Poltergeist (1982) Is A Masterpiece of American Horror Cinema
Some movies terrify you. Others haunt you. Poltergeist does both. And then it follows you home to your brand new home with a new pool being built.
Rating: 4 Cocktails 🍸🍸🍸🍸
Steven Spielberg’s supernatural masterpiece (officially directed by Tobe Hooper, though we’ll get to that controversy) took the American Dream and twisted it into a nightmare, proving that evil doesn’t need gothic castles, stalking unkillable monsters or remote cabins. Sometimes it’s waiting right under your suburban lawn, and sometimes the scariest thing in your house is that goddamn clown doll your kid insists on keeping.
They’re Here: The American Dream Nightmare
The Freeling family has it made. Steve (Craig T. Nelson) is a successful real estate developer. Diane (JoBeth Williams) is the quintessential California mom: fun, loving, and effortlessly cool. Their three kids, sixteen-year-old Dana (Dominique Dunne), eight-year-old Robbie (Oliver Robins), and five-year-old Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke), are growing up in Cuesta Verde, a beautiful planned community in the San Fernando Valley. New house, new pool being dug in the backyard, friendly neighbors. The American Dream in Technicolor.
But something’s wrong with the house.
It starts innocuously enough. Carol Anne talks to the TV static after the broadcast day ends, whispering to unseen voices. Chairs stack themselves on the kitchen table while no one’s looking. Carol Ann goes sliding across the kitchen floor. A glass of milk shatters. Then things escalate. Carol Anne is pulled through her bedroom closet into another dimension, a spectral limbo where malevolent spirits hold her captive. Her terrified voice echoes from the television: “Mommy, where are you? I can’t find you.”
Desperate, Steve and Diane call in a team of parapsychologists led by Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight), who quickly realize this isn’t your garden-variety haunting. When two of the investigators are chased out (a very vivid face-peeling scene and leftover chicken scene), they bring in Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein), a spiritual medium who explains the horrifying truth: the Freelings’ house, and the entire Cuesta Verde development, was built on top of a cemetery. The graves were moved, but the bodies weren’t. So, now the spirits are restless, angry, and the Beast that leads them has claimed Carol Anne as its prize.
What follows is a desperate rescue mission that takes Diane into the spectral realm itself, crawling through a portal in the kids’ closet to find her daughter. They retrieve Carol Anne, Tangina declares the house cleansed, and the family prepares to move out.
But the Beast isn’t finished.
That night, as Steve is away and Diane bathes the kids, all hell breaks loose. Robbie is attacked by the gnarled tree outside his window and nearly devoured before Diane rescues him. Then she falls into the muddy excavation for their pool, and corpses erupt from the ground around her, skeletons clawing their way out of the earth. The house implodes, the family barely escapes, and as they drive away in the rain, Steve checks them into a Holiday Inn. The final shot? Steve rolling the motel room’s television outside. They’re done with TV for a while.
The Spielberg-Hooper Hollywood-As-A-Business Question
Before we talk about the film itself, we should ask: who actually directed Poltergeist?
Officially, Tobe Hooper, the man behind The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, is credited as director. But Spielberg wrote the script, produced the film, and was on set virtually every day. Multiple cast and crew members have said Spielberg did “the bulk of the work.” He storyboarded every shot, had final say on all creative decisions, worked exclusively with composer Jerry Goldsmith (Hooper reportedly had “no input whatsoever” on the score), and even supervised the editing.
So why didn’t Spielberg just direct it himself? His contract with Universal prohibited him from directing another film while making E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which was shooting at the same time. Directors Guild rules also prevented anyone assigned to a production before a director from replacing them, including the producer. When rumors swirled that Spielberg had essentially directed the film, the DGA investigated. Spielberg quickly wrote an apologetic open letter to Hooper, published in trade papers, praising him as the director.
Cast members have given conflicting accounts. James Karen and Oliver Robins sided with Hooper. JoBeth Williams said it was a collaboration with Spielberg having “the final say.” Producer Frank Marshall admitted that Spielberg “was the creative force” and that Hooper “handed in his cut and was virtually not involved in any post-production work” for months.
The truth? It was likely a genuine collaboration, albeit one where Spielberg’s vision dominated. The film FEELS like Spielberg, the suburban setting, the family dynamics, the sense of wonder mixed with terror. But Hooper’s horror instincts are there too, in the way the scares are staged and the genuine dread that permeates the film. Maybe it doesn’t matter who technically called “action.” What matters is they created something extraordinary.
Why Poltergeist (Still) Works
Poltergeist succeeds because it weaponizes familiarity. This isn’t a haunted mansion or an isolated cabin. It’s a California subdivision full of station wagons and Star Wars toys and parents who smoke pot after the kids go to bed. Spielberg and Hooper understood that true horror comes from violating safe spaces, and nothing is supposed to be safer than your own home.
The film’s PG rating (this was well before PG-13 existed) is deceptive. Poltergeist is genuinely terrifying, earning that rating only after Spielberg and Hooper successfully appealed an initial R rating. There’s the parapsychologist who hallucinates ripping his own face off in the bathroom mirror. There’s Carol Anne’s ethereal voice calling from the television. There’s that fucking clown.
Oh, that clown. Sitting in a chair at the foot of Robbie’s bed, grinning its frozen grin. Every kid who saw this movie became terrified of clowns if they weren’t already. The scene where it attacks Robbie, its arms elongating to wrap around his throat and drag him under the bed, is masterfully staged. Hooper builds the tension to an unbearable pitch: Robbie covers it with his jacket, but when he looks again, the chair is empty. Where is it? He checks under the bed. Nothing. He sits back up, and there it is, right behind him. The mechanical clown used in the scene malfunctioned during filming and nearly strangled child actor Oliver Robins for real, Spielberg had to rush over and pry it off when he realized Robins wasn’t acting anymore. The terror on screen? Partially genuine.
The special effects, overseen by Industrial Light & Magic, are spectacular. The closet portal, the spectral tentacles, the face-melting scene? They hold up remarkably well. But the film’s greatest effect might be its sound design. The combination of Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score and the ambient sounds of the otherworldly realm creates an atmosphere of creeping dread that never lets up.
And then there are the skeletons in the pool…
The Real Horror: Those Skeletons Were Real
In the film’s climax, Diane falls into the muddy excavation and finds herself surrounded by corpses erupting from the earth, the bodies that were never moved when the cemetery was relocated. It’s one of the most visceral, terrifying sequences in the film.
Here’s the thing: those weren’t prop skeletons. They were real human remains.
JoBeth Williams spent four or five days shooting in that muddy pool, surrounded by what she thought were plastic props. She only learned years later, in a chance encounter with a special effects crew member, that they were actual human skeletons purchased from a medical supply company. Special effects artist Craig Reardon confirmed it under oath during a 1982 deposition, explaining that real skeletons were cheaper than high-quality replicas, the production ordered 12 or 13 of them from a biological supply company that typically sold them to medical schools.
Williams’ reaction when she found out? “It was a real nightmare.” She later admitted she was glad she didn’t know at the time, or her terror might have been too real to capture on film. Will Sampson, who played the shaman Taylor in Poltergeist II, reportedly performed an exorcism on that sequel’s set because the use of real remains had created such unease among the cast and crew.
(The use of real human skeletons wasn’t unique to Poltergeist. Films like Frankenstein (1931) and House on Haunted Hill (1959) did the same, but the revelation added a macabre authenticity to an already disturbing scene. It also became fuel for something darker: the Poltergeist curse.)
“The Curse”
The so-called “Poltergeist curse” has become part of Hollywood legend. In the six years between the first film’s release and the third’s completion, four cast members died, two of them young actors, two tragically unexpected.
Dominique Dunne, who played eldest daughter Dana, was murdered just months after the film’s release.
Julian Beck, who played the evil Reverend Kane in Poltergeist II, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1983 and died shortly after filming in September 1985. He was 60.
Will Sampson, who played the Native American shaman Taylor in Poltergeist II, died in June 1987 from complications during a risky heart-lung transplant. He was 53.
Heather O’Rourke, little Carol Anne herself suffered the most haunting fate. During production of Poltergeist III, the 12-year-old was being treated for what doctors thought was Crohn’s disease. It was a misdiagnosis. On January 31, 1988, she collapsed at home and suffered cardiac arrest. She was rushed to Children’s Hospital in San Diego, where doctors discovered she had intestinal stenosis caused by a congenital abnormality. She survived emergency surgery but suffered another cardiac arrest in recovery. Doctors performed CPR for over 30 minutes before pronouncing her dead. She was 12 years old.
Poltergeist’s Cultural Impact
Made for approximately $10.7 million, Poltergeist grossed over $121 million worldwide, becoming the eighth highest-grossing film of 1982. It was released just one week before Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and that summer became known as “The Spielberg Summer.”
The film spawned two sequels: Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Poltergeist III (1988), a short-lived TV series called Poltergeist: The Legacy, and a 2015 remake. But none captured the magic and terror of the original.
Poltergeist fundamentally changed how we think about haunted house movies. It proved that suburban America could be just as terrifying as gothic mansions, that families could be both believable and in supernatural peril, and that PG-rated horror could be genuinely frightening. It influenced everything from Insidious to The Conjuring, establishing tropes that persist today: the child medium, the malevolent entity, the house built on cursed ground.
And it made an entire generation terrified of television static, swimming pools, and especially clowns.
The Cocktails and Movies Verdict
Poltergeist is a masterpiece of American horror cinema: a film that works on every level. The performances are naturalistic and grounded, making the supernatural elements hit harder. The special effects are spectacular. The scares are genuinely frightening. The story, while following familiar beats, is executed with such craft that you’re willing to forgive any predictability.
The question of who really directed it may never be definitively answered, but it almost doesn’t matter. What Spielberg and Hooper created together, whether through true collaboration or creative tension, is a film that has endured for over four decades. It captures something essential about American life in the early 1980s and then corrupts it, turning the dream into a nightmare.
The tragic deaths that followed have given the film an unintended darkness, a real-world horror that eclipses anything on screen. But those deaths weren’t caused by angry spirits or a curse. They were caused by misdiagnosis, disease, and in Dominique’s case, domestic violence.
What remains is the film itself: 114 minutes of expertly crafted terror that remind us our safe spaces are never as safe as we think, and sometimes the scariest thing in the room is the one we’ve looked at a thousand times before. That. Fucking. Clown.
Just sitting there. Watching. Waiting. Grinning.
