jobeth williams

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In elementary school I can remember bragging about how many times I’d seen the original Star Wars. I’d even brag that my brother had seen it more than me, something like 27 different times. My mother says it played constantly on HBO, and we’d watch it every time it was on.

But then I also remember when I was a young teenager renting the original trilogy, and it felt like new. I knew I had seen the films before, but I only had vague memories of them. And I can remember excitedly talking to my friends about it like it was a new discovery.

Yet I also remember watching Return of the Jedi in the theater. I would have been seven years old.

I don’t know what to make of all that except that memory is a weird thing.

I don’t remember ever seeing Poltergeist II: The Other Side before. I’d never logged it on Letterboxd or IMDB. For the first two thirds of the film, nothing was familiar. And then the family ran into the garage to flee the ghosts. Suddenly I remembered that they were about to get attacked by power tools. Suddenly I remembered talking about that scene with my friends right after we watched the movie. We felt it was the best scene in the entire film. Clearly I had seen the film before; I just couldn’t remember it.

Like I say, memory is a weird thing.

Truth be told, other than that garage scene, most of the movie is rather forgettable.

Poltergeist was so popular a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was how do you make a sequel to a haunted house movie when the haunted house was completely destroyed at the end of the movie?

The reasoning for the haunting in Poltergeist was that they built the house on top of an old cemetery and only bothered to move the headstones and not the actual corpses.

For the sequel, they retcon some business about how underneath the Freelings house not only was there part of a cemetery but also a big cave where an insane preacher incarcerated his flock because he felt the end of the world was nigh. They all died there, and the preacher has now turned into a spectral beast that’s now hunting poor Carole Anne (Heather O’Rourke) because of her time spent in the netherworld, and maybe she can help get him out.

Or something. It is all a lot of silly hogwash.

The preacher (Julian Beck) can manifest into a physical form and looks a bit like a reject from Children of the Corn. He’s actually quite creepy and makes for the second-best part of the entire film.

The Freeling family has moved in with Diane’s (JoBeth Williams) mother. They are trying their best to forget about the past and move on with their lives. But Carole Ann keeps having psychic visions, and that darn preacher keeps showing up. Then the old psychic from the first movie, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), shows up declaring all sorts of terrible things to come.

The thing I loved about the first film is that it slowly revealed what was happening. It allowed us to get to know the Freelings, and the scares were doled out a little at a time. That built the tension over the course of the movie.

It isn’t that things come too fast in this movie, for it too takes its time before the real scares come, but the buildup just isn’t interesting. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg made those early scenes fun to watch. Here it’s just a lot of myth building that the first film didn’t need.

There are some good scares. The preacher is creepy, and that garage scene is great. There is another moment where Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) eats the worm in a bottle of tequila, and things get really nasty.

But mostly this feels like a sequel that was rushed into production without much thought being given to why it should exist at all.

poltergeist

I was too young to have seen Poltergeist in the theater, but I discovered it not long after on home video and cable television. It became one of the defining movies of the 1980s for me. But unlike films like The Goonies or Harry and the Hendersons, Poltergeist still holds up remarkably well all these years later, even watching it as an adult (and I say that as someone who still enjoys The Goonies but recognizes its many flaws).

It certainly helps that it had Steven Spielberg as a cowriter and a very hands-on producer. This is Spielberg in the 1980s, the absolute peak of his powers. There is actually a bit of controversy over how much work he did on this film. Tobe Hooper is the credited director, but it has long been rumored that Spielberg did most of the helming. He was in the middle of making E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial at the time, and his contract on that film said he couldn’t direct anything else while making that film.

As far as I can tell, Hooper did direct it, but Spielberg was on set most days, was very enthusiastic about the picture, and likely persuaded Hooper to his way of directing in numerous moments.

Whoever directed what, this is still a great movie. I made my daughter watch it with me last night, and she loved it. I still do, too.

Something I noticed this time around was that the Freeling family are good people. They all clearly love each other, and there aren’t any real problems going on between them. Spielberg’s parents divorced when he was 19 years old, and it had a clear impact on him and his art. Many of his films deal with broken homes, so it is interesting to see how solid the marriage is in this film.

I love how deliberate the film is with its storytelling and the manner in which it doles out the horror. It begins with Carole Ann (Heather O’Rourke) putting her hands on the TV playing static just after the patriotic sign-off (and I had to explain to my daughter that TV used to shut down for the night) and talking to it. The next night she’ll do it again and utter her famous “they’re here.”

Before that, the boy Robbie (Oliver Robbins) will get frightened by a storm, the creepy tree just outside his window, and a clown doll (that freaking clown!), both of which will come back later in terrifying ways. But then we’ll see the dad, Steve (Craig T. Nelson), come in to comfort him. He explains how you can tell a storm is moving away by counting the time between the lightning flash and the thunder (something I did for years after watching this.). When the storm moves closer, the two youngest will wind up sleeping with Steve and their mother, Diane (Jobeth Williams,) but not before Steve tells his oldest daughter, Dana (Dominique Dunne), to get off the phone and go to bed.

All of this allows us to see that this is a real, loving family. We’ll later see Diane fixing the kids breakfast and Steve trying to sell a house to a nice couple. These are nice, normal people.

The frights are slowly dropped into these domestic scenes. The dining room chairs stack themselves onto the table. It gives Diane a fright, but then she’s curious about it. She experiments with them. By the time Steve gets home, she’s figured out if you place a chair in one spot, it will slide to another. She’s even marked the starting spot with a circle on the floor and drawn arrows down to indicate its path. She’s more fascinated by this than scared. She’ll even allow Carol Anne (with a football helmet on) to slide across the floor.

This is the most Spielbergian moment in the film to me. There is a sense of wonder about what’s going on here. It reminds me of that scene in Close Encounter of the Third Kind where the little boy stands in front of a doorway with this immense bright light shining down on him. His early films always had this sense of marvel and delight at the unexplained and unknown.

Then, of course, all hell breaks loose. The ghosts come, Carol Ann disappears, that freaking clown attacks. The horror amplifies. As an audience member, I am thrilled. They bring in parapsychologists to study the phenomenon. A powerful medium, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), comes to try and contact Carol Ann. She gets a great entrance, marching into the house as everybody moves out of her path until she comes into the living room, her hair pulled back, her big glasses shining, her small stature feeling so big.

All of this allows the film to pull back a little from the horror. So many horror films lean into the monsters; they push them into our faces so we’ll be scared. This film studies the phenomenon, allowing the audience to feel slightly safer. That sense of wonder remains. But then again the scares come, and we are unsettled. It is a brilliant balancing act, pushing and pulling us between that sense of wonder and being scared out of our wits.

I forgot how much I loved this film, but watching it again with my daughter made me relish just how brilliantly it is made and how fantastic it still remains.