Poltergeist (1982)

 "They're here!"
-Carol Ann Freeling



The paranormal activity that starts happening around the Freeling house seems harmless enough at first, but things quickly escalate when the youngest child, Carol Ann (Heather O'Rourke), is taken into into the spirit realm.  Her parents have to team up with a group of parapsychologists to get Carol Ann back.


What Works:

I love how quickly this movie escalates.  Most movies like this would drag out the paranormal stuff for a long time and spend too long on small and innocuous things.  These events ramp up quickly in Poltergeist.  We get the weird stuff with the TV, then the chairs stacking before all hell breaking loose with the tree attack and Carol Ann's disappearance.  With things getting so crazy so quickly, it keeps you on your toes because who knows what could happen next!

The first time I watched this movie, I wasn't expecting much because I saw it was rated PG.  There's no way this movie could be scary, right?  Wrong.  This is a very creepy movie with haunting moments like Carol Ann speaking to Diane (JoBeth Williams) from the other side.  The corpses popping out of the ground is also fantastic, as is the nightmarish moment where Marty (Martin Casella) rips his own face off.  It's the stuff of nightmares.

We get some really great performances as well.  Craig T. Nelson seems like he is going to play the skeptical dad, who doesn't believe any of this crap, but that isn't the case.  Things escalate way too quickly for him to be skeptical and I appreciate that we skip right over that.

I normally don't care for kids in movies.  Most child actors aren't very good and are frequently annoying.  That isn't the case with Heather O'Rourke, who does a wonderful job as Carol Ann.  Normally, when there is a kid in danger in a movie, it doesn't automatically get me invested, but O'Rourke is so sweet that I needed to see her get saved.  Her performance raises the stakes of the film immensely.

Finally, Zelda Rubinstein is wonderful as the medium, Tangina.  She steals every scene she is in with some wonderful dialogue.  I only wish she was in more of the movie and I'm pumped that she is in both sequels.


What Sucks:

My only compliant is that some of the special effects don't look great.  I recognize that they are a product of the time period.  However, take the scene where objects are flying around Carol Ann's bedroom when the parapsychologists show up.  It doesn't look great.  In The Exorcist, they do a similar scene that looks a million times better and came out almost a decade earlier.  There isn't an excuse for how silly this scene looks in Poltergeist.   


Verdict:

Special effects aside, Poltergeist is a horror classic for a reason.  It has excellent performances, a tight script, great pacing, and manages to be uber-creepy.  It has definitely got it going on.

 9/10: Great 

  

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