Last night the Missus and I spent a lovely evening courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, watching Psycho, The Birds, and Poltergeist in a row. As a marathon, it was not flattering to its concluding film. Granted, Hitch is a tough act to follow, especially with those movies–she and I were astonished anew at Anthony Perkins’s heartbreakingly naturalistic performance, the still-shocking violence of the shower scene, Martin Balsam’s oh-crap-I’m-in-the-wrong-movie private dick, the sheer relentlessness of bird attacks on children, the proto-Night of the Living Dead house under siege, and on and on and on. By comparison, Poltergeist is pretty freaking stupid.
I’m honestly kind of baffled as to why that movie has the scary reputation it does. Maybe it’s “the curse” and the tragic fates of Dominique Dunne and Heather O’Rourke? I guess it’s the nature of the film’s scariest images–simply put, they’re tailor-made to scare the living shit out of any little kid who saw the movie while still in grade school. Evil clowns, evil toys, evil backyard trees, getting sucked into the closet, eerie TVs left on in the dark, parents who can’t save you…that’s all straight outta Spielberg’s eight-year-old id, from what I understand. But for grown-ups, it’s really rather weak.
And it’s not just the goofy and boring nature of the fright images the filmmakers deploy–it’s how haphazardly they deploy them, with seemingly no regard to a crescendo of escalating horror. Once you’ve seen lasers shoot out of the wall, who cares that the chairs are rearranging themselves? How do you expect the audience to process a sudden leap from slip-sliding across the kitchen floor like a cool carnival ride to a man-eating tree and a haunting with the power to trap a kid in another dimension–in the space of a few hours?
By the time the paranormal investigators show up, Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams are treating the disappearance of their daughter following their son’s near-murder by an evil Ent and an ongoing paranormal riot in the kids’ bedroom like a particularly unpleasant bedbug infestation. So long, high stakes. No one’s reaction to what’s going on seems commensurate with the magnitude of the supernatural occurrences they’re witnessing, even though the script goes out of its way to downplay the investigators’ most notable prior experiences. And again, it bounces super-rapidly between novelty-act stuff like old jewelry dropping from the ceiling and a Hulk action figure flying around, to grand-guignol horror like a maggot-infested chicken wing and a guy tearing his own face off, back to Spielbergian “wow!” moments like a ghost parade down the staircase. I don’t know if this is a product of the uneasy collaborative dynamic between nominal director Tobe “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Hooper and screenwriter/producer/de facto director Steven Spielberg or what, but it plays havoc with the film’s pacing and leeches the pizzazz out of the scares. And once Zelda Rubenstein shows up and they go through that absurd physical business with the tennis balls and the rope and the bathwater, I was yawning and ready to change the channel. (For a far more effective combination of the supernatural with physically-verifiable science-fiction trappings, see Ghostbusters.) Also, if you can figure out why they go through all that trouble to establish that she’s the real deal only to have her erroneously pronounce the house free of hauntings anymore, please fill me in.
But you know what is compelling about the movie? All that gloriously weird suburbia subtext! I’m not even sure the filmmakers realized what a bizarre beneath-the-surface look at three-kids-and-a-dog middle-classness they were providing. You obviously don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what they were getting at with building developments on top of graveyards–in terms of metaphorical subtlety it’s up their with Dawn of the Dead‘s zombies in a shopping mall–or by opening with the Star Spangled Banner. But what about the fact that JoBeth Williams’s extravangly MILFtastic mother is 32 and her oldest daughter is 16? What about the pot-smoking scene, or the alcoholic desperation of Craig T. Nelson’s football-watching buddy’s beer run? What about the oldest daughter showing up at the very end with two huge, unexplained hickeys? What about Mom getting a kick out of the construction workers hitting on her daughter? What about Williams spending much of the climactic sequence with her panties on display? What about the seemingly endless amount of conspicuously consumed stuff in the kids’ bedroom? What about that vagina tunnel into the afterworld? I don’t think it’s at all surprising that the sequence that’s the most effectively scary, the climax, is the one where this stuff all comes to the fore most directly. I almost feel like when people remember Poltergeist, they’re transferring their impressions of that strange, and therefore frightening, final sequence onto the rest of the movie.