Tuesday 12 January 2010

Film: Poltergeist, 1982, Tobe Hooper

Poltergeist is a horror/ thriller film directed by Tobe Hooper and produced by Steven Spielberg, the reason I added Spielberg here is because He had a lot of influence in the film. All the sense of family, love and affection present in most of his films, for example, E.T.




It shows a story an American Suburban Family, that suddenly begins to have contact with evil spirits in their house, these happens when their younger daughter Carol Anne starts to listen those spirits from their TV. After a few phenomenons happen in the house, from chairs moving to living trees, in one of those incidents their young son is highly injured by a living tree and Carol Anne is ' sucked' inside the house to the world of the dead, or something in between.
With the help of psychologists and ' ghost-busters' they embark in the quest to attempt to bring Carol Anne back.

In my opinion, This film had a 'fake' end, meaning that when they finally saved Carol Anne everything will be alright with the family moving out, but instead it started an even more scary part of the film with the living house and living clown's doll.
At first, the film wasn't really scary, just some scenes can actually send a shiver down your spine, for example when Carol Anne keeps repeating " They're here", or the gory bathroom scene, where one of the "Ghost-Busters" start to peel the face of his skin off. However, on the second part of the film everything seemed to scare me, the uneasiness on clown doll or the pool full of corpses or even the "house's mouth" with a really horrific organic structure.
Overall,the amazing special effects for that time added to the amazing acting, where we could distinguish characters by their acts affections to their relatives or the fear and disgrace in the mother's eyes when Carol Anne is not answering her.
Finally, another 'Uncanny' film underlining the consumerism lived in the American Suburbia, but also highlighting the way society treats TV as a valuable item irreplaceable in people's lives nowadays.


People Don't watch Bad TV!- and dont let your children watch Static Television Images, let them watch War films. ( one of the most ironic scenes in the whole film)

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