1982 Horror Movies

[Bridgette Kubis]

Creepshowis comprised of five short horror stories that are each compelling and envelope-pushing and memorable. The acting is hammy, the actors are having fun, the stories are spooky but not hard to handle for the easily spooked horror fan. This movie is like a trip down to nostalgia town. Creepshow is a fun, funny, and scary movie that I had not seen before this, and will now revisit year after year.

It goes without saying that I enjoy horror movies. I also like to run, hike, read (comics, fiction, sci-fi, fantasy), write, and spend time with my family. I am usually pretty direct and find that honesty and kindness are what is most important to me. Along with Bryce, I am a co-founder of Horror Movie Talk.

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I remember seeing ads for what must have been one of the sequels when I was a toddler in the mid-'80s, and it seemed terrifying to me at that age. Then, growing up, I remember hearing about how it was a cursed movie and etc. etc. etc. I was expecting it to be...a little darker?

Like, literally. As Keith notes, there are a handful of isolated moments where this thing turns into a Tobe Hooper movie, but a lot of it is very bright and sunny, and not in an ironic Midsommar way or a surreal "everything's a little bit too happy" way - in a Spielberg-optimistic way. Has everyone seen that trailer for Kubrick's "The Shining" recut as a romantic comedy? A lot of Poltergeist feels like that to me.

Those of a certain age might have encountered Poltergeist as a rumor before they knew it as a film. I know my elementary school\u2019s playground buzzed with whispers of the \u201Cmovie where the guy rips his face off.\u201D And, indeed, Poltergeist does have such a scene and it is remarkably grisly, so grisly that it raises the question of how, in this pre-PG-13 era, Poltergeist arrived in theaters rated PG. Other PG-rated movies released in 1982: Annie, Gandhi, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That Poltergeist\u2019s credits list E.T. director Steven Spielberg as writer and producer undoubtedly goes a long way in explaining how the film got away with such a scene that, even though it\u2019s soon revealed to be a supernatural hallucination, still seems designed to induce nightmares.

Of course, that\u2019s not the only such moment in Poltergeist, as those who dared to check out the source of all those playground rumors found out. There\u2019s the gnarly, malevolent tree, the grinning clown toy, the swimming pool filled with corpses, and more. If a sadistic filmmaker were to design a horror movie for the sole purpose of freaking out young viewers by slipping it into theaters with a misleading rating, it would probably look a lot like Poltergeist.

That said, not a lot of horror movies looked like Poltergeist in 1982, or look like it now. Its core novelty comes from transplanting an old story\u2014this house is haunted!\u2014to a fresh setting, the American suburbs that were still finding new places to sprawl as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. The film\u2019s California planned community, Cuesta Verde, is designed to be a safe place for nice people, one that offers a fresh start away from the past, and, though this remains unspoken, the city from which Cuesta Verde\u2019s overwhelmingly white residents have fled. But the past has ways of reasserting itself and safe places aren\u2019t always as safe as they appear\u2014not even lived-in split-levels filled with trappings specific to the era. Poltergeist\u2019s central family, the Freelings, make their home in rooms filled with catalog-bought furniture, Atari cartridges, and Star Wars toys. Its modern conveniences include two TVs and a gleaming kitchen. None of this will keep them safe.

Poltergeist treats the suburbs with braided suspicion. An early scene, one that opens with a dissolve from the Freelings\u2019 kitchen to an identical room in a model home, finds Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson), the star agent for Cuesta Verde\u2019s development company, mid-routine as he attempts to move to another home. He has the patter down, but it\u2019s clear his heart isn\u2019t in it when tries to address his clients\u2019 concern that one house looks just like all the others. Steve\u2019s lived in Cuesta Verde from its founding in 1976 and, per his boss Lewis Teague (James Karen), has done more than anyone to make it a success. But at this moment, even before his life has taken a turn for the seriously weird with the abduction of his daughter Carol Anne (Heather O\u2019Rourke), he doesn\u2019t seem to believe his own pitch (though this doesn\u2019t mean he won\u2019t make the sale). And even before it\u2019s revealed that the Freelings and their neighbors have built their homes on a former cemetery whose relocation plan didn\u2019t include moving the dead, Poltergeist depicts Cuesta Verde\u2019s mere existence as an act of hubris. It\u2019s been sold as a place of escape\u2014from grime and unpredictability and the prejudiced fears they won\u2019t say out loud\u2014but it\u2019s only brought them headlong into other, more real if less tangible, threats.

It\u2019s impossible to talk about Poltergeist without discussing its origins and production, if only briefly. The film\u2019s roots date back to Dark Skies, an alien invasion film Spielberg never made. Spielberg received a story credit for the film and a screenplay credit alongside Michael Grais and Mark Victor, though it was director Tobe Hooper who steered it away from aliens and toward ghosts. For reasons covered thoroughly elsewhere and too complicated to get into here, Spielberg has overshadowed Hooper to the point where some have credited him as the film\u2019s real director, though both Hooper and Spielberg have pushed back at this.

Beyond offering some deeply researched context into the making of the film and the paths that brought Spielberg and Hooper to Poltergeist, Jacob Russell\u2019s recent book on the film, called simply Poltergeist and released as part of DieDieDie Books\u2019 series of horror movie monographs, makes an excellent argument that at the very least the talk of Spielberg being the film\u2019s true director is inaccurate, however heavy a role he played. That jibes with my own impression of the film, too. Some shots, especially the \u201CSpielberg face\u201D images, bear the director\u2019s unmistakable stamp, and Hooper worked from Spielberg storyboards. But Hooper was far from technically unskilled, as the masterful The Texas Chain Saw Massacre attests. He certainly wouldn\u2019t be the first director to feel the influence of a powerful producer, but that shouldn\u2019t sideline his contributions.

That said, you can\u2019t easily take Spielberg out of the picture either. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Poltergeist, and other Spielberg productions of the era all treat the American suburbs with varying degrees of affection and disdain. A similar suburb becomes a site of wonder in E.T. (which opened just a week later in the remarkable summer of 1982), but also a place where latchkey kids lead an unguided, parentless existence. It\u2019s a home not unlike the Freelings (but smaller) in which Richard Dreyfuss finds himself alienated from his family in Close Encounters. Back to the Future\u2019s \u201880s suburbia exists around an abandoned downtown that, we\u2019ll soon see, once served as the vibrant center of Hill Valley. Did we know what we were doing when we built so many of these places in the years after World War II? Are they really where we want to spend our lives?

The Freelings may not have had that much of a choice. As the film opens, they seem happy enough and Steve\u2019s marriage to Diane (JoBeth Williams) appears to be rock solid. But that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re not without regrets. A scene in which Diane and Steve smoke pot after (they think) the kids have gone to bed appears to be headed in an intimate direction before they\u2019re interrupted, but it\u2019s also built around the couple mockingly acknowledging their faded youth. Later, when strange phenomena start to occur, Diane asks Steve to \u201Creach back into our past when you used to have an open mind, remember that?\u201D Like many Baby Boomers, the \u201980s has brought the undeniable approach of middle age and washed them up in a much less wondrous world than they might have dreamed of in the 1960s. Though Diane studies up on Carl Jung as she tokes, Steve\u2019s bedtime reading is a book on Reagan written by a collection of New York Times writers in the early days of his presidency.

Here\u2019s a detail you might have missed, however. (I know I did the first few times I watched the film.) When Steve reaches out to Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight), an academic who dabbles in parapsychology, he tells her his wife is 31\u2026 no, 32 and his oldest daughter Dana (Dominique Duane) is sixteen. The math makes Diane a teenage mom. Assuming Steve\u2019s around the same age, their time exploring the carefree, experimental 1960s ended sometime between 1965 and 1967. Whatever path brought them to Cuesta Verde, it\u2019s probably not the road they imagined themselves taking when they watched the Beatles play Ed Sullivan. That they were the first to arrive makes sense in that context. Life hurried them to a destination it would take their contemporaries a few more years to reach.

This is also more or less Mrs. Robinson\u2019s story in The Graduate, only transposed up a generation and down a tax bracket or two. But where Mrs. Robinson knows she\u2019s trapped and drinks and fools around in an attempt to escape. Diane and Steve need a supernatural tap on the shoulder to reframe their home as a place of fear rather than shelter, one they need to escape even more urgently than Mrs. Robinson.

A fuzzy kind of metaphysics guides Poltergeist. The malevolent spirit that gives the film its title seems to kidnap Carol Anne out of spite. In whatever between-worlds realm she finds herself she becomes a magnet for restless spirits reluctant to move onto the afterlife. Her return seems to end this, but then the spirit world takes another pass at wiping out the Freelings. Are the bodies beneath the house the root cause of all this or is this a separate problem? Unclear. And it doesn\u2019t really matter. The film\u2019s power comes not from a coherent vision of the spirit world but from the way it turns the Freeling home and material possessions against them and those who would aid them. Toys fly through the air then, later, attempt murder. A steak crawls across the counter. A bathroom heat lamp turns face-meltingly hot (the cause of the film\u2019s most infamous scene).

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