Spielberg’s ‘Poltergeist’ the Great American Ghost Story: Halloween Month Horror Series Part IV
Now, you know you’ve got problems when a hostile ghost uses the family TV as a medium to communicate with your youngest daughter. And then with the earth shaking declaration by the child that “They are here,” your perceptions of life are forever changed. And that’s exactly what happened to the Freely family, an average family of five, when they moved into their brand new house in the brand new planned community of Cuesta Verde, California.
A poltergeist is defined as a malevolent ghost with an ax to grind with the living, and the host of angry ghosts who haunted the Freely family home had plenty to complain, when according to the paranormal experts that the family hired, their house was built over top their cemetery home. In short, the family of one son and two daughters were trespassing. So to get revenge, the highly irritated spirits play mind games with the family by moving furniture around and bending forks. Finally the spirits get the ultimate revenge by kidnapping the youngest daughter eight year old Carol Anne by pulling her through a portal in her bedroom closet to the spirit world. So now the child is speaking to the family through the TV. Now, her brave Mom has to rescue the child by having a rope tied to her ankle and entering the portal herself to retrieve the child, and she succeeds, entering back into the house through a second portal in the living room ceiling, But the family has no choice but to move away and leave the house as a haunt for the pesky ghosts. They won. This is a brief plot summary of the movie entitled “Poltergeist” the 1982 movie written and produced by Steven Spielberg, which became the eighth highest grossing film of the year.
Steven Allen Spielberg, born on December 18, 1946, is one of the major directors/screenwriters of the horror entertainment and science fiction movie industry of the late twentieth century, and high grossing movies such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark, “ET, the Extraterrestrial,” and “Jurassic Park.” he certainly is a big name in films, and his screenplays are considered to be among the classics. But he raised his film making to the level of fine art when he made movies such as “The Color Purple,” and “Schindler’s List” dealing with such serious topics of racism, sexism, and the holocaust.
“Poltergeist in particular” affected the public in such a way that real estate laws in the four states of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Minnesota have made it a breach of contract to knowingly sell a haunted house without disclosing the fact to the buyers. The public was actually led to believe, now that’s what you call influence.