The CineFiles

Poltergeist pretty much warped the childhoods of every one of my contemporaries who were children in the 1980s. Many parents blithely assumed, since Steven Spielberg was the producer and co-writer of the script, that it would be a film in the vein of ET: The Extraterrestrial. It was not. I mean, other than also having fantastic special effects for the period and also invoking intense emotion in the viewer. Poltergeist was directed by Tobe Hooper, who was made famous in horror directing circles for 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Definitely not ET.

Seriously, this film pulled out all the stops from putting adorable moppets in peril to instilling new terror in the heart of homeowners everywhere: what if your fancy new home is actually built on top of a cemetery where they moved the headstones but left the bodies! And what if those bodies are inhabited by some pretty pissed-off ghosts? YIKES!

So, Millennials who might be reading this, this movie is why your parents yelled at you for getting too close to the TV screen while watching cartoons.

They’re HEEEEEEEERE!!!!