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Poltergeist (1982) More at IMDbPro »

Poltergeist (dvd):

Amazon.com video review: What a combo! Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, teamed up with family-oriented producer Steven Spielberg to make Poltergeist. The film is about a haunted suburban tract home in a development very much like the Arizona one in which Spielberg was raised. (Because it came out the same summer as Spielberg's E.T., it was tempting to see both movies as representing Spielberg's ambivalent feelings about childhood in suburbia. One was a fantasy, the other a nightmare.) Spielberg also cowrote the screenplay, which taps into primal, childlike fears of monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, sinister clown faces, and all manner of things that go bump in the night. At first, some of the odd happenings in the house are kind of funny and amusing, but they grow gradually creepier until the film climaxes in a terrifying special-effects extravaganza when 5-year-old Carole Anne (Heather O'Rourke) is kidnapped by the spooks and held hostage in another dimension. Though not nearly as frightening as Hooper's magnum opus, or the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, which came along two years later, Poltergeist is one of the smartest and most entertaining horror pictures of its time. --Jim Emerson

Poltergeist Collection (vhs):

Amazon.com video review: The law of diminishing returns was obeyed assiduously by the three Poltergeist movies, which have been boxed together to show how Hollywood milks an idea for every last ounce of cash it can. The best in this series is the original, directed by Tobe Hooper and produced by Steven Spielberg (who reportedly also lent a hand behind the camera), about a suburban family whose house turns out to have been built on an Native American burial ground. In the film's most clever touch, the disturbed spirits attack the family (and pluck its youngest daughter into the netherworld) through the TV. Oddly, though the family moves away in the sequel, the spirits follow them, then remain committed to harassing the daughter in number three, even though she's gone to stay with relatives. By that last film, the special effects have become the raison d'etre for the whole movie (which later launched an entire cable TV series). Why didn't they just call Ghostbusters? --Marshall Fine

Poltergeist (vhs):

Amazon.com video review: What a combo! Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, teamed up with family-oriented producer Steven Spielberg to make Poltergeist. The film is about a haunted suburban tract home in a development very much like the Arizona one in which Spielberg was raised. (Because it came out the same summer as Spielberg's E.T., it was tempting to see both movies as representing Spielberg's ambivalent feelings about childhood in suburbia. One was a fantasy, the other a nightmare.) Spielberg also cowrote the screenplay, which taps into primal, childlike fears of monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, sinister clown faces, and all manner of things that go bump in the night. At first, some of the odd happenings in the house are kind of funny and amusing, but they grow gradually creepier until the film climaxes in a terrifying special-effects extravaganza when 5-year-old Carole Anne (Heather O'Rourke) is kidnapped by the spooks and held hostage in another dimension. Though not nearly as frightening as Hooper's magnum opus, or the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, which came along two years later, Poltergeist is one of the smartest and most entertaining horror pictures of its time. --Jim Emerson