Poltergeist

Tobe Hooper directing + Steven Spielberg acting as producer/screenwriter: if this were a chemistry experiment, there’d be a high risk of an explosive reaction. Actually, from a certain point of view, “Poltergeist” is something of a schizophrenic movie, the product of two antithetical modes of conceptualizing cinema (and reality): on one hand we have the most banal and commercial of Spielberg’s worst traits (fundamental naive optimism and obtuse patriotism), and on the other hand we get the fierce tirades against the American system that have always been the hallmark of Hooper’s oeuvre.

In a showdown between a cloying vision full of teary-eyed “kumbayas” and a stubbornly uncompromising hypercriticism, it’s basically the latter which prevails, sending a classic middle-class American family to flounder in the seething mud of putrefied bodies screaming for vengeance. Television and its consequences, another symbol of post-modernity, become the butt of creeping satire (picture the scene in which the mother, to keep little Carol Anne from ruining her eyes staring at a screen distorted with interference, turns the channel to a war movie), and the TV set itself becomes the primary means of contact with the dimension of unsettled souls. Well-cast actors, well-done special effects, guaranteed suspense.

Tons of classic scenes: The little girl staring hypnotized at the flickering TV screen, the attack of the tree monster, the face peeling in the mirror, the implosion of the house.

Its huge box-office success led to two mediocre sequels plus an unnecessary 2015 remake.