obvious quantity dressed out of frame is kind of a Spielberg trope, and it speaks to the theme of this movie,

[37:49] the way suburbia ignores and erases history, and how history will always come whirring back. For several minutes, we could only see the bright, sunny progress of the development of the valley below, while we, without realizing it, were actually standing with the camera on these graves,

[38:03] looking past the fence that Steve and Mr. T, such as the Truth of Suburbia, forget your troubles, just look over in that direction. This vast cemetery, with its evil tree, was all a gorgeous matte painting. That's why the grass to the right of the frame blows in the wind, but the grass inside of the fence is deadly still.

[38:18] But it also creates this creepy effect where everything in that cemetery just looks dead and frozen in time. I have seen many of the best shots in film history use matte paintings like this. Mr. Teague says it's not ancient tribal burial ground, it's just...

[38:31] deep. Besides, we've done it before. He confirms that a few years earlier in 1976, they moved another cemetery that was down in the Freelance neighborhood. 1976 would have been the Bicentennial. This movie suggesting this type of disrespect of history

[38:44] really does go back to the founding of the country. It really is the story of America. That's why this movie opens with the National Anthem. But this is based on something that happened in real American history. From Denver, Colorado's Sheathman Park.

[38:56] In 1858, the land now known as Sheathman Park was a Catholic cemetery. In 1972, Congress called the site Federal Land and then sold it to the city of Denver with a provision that must always serve as a cemetery. But throughout the 1880s, the city of Denver wanted to change its status to parkland, and in 1890, Congress allowed it.

[39:11] So in 1893, undertaker E.P. McGovern began moving the 5,000 graves, but a contractor mishandled these remains, including dismembering corpses to stuff them into smaller child coffins. McGovern was dismissed and the project was halted with many of the graves still there.

[39:25] And the city had no funds to complete this task and to complete the park. But in 1907, the widow and children of a teasman estate donated $100,000 for a Greek-style pavilion. It still stands there today and many of the graves that were never moved are still there.

[39:38] Indeed, this is the story of America. Dr. Lestree turns to the house with her products back up. Zelda Rubinstein playing the incredible Tangina Barron. It is rare when a movie this late into the runtime has a character join the story completely unannounced

[39:52] and fully changes the dynamic this effectively. For the next 19 minutes of the movie, that's really it. Poltergeist completely belongs to her. From her opening line here... Don't mind holding back. You can in my footprint, please.

[40:05] To her iconic closing line... And I love how even the other characters just stand back in a kind of formation, allowing her to strut in with the regal authority offset by her tiny physical size.

[40:18] Steve likens Tangina to a munchkin from Oz and calls this Les' Knott's Berry Farm solution. As a SoCal resident, I always appreciate a reference to the amusement park that Walt Disney ripped off to make Disneyland. Even as calling Tangina kind of a hokey roadside attraction and not even legit enough to be Disneyland,

[40:33] he tried to answer her with his mind and she later proved this kind of ESP by hearing their whispers from all the way upstairs. She was just choosing not to respond to trick answers. Then Gina makes Diane promise to do everything she asks, even if it's contrary to her beliefs as a human being and as a Christian.

[40:49] She gathers them around like children to explain everything with a calm, angelic confidence. There is no death. It is only a conversation to a different sphere of consciousness.

[41:01] She wants them to empathize with these tragic, confused souls, and want for them the salvation that awaits them by crossing into the spectral right. Then she shifts into the dire tone to describe the other entity trapping Carol Ann. Yeah, I love how sometimes movies can just get your heart pounding with a declaration of the mission.

[41:24] Now, what happens next is something I only discovered on my 10th rewatch here. This whole scene in the upstairs hallway is a discreet Spielberg wonder. It's a full three minutes, never cutting, just letting the camera roll on these actors organically acting the hell out of the scene through eight different camera setups.

[41:41] One, a close-up of Ryan numbering the tennis ball. Going to two, a wide shot of Steve dropping off the rope and Tangina small in the back of the shot. Going to three, Tangina stepping forward to now loom large in the foreground and try to sense where Carol Ann is and conduct these parents.

[41:55] Going to four, Tangina reporting Carol Ann is restrained and both of the parents stepping forward, debating over who's more of the disciplinarian. Going to five, a close-up on Steve taking an aggressive tone with Carol Ann to try to get her to break free of the beast. Going to six, the camera pushing in on Diane to tell Carol Ann to run to the light

[42:10] and get away from the beast and try to get the souls to cross over, going to 7, a push in on Tangina for her chilling morning, and then going to 8, the final shot of the doorknob to the kids' bedroom. I mean, I can't imagine how hard it must have been for these actors

[42:22] to play this emotional intensity in a single 3-minute take, as Spielberg, and I'm confident it was Spielberg directing the camera and not Hooper, because wonders like this are unmistakably Spielberg, constantly moving the camera into these tight, invasive angles,

[42:35] like they must have rehearsed the shit out of the scene. Our hearts break with Stephen as he repeatedly professes that he hates raising his voice to his kids and never ever spanks them. And then again with Diane, who has to urge her daughter to run into the direction of the light that she knows would take her daughter to the afterlife.

[42:50] Run to the light, baby. Mommy is in the light. I'm already waiting for you. Mommy is waiting for you in the light. I think you're perfect. But Tangina is unsicken by that. I hate you for this. And gives us a calm warning.

[43:03] They just give us so much information all at once. I never told you. I love you. It hurts in the very beginning. I'm keeping him to help, but knows too much already. It knows too much already? Yes for Robbie it knew about his fears of the tree and the clown It still knows The eerie blue light blasting from the closet was according to Spielberg the most complicated lighting effect of the film which he explained in the making of Futurette that was directed by Frank Marshall

[43:27] From a lighting standpoint, the most difficult scene became the sequence in the famous or infamous closet. The closet where everything goes into and comes out of. The closet with the special lights. There were so many lighting effects.

[43:40] strobes and Las Vegas spots and fish tanks of water to give a different kind of diffusion to the beams coming out and four large wind machines and minutia and smoke. It was just

[43:53] to coordinate all that for a simple effect. We just didn't want to light, but we wanted the light to live, to really breathe and to include a kind of a personality. After the tennis ball test works, they feed the rope through the portal and the line is held by Stephen upstairs and Ryan

[44:06] down below. Tangina plants to go in but Diane says Carol Ann will only come to her. You're going to go to the bar! You're going to go! Come on, you're going!

[44:18] Always true for a joke. We get this glorious shot of Steve and Diane kissing in the special lights with the wind sweeping around them. Spielberg had another version of this sweeping kiss in the wind in E.T. Diane goes in, and Steve gets impatient of not knowing when they'll come out.

[44:32] Tangina ignores him and calls on the other souls to go into the light. Her goal is to weaken the beast by depleting it of these other lost souls,

[44:46] transferring them over to the afterlife so Carol Ann can escape in that chaos. But Steven panics and tries to retract Diane, but hooks a bigger fish instead.

[44:59] Ah, the beast reveals its face. Rewatching this, one cannot help but see the parallel to Steven Spielberg's Jaws. when Brody tosses a chum in the water and then is suddenly greeted by a giant maw that he was not expecting.

[45:11] Come on down and chum some of this shit. For now, this is just a demonic beast. But in the sequel, when we learn it's actually the form of Reverend Henry Kane, it manifests as a tequila worm in the sequel and gets swallowed by Steven,

[45:25] briefly possessing him, and then gets puked back out as a giant worm. And then it mutates into a reptilian ghoul and becomes a tall black skeleton with an array of multiple heads from the people whose souls he has consumed. So this howl is really just the beginning.

[45:39] But thankfully, with the beach turned back this way, Ryan and Dr. Lex are able to yank Diane and Caroline back down, covered in this gooey ectoplasm looking very much like some placental fluid. Wiping it off in the bathtub, both Diane and Caroline wake up.

[45:52] Oh, God. After all of that, and Gina suddenly remembers her whole livelihood really is based on how she buttoned Ryan's video recording. So she bounces her hair, strikes a pose, and says, As the family packs up the house,

[46:06] Diane tells Dana that they're going to stay the night at the Holiday Inn on I-74. Uh-huh. We are on the agenda. Man, 80s teenagers just got laid way more than millennials in their 30s.

[46:20] Dana asks her mom about the gray X-Men rogue streak through her hair that she got from her brushless death in the afterlife. Here is where the real brilliance of Poltergeist's story structure kicks in. Like, the movie should be over. How could anything top what we just witnessed?

[46:34] But of course, it's not over, because the wrongs that started all of this have not been righted. The rescue of Carol Ann was too easy. No price has been paid. Other than Ryan's video recordings, there's really no evidence of any of this. No admission of wrongdoing by Cuesta Verde.

[46:48] Nothing in place to stop them from just doing the same thing to those headstones up at the top of the ridge. The true sin of suburbia is to never admit any wrong. Just sweep everything under the rug, bury it, move on, resettle, forget it.

[47:00] Forget history. He doesn't seem to remember anything. The one piece of physical evidence of this haunting is Diane's gray hair. And we're going to see her this evening dying it away, erasing the scar. So this movie cannot let these characters get off that easy.

[47:14] So here, Poltergeist starts a new trend in Hollywood of a false climax. Not just a final scare that was pretty well established in horror before this, but really reframing the film's climax as just the technical climax,

[47:26] really the end of the second act, and hitting us with a surprise third act in a dramatic climax, what ultimately becomes the most dazzling and horrifying ten minutes that Steven Spielberg and Tony Hooper have ever directed. But as we get into it, we see the dad, Steven, tripping over Robbie's yellow bike.

[47:42] Now remember, this was the same bike that Steven's buddy peddled in the opening scene on that beer run back to his house during the game. I think the bike might have moved itself to try to trip Steven, because as we will see, this house and the grounds and everything in it are still haunted.

[47:55] From the moment Diane turns on the water to bathe and dye her hair, the reddish-orange light signals to us that the madness is about to begin. Back in the kids' bedroom, it makes zero sense for the clown doll to be right there in the middle of the room, facing Robbie's bed, on a chair, directly in front of that hell-mouthed closet.

[48:10] But here's a detail no one ever talks about. Look at the chair. It's not the wicker chair that matches the bedroom set that we saw the clown on earlier. Presumably, that chair was packed up with the moving truck. This chair is one of the same downstairs kitchen nook chairs that was enchanted earlier, moving around on its own.

[48:27] There would be no reason on moving day for the family to move one of those chairs upstairs just to hold up this clown doll. Meaning the chair must have moved itself up here in order to keep the clown doll within Robbie's eyeline to scare him.

[48:40] So forget the clown, the chair tells us that this house is still haunted. Meanwhile, there's something very cute and very creepy about Carol Ann with the tattooing Luke Kenner figurine in her mouth moving the doll's head back to his body? Why was the head removed like that, perfectly placed like that?

[48:54] Yes, the lingering entity must have done that. But we stay for a long shot on Diane in the bath, just waiting for something to happen to her, but nothing for now. So when we cut back to the bedroom and we see that empty chair,

[49:06] our stomachs drop. Robbie looking over the bed on one side as the camera follows over his shoulder and then comes back to lift the covers on the other side. I mean, it's impossible not to cover your eyes here.

[49:19] Ah, God! So this amounts to another brilliant three-step visual magic trick. Nothing on this side. Nothing on this side. And then, gosh, the pristies! I mean, they even changed the design of the clown's face to look more sinister

[49:34] just for this attack as he drags Robbie under the bed and strangles him. Meanwhile, Diane, looking younger and more vulnerable than ever, wearing just a jersey, gets dragged onto the wall and the ceiling of the bedroom. So, of course, this was accomplished using the rotating set.

[49:48] now going a full 360 degree rotation that really wore down poor JoBus Williams, whose bare legs were getting scratched by the secco ceiling. But what really sells this illusion are the details. They deliberately crowded this bedroom with things that appear to be loose.

[50:02] Boxes filled with newspaper, toys on the ground, framed photos, loose bed sheets, a heart balloon hovering by the wall. But in truth, all of these things were firmly anchored in place with hidden adhesives and wires. Even the balloon and its string, which is actually just a stiff wire,

[50:16] so that when the room set rotated, the only thing free to move around affected by the gravity would be the actress. And it even had Diane blow-drying her newly dyed hair so that it would be fluffed up and not respond as much to the shifting gravity, which is brilliant.

[50:29] But the whole rotating room illusion was, of course, as old as cinema itself, from Victor Fleming's silent film When the Clouds Roll In in 1919, Buster Keaton in The Boat in 1921, Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968,

[50:42] even Spielberg doing a version of it himself with the stuff floating in the car in 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But after Poltergeist, we would see it much more in horror, like Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, David Cronenberg's The Fly in 1986,

[50:56] meaning Spielberg was the one who saw this done and thought, rather than comedy or sci-fi, this kind of thing can be used to scare and torture these victims. Robbie tears a stuffing out of the clown while the closet door turns into a fleshy hellmouth,

[51:08] and Diane is trapped from the room by this new incarnation of the entity. this roar sound effect would become the source of the ncm bumper lion roar outside diane falls into the swimming pool pit the thing that she worried would be fall caroline

[51:24] where human remains bubble up from the mud yes these were real human remains joe beth williams spent four to five days of shooting these scenes and did not realize until after they wrapped that these were actual skeletons this was confirmed by the special effects makeup artist you talked

[51:38] about earlier, Craig Reardon, who, in mentioning it too, was deposed as part of a lawsuit by other screenwriters, claiming that their ideas were taken and used for poltergeist. This didn't settle out of court, but Reardon's testimony was relevant to the origin of many of the scares in the movie.

[51:50] And as to the pool skeletons, Reardon testified under oath that he acquired these real skeletons from a medical supply company. According to the deposition, he said, I acquired a number of actual biological surgical skeletons, is what they're called,

[52:03] therefore hanging in classrooms and studying. These are actual skeletons from people. I think the bones are acquired from India, but at any rate, we got 13 of these, and we dressed them so that they looked not like bleached, clean, bolted-together skeletons,

[52:15] but instead disintegrating cadavers. And, you know, added sculpted rubber and things to them so they would have a kind of dramatic, leering, spooky aspect, and not be dull, what am I trying to say, clinical-type corpses, you know? So really what we saw as the rotting parts on these skeletons

[52:29] was actually the sculpted rubber that was added, but the original bones beneath were real bones. But still, this was the process of a lot of Hollywood films before this. Real human skeletons were used in 1931's Frankenstein, 1959's House on Haunted Hill, and 1978's Dawn of the Dead.

[52:43] The neighbors helped Diane get out, and she runs back inside, but now the architecture of her upstairs hallway is just completely different. It's now a long, straight hallway that goes on and on, and she runs down it while the camera performs a dolly zoom,

[52:56] zooming in or out on the part of the frame while the dolly moves in the opposite direction, creating the effect of this expanding space that you can never reach the end of. But I love JoBess Williams' performance of limping in place to suggest that kind of hopelessness that one would feel in a dream,

[53:10] followed by a determined digging in and sprinting to show this mama bear overcoming these horrors of this house. Now the whole closet has become the pulsating, fleshy throat of this beast. And as Pentacle slithers up, Diane just screams,

[53:23] Help me! Help me! It says something that the first utterance of God, like the first spoken prayer of this movie, is what seems to give Diane the strength to heave both of her kids out of the room. Fever does often default to the power of faith.

[53:36] Raiders of the Lost Ark was ultimately a testament to God rewarding the penitent and the non-Nazis. As coffins and corpses burst through the house and the front yard, the side doesn't really focus on it, but you can see in the background the S-shaped staircase just undulating like a fire hose.

[53:51] Diana and the kids had to get down that thing. Mr. Teague, who presumably wrote back with Stephen to try to talk him out of leaving, now gets this verbal lashing. The property still refuses to let the family drive away easily.

[54:08] Another corpse flies out of the garage onto their hood. Dana gets dropped off by her boyfriend to give us this iconic scream. It's such a good take that it's easy to miss the really cool detail, a hickey on Dana's neck.

[54:22] Her siblings are practically ready to leave her behind at this point, but Steven stuffed her in the car, and they plowed through all the barriers thrown in their path as this whole neighborhood explodes around them. Water hydrants, gas lines, leaving only Mr. T behind to watch in disbelief

[54:35] as the entire house is sucked into the void. This incredible effect was accomplished with a scale model of a house that was only four feet wide placed on an industrial strength vacuum cleaner on a horizontal plane.

[54:47] They put 100 wires attached to various points of the structure and ran them down through the house into the vacuum collection stack beneath it, and then a camera was mounted above that table pointed downward, filming 300 frames per second. So then the vacuum was switched on, they pulled the wires,

[55:00] and the house was blasted with pump-action shotguns, and then everything got stuck down to the vacuum, and it all went down in two seconds, but they got it on the first take. This is the Cecil B. DeMille shot of the movie, this true grand finale, an encore that first-time viewers never thought we would get,

[55:14] but is totally necessary for the themes of the film. Everyone in this community, including the green developer who started it all, must bear witness to these suburban sins. As quickly as they are trying to erase history, history can just as easily erase them from existence.

[55:28] The film ends at the Holiday Inn that Diane mentioned earlier. The pulsating blue star in the neon sign reminds us of the blinding bluish light that they were fighting so hard to stay out of. The sign beneath reads, Welcome, Dr. Fantasy and Friends. Dr. Fantasy is the magician stage name of producer Frank Marshall,

[55:42] who would do magic shows on set for the cast and crew at the end of his productions. In another longer than usual take, we follow this exhausted family all the way down the walkway, into the room, and then after a pause, we end the movie as we began, on a TV.

[55:58] Based on the time of night, I'm guessing the only thing that would be on right now would just be static. It's easy to see poltergeists as a warning about the dangers of screens, but a deeper reading of the film, like the one we just did together, shows that none of these horrors were truly the fault of television.

[56:12] Television was just the medium that the evil was able to use to invade the house and abduct heroine. But it was also the only way the free links could continue to talk to their daughters. so much so that Diane never wanted to turn it off. Parents of missing children do need the media and social media

[56:25] to try to reunite with their kids. But the father, Steven, coming to TV outside, shows how America really does fail to learn the lesson of its misdeeds. It always blames the media, blames television, blames social media,

[56:37] and never the underlying causes of our ills, which are the universal debris stains of greed, ignorance, apathy that technology only just channels and amplifies. But, you know, can you blame an exhausted dad like this

[56:49] for just saying, screen time is over. Go to bed. I love Poltergeist, and I'm so glad I got to break down that part of our Weekend Watch series. Next week, you're going to see Jessica's video about Scooby-Doo. Comment down below with your thoughts on this movie,

[57:02] and a special thanks to one of our In Our Underground subscribers, Dante, for supporting us at the executive register level. You can get all of our exclusive bonus content by clicking the link in the description below or going to inourunderground.supercast.com. Big thanks to Studio Tech Brian Kim,

[57:14] New Rock Stars editors Joshua Stephen Hurd, and Abby Friel, and all of our supporting editors for their work on this video. So follow me at EAVOS and hit the subscribe button. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. And remember, if you move the headstone, you always have to move the body!