Tobe Hooper – 1982 – USA
Famous
for bearing the stamp of its producer, Steven Spielberg, far more prominently
than its director, Tobe Hooper, Poltergeist
was a big-budget Hollywood attempt to cash in on the mini-revolution in
American horror films of the previous decade.
Raw, subversive, independent classics like Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978) were powerful precisely because of their modest
scales, ingenuity and crews of outsiders full of fresh ideas. Surely, Spielberg and the good people at
Universal tapped Hooper because of his brilliant Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and they expected him to shine in that
foreign environment just as Spielberg had risen to the occasion when admitted into
the big leagues. But for whatever
reason, it seems that Hooper recoiled and Spielberg had to take over. (John Carpenter suffered a similar ordeal at
Universal’s hands that year with The
Thing, the failure of which sent him packing back to the indie world. But at least in his case he kept control of
the film and time has vindicated him; the film is now regarded as a virtually
flawless masterpiece.) Poltergeist seems a weak sister-film to
Spielberg’s E.T. which was out the
same year. Both movies take place in the
same affectionately-drawn suburban neighborhoods in which Spielberg grew
up. In a troubling way, the colorful and
comedic early scenes depicting the average nuclear family are simultaneously
the most successful thing in the movie and also the most calculated, corny and
evocative of the schmaltz that was soon to be closely associated with
Spielberg’s name. This is a film that
certainly would have been directed by more reliable Spielberg surrogates like
Joe Dante or Robert Zemeckis under better circumstances, and it probably would
have come out exactly as it is now; an overdone, showy and weirdly
mean-spirited thrill-ride designed to delight the most average audience
imaginable. In that way, it is the
template for many a Spielberg production to follow – i.e. Gremlins (1984), The Goonies (1985),
Back to the Future (1985), etc. –
films that, despite being crowd-pleasers, are uncomfortably perfect in their
adherence to the Spielberg formula. In
any case, to get back to Poltergeist specifically,
a few early scenes are promisingly creepy, but the rest is one excuse after
another for a barrage of special effects that take the place of any real
creativity, originality or an exploration of the deeper issues at hand. Handled differently, the supernatural happenings
in the story might have been unsettling instead of just comically gross. It seems to be generally understood that Tobe
Hooper didn’t deserve much or any of the credit for the film’s success, as it
did his career no good; like Carpenter, he went right back to making more
personal films in the way he knew how, such as Lifeforce (1985) and Invaders
from Mars (1986).
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