Poltergeist (1982)
Poltergeist is kind of horror-comedy in which a suburban California home becomes a literal vortex to the beyond. It’s a classic in the necro-architecture genre; spirits live in the walls, are projected by the television, and they kidnap the five year old Carol Ann. This makes the film shift for a moment into a faery story that bears some resemblance to, for example, Picnic at Hanging Rock; the young girl disappears into the fay intensities of childhood itself. But the viewer, along with the rest of the family are left behind in sleepless misery. The film is often described as being cursed, because they used real skeletons? and several members of the cast died soon after. I myself experienced strange phenomena in viewing the movie alone in the dark, and attempting to get a screen grab of the cinematography with my phone, my flash went off—somehow, this has never happened before—and I was startled to see my own shocked face, lit up for an instant in the mirror across the room. I immediately was creeped out and had to eat a mango ice lolly to comfort myself. Written by Steven Spielberg, the movie forms, along with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. (1982) and Jaws (1984), a series regarding contact with the alien other; and which leads me to ask: what was Spielberg smoking back then?
the hellacious vertices of childhood
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