POLTERGEIST — The first suburban haunted house

Before POLTERGEIST, haunted house movies took place in old, creepy mansions. Regular host Rico Gagliano visits the original suburban house in California to check for ghosts and hands over to guest host Anna Bogutskaya to explore how POLTERGEIST transformed horror movies forever with the help of the movie’s star JoBeth Williams, original publicist Mick Garris and horror filmmaker Vincenzo Natali. 

Season 6, titled Haunted Homes, explores how haunted house movies have mirrored our relationship with our homes. Each episode visits a horror movie that changed the way we imagine a haunted house, from the crumbling Gothic mansions to white picket fences, what it says about the people who live in the houses and what scares them the most.

Guest written and hosted by Anna Bogutskaya. Find her book on horror films and feelings, FEEDING THE MONSTER, online and in all good bookshops. You can also listen to her horror film history podcast The Final Girls and subscribe to her movie newsletter Admit One.

THE SUBSTANCE is now showing in theaters across the US, UK, Latin America, Germany, Canada and Netherlands. Visit trythesubstance.com for showtimes and tickets.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes terrified screams, demonic moans, exploding graves and scariest of all... spoilers. All right everybody, your host Rico Gagliano here and I'm talking to you while standing just across the street from a house that, when I was a kid in the 1980s, scared me to freakin' death. It is here in Simi Valley, California, just about an hour's drive north of where I live in LA. And if you didn't know anything about it, it definitely wouldn't seem scary at all. It was built in 1979, and it looks like it. It's two storeys, kind of beige stucco shingled roof. It's kind of big and blocky looking. It's pretty much the same as every other house in this very unassuming, suburban tract neighborhood I'm standing in. There's a guy a few feet away from me, you know, cleaning his car this morning. But that's exactly what was so freaky about it when it played the starring role in a movie I could not stop watching when it came out in the summer of 1982.<i>The house looks just like the one next to it,</i><i>and the one next to that,</i><i>and the one next to that.</i> Back then, I was living in an unassuming suburb on the east coast, in a smaller but equally plain mid-century house. So even though I was an easily frightened kid, one thing I knew I didn't have to worry about was that my house was haunted. Because like, that could only happen in super old houses where people died a long time ago surrounded by, like, gas lamps. Right?<i>Poltergeist</i> was a kind of haunted house movie I'd never seen before. One where the house looked like mine.<i>What's happening?!</i><i>Poltergeist. It knows what scares you</i>. I was fascinated and also totally terrified. And it's still kind of terrifying looking at it right now. But years, actually decades later, on the other side of the world, a very different kind of kid watched that same movie and had a very different reaction. Her name was Anna Bogutskaya and she has grown up to become an amazing UK based critic, author, film programmer and podcaster. She hosts the horror movie podcast<i>The Final Girls</i>. Her new book, <i>Feeding the Monster</i>, is all about horror culture. She's an expert on all things terrifying, is what I'm saying. And as you're about to learn in just a few seconds, unlike me, she ain't afraid of no poltergeist. In fact, when all of us at MUBI looked at the calendar, and we saw Halloween was coming up, she is the first person we thought of to guest host our new season all about creepy homes, like the one right across the street from me. You will be in frighteningly good hands with her. I will be back as usual in November, to host our next season. Meanwhile, take it away, Anna. And now I'm going to get the hell out of here because, frankly, it feels like this house is looking at me. Thanks, Rico. It's an honor. And people, as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be haunted.<i>I know I'd go from rags to riches</i> Ever since I saw my first horror movie, aged nine, which, if you're wondering, was Wes Craven's 1984 dream horror<i>Nightmare on Elm Street</i>, I wanted to know if there were ghosts and where I could meet them. But like Rico, I figured that the only houses that got haunted, according to the movies, were ancestral old homes, not new apartment complexes in the Olympic Village in Barcelona. That's where I lived. That is until <i>Poltergeist</i>.<i>My clothes may still be torn and tattered.</i> In which a sweet little suburban house, newly built, paint still fresh, got infested with nasty, meddling ghosts that pour out of the bedroom TV and abduct little Carol Anne Freeling, sending her family into a frenzy, trying to find a way to bring her back from the ghost dimension. I had a small box TV in my room and at night, much like Carol Anne, I would often tune in to static, trying to make out premium cable channels through the fuzz. Unfortunately, no ghosts ever emerged from that television. But that's the TV that I first watched <i>Poltergeist</i> on. The movie that took away the safety net of suburbia and made it so that every house was at risk of being haunted, including mine. A girl can dream, right?<i>They're here.</i> Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Today we'll launch season six. We're calling it Haunted Homes and for the next five episodes leading up to Halloween, I'm going to tell you the stories behind some of the most terrifying and impactful haunted house movies ever made.<i>Get out...</i><i>House.</i> In the last couple of years, between the pandemic, the housing crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the economic collapse, the other economic collapse, the rising rents, impossible mortgages and just the general state of the planet. Our relationship with our homes and our houses has completely fractured. And in times of crisis we, well, me at least, turn to horror. And there's nothing more terrifying than being scared of your own home. It has to do with the fact that the house, of course, is a shelter from the outside world. But invariably horror emerges from within. So it may be a shelter, but it also becomes a container for the horror that's inside ourselves. And we tend to project ourselves on our environments. That's Vincenzo Natali, writer and director of such horrors as <i>Cube</i> and <i>Splice</i>, and who's also, in his own words, A <i>Poltergeist</i> expert. Vincenzo is one of a bunch of folks I talked to, including <i>Poltergeist</i> star JoBeth Williams, about the making and the meaning of a movie that changed the whole haunted house genre and spoke to the changing state of mind of America in the 1980s. It was very exciting for young couples and young families to be able to afford a shiny, new, spanky new home. And that's why I think one of the reasons it's so shocking because you think, okay, these spirits can't have lived here that long because this house isn't very old. Oh, but they could live there. So lock your bedroom closet, trim the tree branches outside your window and cover up any clown dolls that you might have lying around. In this episode, we invite ourselves over to <i>Poltergeist</i> house. Horror and houses have always been intertwined, even before the movies. In fact, horror as a genre comes from Gothic novels, which were named after an architectural style. So the first Gothic novel, so named because it took place in a Gothic building was<i>The Castle of Otranto</i> by Horace Walpole, which was written in the 18th century. And haunted house movies have been around as long as cinema itself. One of the first horror films ever made was sort of a haunted house movie.<i>The House of the Devil</i>, circa 1896, was made by film pioneer Georges Méliès. Considered by some more of a trick film than a horror film, with others calling it a vampire film because there's a bat that turns into a guy. Regardless of that, the most important part for me is that it takes place in an ancient, dusty building, and with that, it firmly established what a haunted house is supposed to look like in a movie. Even now, when I ask my guests,"What do you think of when you think of a haunted house?" The answer was nearly universal. To this day, I think it still conjures a Victorian house or an older house. Yeah, I probably think of a old Victorian house at the end of a street. It's night and there's a storm brewing behind it and probably a flash of lightning. That would be my classic. And it looks like everything inside... from the outside, you can tell everything inside would be covered with a thin layer of dust and cobwebs. Well, when I think of a haunted house, I think of haunted house movies. There was an outlier, JoBeth. I think of <i>Poltergeist</i> because I lived through basically feeling haunted for three months. But it actually took filmmakers a long time to populate the humble, decidedly not Gothic, American suburbs with ghosts. Maybe because they were the last place anyone thought of as scary? That is, until the imaginations of two suburbanites who grew up in the '50s, joined forces and made a film that changed haunted house movies.<i>It's a movie about tightening your stomach muscles</i><i>and keeping them there for two hours, you know, until something gives.</i><i>Either the movie or your stomach.</i> That is Steven Spielberg from an interview in 1982 talking about <i>Poltergeist</i>, which he co-wrote and produced. Spielberg grew up in the suburbs, and they formed his imagination.<i>Just sort of based the lifestyle on a lifestyle that I'm familiar with.</i><i>Growing up in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, in tract homes with cul-de-sacs</i><i>and two car garages,</i><i>and the suburban lifestyle breeds a certain kind of individual.</i> A child of divorce himself, suburbia, with its promise of safety, coupled with the darkness lurking underneath the white picket fence lifestyle, is what Spielberg knew best, and it informed a lot of his work, starting with his 1977 alien passion project<i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>.<i>What do you want?</i><i>I just want to know that it's... it's really happening.</i> That's the film in which a small suburban community becomes obsessed with the unidentified flying objects that suddenly appear in the skies of Indiana. It was a hit, and landed Spielberg his first Best Director Oscar nomination. But Steven had a problem. The studio that released <i>Close Encounters</i> wanted a sequel immediately. That seems like a good problem to have, right? Well, Spielberg's issue was that he'd been burned by the sequels to his first blockbuster, <i>Jaws</i>. He had no approval or input on them and he wanted to avoid the same happening to <i>Close Encounters</i>. So Spielberg was keen to be involved, for... quality control. He started working on a dark companion piece to that film, jumping off from the UFO research he'd already done. He came up with a story about a malevolent little alien that tormented a family and invaded their home. It was to be called <i>Night Skies</i>.<i>We will witness the arrival.</i><i>The search.</i><i>The desertion.</i> The idea marinated.- It developed.<i>- The fear.</i> The malevolent alien turned into a nice one. A lost little creature trying to get home. That, of course, would become the script written by Melissa Mathison, who gave it a new title.<i>Steven Spielberg's</i> E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. And Columbia Pictures... passed on it Because it was too, quote, "wimpy." Spielberg moved the project to a different studio, Universal. But <i>E.T.</i> and <i>Poltergeist</i> were birthed from the same germ of an idea. The core of <i>Night Skies</i> stuck with him. The concept of malevolent forces terrorizing a suburban family. The idea morphed. The aliens became ghosts. Spielberg pitched it to another studio, MGM, who quickly snapped it up,

which created another problem for Steven: 13:01

he couldn't direct both movies. Enter Tobe Hooper. Of course, if you're Steven Spielberg and you're about to make a great haunted house movie, and here comes the director of<i>Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i>, which is made with such cinematic boldness and know how, and it works so well, why would you not hire Tobe Hooper? That's the voice of Mick Garris, a doyen of horror film, screenwriter, producer, director, podcaster, and close personal friend of Hooper. They met, actually on the set of <i>Poltergeist</i>. Mick was the movie's publicist, and it was there that they quickly bonded. On first glance, Hooper wouldn't seem like an obvious partner to Spielberg. In 1974, he had launched himself onto the scene of American independent filmmaking with <i>Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i>, a violent, verité style slasher that channeled the rage that young generations felt about the Vietnam War. He also made the hotel horror <i>Eaten Alive</i>.<i>Into this house of terror comes a handful of unsuspecting innocents.</i> And the circus themed slasher<i>The Funhouse</i>,<i>Who is mad enough to enter that world of darkness.</i> While spectacle and childhood wonder are the key ingredients of a Steven Spielberg movie... Insanity is certainly one of the hallmarks of a Tobe Hooper film. The idea that, oh my God, are you gonna go there? Or not even having an idea of where "there" is, the marker is so far beyond what your imagination can take you to.<i>Waiting for the harvest and the time of reaping.</i> But characters in both of the <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> movies, are so out of control nuts, and entertaining, and you buy them as actual characters. There's a fearlessness and a relentlessness, but also a really dark sense of humor. And there's politics in there as well. That may be pretty well hidden, but there's social commentary all over the Tobe Hooper movies, and if you're a good spelunker, you can excavate some really good political messages from what he had to say. Hooper, like Spielberg, was also a child of divorce. Like Spielberg, he was a lifelong movie obsessive. His mother supposedly went into labor in a cinema, and like Spielberg, he too spent his childhood in a suburb, in his case, outside of Austin, Texas. Bottom line, it makes sense that Spielberg gave him a call. The timeline here gets confusing, but Hooper said that Spielberg pitched him the dark alien sequel to <i>Close Encounters</i>, but he wasn't interested in aliens. His thing was ghosts. Hooper had been interested in the paranormal for years since his father died when he was just a teenager. He told <i>Fangoria</i> magazine in 1982 that he had been working out of what had been Robert Wise's office in the Universal Studios. Wise had famously directed <i>The Haunting</i>, one of the most influential haunted house movies ever made. The only thing that Wise left behind in that office was a book on poltergeists. Hooper was fascinated by the technical challenge of ghosts. How to get the audience to feel the poltergeist's presence. And so I spent a lot of time going to seances. And they yielded nothing. It wasn't quite close enough to give you, like, what am I... what am I seeing? He worked for a while on his own ghost story with his mentor, William Friedkin. Just the director of <i>The Exorcist</i>. No biggie. But who could resist an offer from Steven Spielberg to work on a big budget studio movie that just happened to align with what you wanted to do anyway? And so <i>Poltergeist</i> had its director. What it needed next was a family for the ghost to terrorize. The first person they cast was JoBeth Williams. JoBeth was mostly a theater actress at this point. She'd done a soap opera... To make money, because theater doesn't pay very much. And a few movies.<i>Kramer vs Kramer</i>, where she played Dustin Hoffman's new girlfriend. And the Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder caper, <i>Stir Crazy</i>. She'd never had a leading role until <i>Poltergeist</i>. Originally, he had wanted Shirley MacLaine for that part, and she turned it down. And she later told me, years later, told me she turned it down because she didn't feel comfortable being involved in anything where paranormal involved children. JoBeth had her own misgivings when she got the script. Frankly, I had never been a fan of horror movies, so when I was offered the movie I said, "Oh, I don't-- I'm an actress. I don't want to do a horror movie." And my agent said, well, it's produced by Steven Spielberg. And I said,"Okay then, send me the script. I think this could be interesting." And it was. JoBeth would be cast to play the matriarch of the film, Diane Freeling.<i>Oh, shit. Tweety, couldn't you have waited for school day?</i> She's a homemaker and a mother to three kids. A teenager who disappears for most of the movie due to being a teenager, not 'cause she's abducted by ghosts. A young boy who is terrorized by the enormous, creepy, clown doll he keeps in his room at all times for... reasons. And little Carol Anne, who is actually abducted by ghosts. Diane's husband Steve, played by Craig T. Nelson, is a successful real estate broker, as his boss never tires of reminding him.<i>I'm just not a developer.</i><i>You're responsible for 42% of sales,</i><i>that's almost half of everything down there.</i><i>Almost $70 million worth of dwelling and properties.</i> He sells houses, likes football and Ronald Reagan, apparently. When their children are kidnaped by ghosts, they are distraught. But they stick together. Their house might be haunted, but they sure aren't. They are a picture perfect nuclear family. If they bicker and tease each other, it's always in a fun, loving way. We would all like to have Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams as our parents.<i>Can you see me? Can you see Mommy?</i> In fact, it was the family angle of the film that appealed to its star, JoBeth Williams. What took me by surprise was how much I liked the script and how drawn into the family itself, I felt. The dialogue with the family and the family story, and the sense of having a child that's gone missing really appealed to me, and I felt emotionally connected to it.<i>Can you find me? Can you find a way home to us?</i><i>I can't find you, I can't.</i> JoBeth's character, Diane, is the beating heart of the movie. It's Diane who is at first, excited about the idea of paranormal activity in the house. Playful even.<i>Okay, now just look.</i> Just watch. She's positively giddy when she shows her husband how the poltergeist moved chairs around the kitchen. The chairs and her kid. It's worth underlining how important the Freelings are to the enduring success of <i>Poltergeist</i>. They were a fictional family you wanted to root for. They weren't troubled or haunted. Neither literally or metaphorically. You know, often haunted houses in particular surround the concept of troubled people or, you know, some kind of emotional disturbance. So it doesn't follow that usual pattern that haunted house films tend to have. And Steven and Diane, the father and mother of the Freelings family, are ex-hippies. I mean, they're smoking dope in their bedroom, famously, while reading Ronald Reagan's biography or autobiography or something. That scene, incidentally, is my favorite moment of the entire movie. It happens before all of the supernatural shenanigans start kicking off. After Steve and Diane have put the kids to bed and are having some time to themselves. The chemistry between Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams is so charming, warm, effortless, and mostly improvised. I remember Craig coming up with that great bit where he's standing, looking in the mirror, and he's poking his stomach in and out and in and out. And, you know, this was not scripted. This was Craig.<i>Your diving days are over.</i><i>We're talking Olympics, Diane. Okay?</i><i>- Let me see your tuck.- We can jackknife into the swan.</i><i>A twist, turn and splash.</i> You know, I think we felt that these were very hip people who, you know, were parents young and had smoked pot in college. And, you know, that's what allowed me to go with the idea, when Diane is in the kitchen and Carol Anne is sliding across the kitchen floor, you know, it's what allowed me to go,"Wow, this is so cool.""It's so amazing." So, you know, I was kind of able to roll with it because we were young and groovy and... They are the cool parents. We were cool. Exactly, we were the cool parents. The joking around with the ghost stops after they kidnap Diane's youngest daughter, Carol Anne. Mediums and clairvoyants come to their house trying to pinpoint who or what is haunting the Freelings. But in the end, it's Diane who goes into a literal Hellmouth to get Carol Anne back.<i>Carol Anne, listen to me. Do not go into the light.</i><i>Stop where you are.</i><i>Turn away from it. Don't even look at it.</i> I loved the idea that she would go into hell to bring her child back. I wasn't a mother at that time, but I wanted to be a mother. And so it called to a certain part of me that thought,"Yeah, that's what mothers do." They undergo any kind of horrible situation in order to take care of their children. So I was very drawn to her and frankly, identified with her in the way I sort of hoped I would be when I became a mother.<i>- What do you think you're doing?- I'm going in after her.</i><i>We'll come to you. Let me go.</i><i>- You've never done this before.- Neither have you.</i> A family that even ghosts can't tear apart is the divorce kid's fantasy. But there's more to <i>Poltergeist</i> than just the Norman Rockwell-like all American family. Actually, consciously or unconsciously,<i>Poltergeist</i> is kind of about that. It's actually tracking what's going on in America culturally and socially at that time. When we return in a minute,<i>Poltergeist</i> rips up the foundations of suburbia itself. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs to brilliant first timers, we've always got something new for you to discover. And regular MUBI Podcast host, Rico Gagliano- Hello.- Oh, hi. Didn't see you there. Hi. I've joined you here in this special. Let's just tell everybody it's a giant cathedral and there's, like, a glitter ball.- Why not?- It's absolutely not just a Google Meet. You're doing great, by the way. Thanks for guest hosting. So, anyway, what is up in the movie multiverse this week? This week I'm heading to the theaters. I'm going to see the new movie,<i>The Substance</i>. This is a MUBI release directed by Coralie Fargeat, won Best Screenplay at Cannes this year, starring Demi Moore as an aging film star who decides to take a medicine that will create a younger version of herself and then all body horror hell breaks loose. I'm assuming that this is on your radar, being the horror doyenne that you are. If you think that there's a Demi Moore starring film that I'm not aware of, you have not met me or know me at all. She used to be our favorite actress growing up and she's phenomenal in <i>The Substance</i>. Yeah, I'm glad you saw it. She absolutely kills it. Margaret Qualley plays the younger her. She is also amazing and this movie is so off the chain insane. There's nothing like-- I think seeing it in a theater is essential.- It really is.- By the way-- but actually, one other thing I'm psyched about this week is you have a piece in our online magazine <i>Notebook</i>, yes? I do. Introducing this entire series that we've been doing. It's all about haunted house movies and how they've changed over the recent years. As always, you'll find all the links you need and that we've referenced in the show notes for this episode.- Speaking of which, back to it.- See you.<i>Poltergeist</i> starts with a black screen and then a fuzzy shot of a staticky TV as the station signs off for the night with America's national anthem. The movie opens with the <i>Star Spangled Banner</i> and it ends with a TV being pushed out of a hotel room, like, it starts with the dual American icons of the <i>Star Spangled Banner</i> and television. It's a boomer horror film. That's by design, because <i>Poltergeist</i> is as much about the fake promises of '80s suburban America as it is about an ectoplasm infestation.<i>But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans,</i><i>windswept, God blessed and teeming with people of all kinds,</i><i>living in harmony and peace.</i> That's Ronald Reagan, former actor and former president, in his infamous 1989 speech defining his vision of America. For decades, by that point, his shining city on the hill largely took the shape of suburbia. After World War Two, there was a real problem with overpopulation in the cities and suburbs started developing rapidly, responding to a huge demand from returning veterans. Large numbers of cheap, identical houses popped up quickly. Malvina Reynolds sang about them in 1962.<i>Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky tacky</i><i>Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes all the same</i> By the early 1980s, the suburbs were the place to be. The decade started off with a recession. Cities were seen as derelict, corrupt places. The suburbs represented the American ideals of home ownership, safety and complete autonomy. Even <i>Poltergeist</i>'s credits take place over a montage of a suburb under construction, with model houses still up for sale. The Freelings completely buy into it. In fact, Steve Freeling's job is selling it.<i>Well, you know, actually we were the first family to set up housekeeping</i><i>in the Cuesta Verde estates.</i> They're pioneers. With a commission.<i>Yeah, it has that. But I think in a couple of months</i><i>you're not gonna be able to distinguish phase one from phase three to phase...</i> Families like the Freelings could move to the suburbs and own their own little part of the land. It's the suburban fantasy land. More space. It's clean. It's safe. To me, suburbs seem like a nightmare. I'd never, ever want to live in that place. But for those people, it was an opportunity and kind of a dream come true. And as they are kind of on the up-side of the curve, things are great. And they're looking up and you know, social justice, what's that?<i>You know, we have a saying around here?</i><i>"The grass grows greener on every side." Yeah, that's the way I feel about it.</i><i>Honey, I can't tell one house from the other.</i><i>Made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same</i> But the suburbs were not all new kitchens and sunshine.<i>How could anyone in the world have a problem with a day like this?</i> The developments that were popping up all around America and the government effort to provide housing were mostly aimed at white families. The discriminatory practices of redlining made sure that suburbia remained mostly white, while African American families and other people of color remain concentrated in urban spaces. The suburbs were idyllic for some, but there was a growing sense that something was wrong with this picture. Actually, if you look at both<i>Poltergeist</i> and <i>E.T.</i>, it's like suburbia is under construction. Oh hi, Rico. Nice of you to drop by. That's, of course, Rico Gagliano host of the MUBI Podcast. It hasn't taken over the entire landscape. It's starting to spread further than it has ever before, but I think in <i>Poltergeist</i> it's also kind of like, yeah, right outside where your neighborhood is, there could be a giant graveyard or just an empty expanse of wilderness and like, you know, forces that are unknown, maybe beyond it. And in <i>Poltergeist</i>, there are literally dead bodies buried underneath the ticky tacky houses. The Freelings have fully bought into the American dream. They're fully selling it to others but they are ignorant of the fact that those pretty little houses are built on death. The entire development is built on a cemetery, which isn't on the brochure. Not exactly.<i>No, but I never heard anything about it, though.</i><i>It's not the sort of thing one goes around advertising</i><i>on a billboard or on the side of a bus.</i> Because the real villains in this film are not the ghosts... It's the real estate company that is building these tract homes on top of graves that they haven't moved, that they haven't told anyone about. They haven't told anyone that they've built this entire thing on a graveyard, and the guy literally says, who runs the real estate company, he literally says,<i>We've already made arrangements for relocating the cemetery.</i><i>Oh come on. I mean, that's sacrilegious, isn't it?</i><i>Oh, don't worry about it.</i><i>After all, it's not ancient tribal burial ground.</i> It's just... people. And even as all of this is going on,"this" being all the ripping off faces, the ghosts kidnaping and creepy clowns attacking children, the big real estate boss is still planning to build more houses.<i>Starting phase five right here where we're standing.</i><i>All of this can be your master bedroom suite.</i><i>That can be your view.</i><i>Interested?</i> The expansion never stops. And it's in this moment that the Freeling dad realizes that... They've kind of, acquired their wealth in an ill-begotten way, even if they weren't aware of it at the time. And so it's saying a lot about, not just that generation, but about America. The Freeling's success literally turns against them. The TV swallows their daughter. The tree attacks their son, and the swimming pool they're building overflows with mud and rotting corpses. Your TV set is a threat. The swimming pool is a threat. And all the nice things that you enjoy in your home, become malevolent. And the film is really great at that. I mean, you basically have a gateway into hell... in the closet. It's not the Freelings that are being haunted it's the whole of suburbia. The whole idea of success. And in a way, the whole of America.<i>I hate you, I hate you.</i><i>You're gone, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.</i><i>Poltergeist</i> was a new kind of horror film. Not only did it move the action to the suburbs, the very image of safety, but it also substituted atmosphere for spectacle. Usually haunted house films rely on atmosphere, it's all about what you don't see, you know, like<i>The Innocents</i> or <i>The Haunting</i> being the two, sort of, prime examples of great haunted house movies. It's what's implied that is frightening rather than what is seen. But in <i>Poltergeist</i> you see everything and more, like, it's one amazing visual or mechanical effect after another. And like the movie itself, making it was both a dream and a nightmare. I mean, it was probably the most exhausting shoot I've done in my career. A lot of things were demanded of JoBeth Williams in particular. Take the single line in the script,"Diane's feet lose her footing in the mud,"and she falls into the shallow end of the unfinished swimming pool,"sliding all the way down the wet mud, to the puddle in the deep end." The muddy swimming pool became much more than that one line in the script seemed to indicate. They turned this pool into this muddy hole that was supposed to be our swimming pool, that we were digging behind our house. And they filled it with mud that was made from peat, which was hideous. And it began to smell like... I don't think I even need to say it. They had huge 16 foot fans all around the pool, to blow the wind all around, and I was terrified that these giant electrical fans were gonna fall into the swimming pool while I was in there, and I'd be electrocuted. So Steven Spielberg said,"Look, I will come into the pool with you when we start shooting"and I guarantee you will be safe." And he put on waders, these giant fisherman's waders, and he waded into the swimming pool and stood there on the edge while I was in the middle of the pool with these skeletons that they were popping up around me, which I thought, of course, were prop skeletons. And about five years later, I learned from the prop man that they were not, in fact, prop skeletons. They were real skeletons that had been bought because they were much cheaper than making the individual skeletons. And there was the week-long stint on the gimbal set, a purpose built, fully rotating replica of the parents bedroom that was built to shoot Diane being thrashed around by ghosts. Which was again like a Ferris wheel. So I literally, for 50 takes, got dragged around this set. And the poor camera operator had to-- he was bolted to the set. So, I was kind of staying in place and the set was dragging underneath me. But, Dennis, I think was his name, he had to go round and round, and at one point he had to get off and throw up, poor thing. And of course, all the screaming. Oftentimes screaming at nothing in particular. Steven Spielberg would hold up a stick, a big pole, and he'd say, "Okay, so look up to the tip of the pole and scream." And Craig and I would look at each other and one of us would say,"What exactly are we screaming at?" And they'd say, "Well, we don't know exactly, but it's going to be very scary."<i>Mom. Mom...</i> And scary, it was.<i>Poltergeist</i> took horror seriously, even though at that time movie studios didn't. The studios were very snobbish about the genre audience and they ignored them. They did not give them the information they wanted. They didn't give them access to doing interviews and the like. It was Mick's job to change that. Connecting the movie with the horror community. To have the director of <i>Jaws</i> producing this new ghost story movie with the director of <i>Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i>, it reached both the mainstream and the independent side of fandom. They interconnected at times and overlapped, but never more than in this movie, so it was a very easy sell. And the results were spectacular. Craig and I had a joke between us that it would wind up being, like, a C movie that would show only in drive-in theaters. We weren't seeing dailies, so we had no idea how the movie looked. I mean, we felt okay about what we were doing, but I was actually shocked that it was as big a hit as it was. It was not just big, it was huge.<i>Poltergeist</i> came out on June 4th, 1982, and <i>E.T.</i> hit cinemas just a few weeks later on June 11th. The so-called "Summer of Spielberg" overtook everything. For an entire summer, you couldn't get away from him. It was the Barbenheimer of its time. That summer solidified Steven Spielberg as the movie maker of his generation. He was on talk shows. He was on the cover of <i>Time</i> magazine, he was on <i>60 Minutes</i>. Spielberg became the poster boy for filmmaking itself. I don't remember there being a lot of coverage of the directors in mainstream American media. It was all about the stars. Between <i>Poltergeist</i> and <i>E.T.</i> that summer was transformative for the movies. It was the beginning of the summer that brought us <i>Road Warrior</i> and <i>The Thing</i> and <i>Blade Runner</i> and <i>Tron</i> and of course, <i>E.T.</i> and many others. So it was a very exciting time. And I also think, although I wasn't aware of it, that that was a moment where culture was transitioning. Movies in particular, because coming out of the 1970s, which was a great era of course, as a 13 year old kid, those films didn't excite me. They excited-- the films that were made in the 1970s excited me as I got older, but in the 1980s it was great if you were a young person. What a time to be a teenager in love with cinema. I remember walking out with my friend, thrilled and amazed by what I had seen, and probably not fully appreciating what I had seen. Not realizing-- like, thinking it was fun and great. Not really understanding oh, that this is something that I would be talking about well over 40 years later. It sounds lovely and simple. A huge success for everyone involved, for Steven Spielberg, for Tobe Hooper, JoBeth Williams, who got <i>The Big Chill</i> off the back of her work in <i>Poltergeist</i>, and Craig T. Nelson, who became the lead in the long running sitcom <i>Coach</i> because of the film. Even Columbia Pictures, the studio who had originally passed on the germ of the idea that would become <i>E.T.</i>, won, sort of. They retained a percentage of the profits and made a killing despite not releasing the movie. Top marks for everyone. However, even during production, a rumor started brewing that has continued to plague <i>Poltergeist</i> for over 40 years. And it's not about ghosts. It's about credit. There was a camera assistant who said,"No, no, Steven Spielberg directed the movie,"and he was very actively involved and very visible on set." Because Spielberg was not only the co-writer of the script, he was a very involved producer. But this was not an uncommon thing for Spielberg to do on other sets, too. Like on the set of <i>Used Cars</i> starring Kurt Russell, which Robert Zemeckis directed and Spielberg produced. The same thing happened, and Steven was very involved in suggesting shots and the like, and Kurt Russell said, "Look, I can take direction from one person.""I don't care if it's Bob Zemeckis or you, Steven, but I can only do it from one." And Steven backed off and said, "You're right, you're right, you're right." There was nobody to do that on Tobe's set except himself. The rumors around directing credit have tainted <i>Poltergeist</i> for 40 years now, and at the time, they sparked an investigation by the DGA, the Directors Guild of America. I myself would see Steven on the dolly and working out, you know,"We can push into a two shot here," and Tobe watch and be agreeable to it. So there were certainly times where Steven's influence was strong, but Tobe's was also equally strong. He was an innovator. But you know, when rumors catch fire, they really can spread. And this was one of those that was too delicious for people not to devour. If you ask me, it's much more interesting to look at it as a pure collaboration between two singular filmmakers. Both Spielberg and Hooper brought their unique sensibility. Spielberg, the spectacle and sentimentality, and with Hooper, the visual audacity and political undertones. The appearance, the look of it, the photographic qualities of it, very much show Spielberg's influence. But there is a viciousness to it and a willingness to go there and an explicitness to it that is almost unheard of in a PG-13 movie. The coffins in the rainstorm coming up out of the swimming pool. The ripping the face apart fantasy. By the way, those are Steven Spielberg's hands ripping the face apart.- No way.- Yeah. Those are Steven's hands ripping it apart. Amazing. But there is a sense of, anything goes, here. When you watch <i>Texas Chainsaw</i>, you think anything can happen. And Jesus Christ, it does. In this, it needed to have that sense of tension running throughout that Tobe provided to the movie. It's one thing to set up a shot, it's another thing to conceive of the hills and valleys of tension and release, that make a really great horror movie. And that, that's Tobe Hooper right there. There are plenty of naysayers and Reddit threads out there about who really directed <i>Poltergeist</i>. I say there would be no <i>Poltergeist</i> without either of them and without <i>Poltergeist</i>, the horror and the haunted house movie would not be the same. We can see the influence of <i>Poltergeist</i> everywhere. In the huge exorcism spectacle of <i>The Conjuring</i> films, where a married demonologist couple helps families possessed by miscellaneous spirits, as well as in the <i>Insidious</i> franchise from the same filmmakers, which take its medium and her assistance directly from <i>Poltergeist</i>. Even the kids film <i>Imaginary</i> was hugely inspired by the 1982 film and how it captures childlike fear. And you can even see the influence in the ectoplasm of <i>Ghostbusters</i>, which came out only two years after <i>Poltergeist</i>. Before then, the ghosts were never gooey. But more than anything, before <i>Poltergeist</i>, ghosts mostly belong to the realm of the Gothic. What Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg did was bring them into your living room, through the TV, through the crack in the closet door. Your childhood home would never be the same, would never be safe again. And that's the MUBI Podcast this week. Follow us to hear more stories about houses and how they haunt us at the movies. Next week, we'll explore how haunting can be a mystery in Guillermo del Toro's<i>The Devil's Backbone</i>. Solve it, and the ghosts will leave you alone. There are things to be frightened of, which are fantastical monsters, ghosts, powers beyond our realm. But there are also things to be frightened of, which are perfectly ordinary. And that's quite often adults. Follow us, so you don't miss it. Until then, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was hosted and written by me, Anna Bogutskaya. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Christian Coons is our editor. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. Additional music by the band People With Bodies. Thanks this week to May Tsehay. And if you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen. Let them know we're not your standard movie podcast. And if you've got questions, comments, or just want to tell us about how your house is haunted, I'd love to hear it. Really. Email us at podcast@mubi.com This show is executive produced by Rico Gagliano, Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca. And of course, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the films we mentioned in this very podcast, subscribe to MUBI at MUBI.com. Thanks for listening. Stay haunted.