The Influence (La Influencia) (2019): adapted from the Ramsey Campbell novel by Michel Gaztambide, Daniel Rissech, and Denis Rovira van Boekholt; directed by Denis Rovira van Boekholt; starring Manuela Velles (Alicia), Alain Hernandez (Mikel), Emma Suarez (Victoria), and Claudia Placer (Nora):
Available on Netflix, The Influence (made in Spain and thus really 'La Influencia') very loosely adapts Ramsey Campbell's superior late 1980's horror novel to decent effect. Some changes make sense either because there's a need for compression in a 100-minute adaptation of a 350-page novel or because certain things in the novel aren't 'cinematic.' Some of those changes may make one view The Influence as being derivative of Hereditary, though Campbell's novel predates that movie by 30 years.
Chief among these later 'cinematic' changes is the decision to have the malign, elderly Victoria on life support for the duration of the film. In the novel, she dies at the beginning. But I can understand the film-makers wanting to leave the door open for a physical battle between 'Good' and 'Evil' at the climax of the film and not simply a spiritual one.
There are other weird lapses that make me wonder about a longer cut of the movie. The disappearance of a major character goes almost unremarked-upon. The coda seems a bit rushed and implausible as one would imagine SOME further police investigation of the events of the movie.
A few moments of implausibility do jar one out of the horror narrative from time to time. I mean, can you really start a massive fire in your urban backyard in Spain and not arouse the attentions of the police and fire department? Because that is one seriously big fire that gets started about halfway through the movie.
The direction is mostly assured, though, and The Influence has a lot of scares both intellectual and visceral. The actors are all competent, especially the child actor playing Nora. And there's a really nice design for a demonic figure, made more effective by the decision not to linger too long on it. Recommended.
The Nun (2018): written by Gary Dauberman and James Wan; directed by Corin Hardy; starring Taissa Farmiga (Sister Irene), Demian Bichir (Father Burke), and Jonas Bloquet (Frenchie): A minor entry in The Conjuring franchise gives us an origin story for the Evil Nun who shows up repeatedly in that franchise. Short story, it's a demon named Valar. Long story... it's a demon named Valar!
It's 1952 and Vatican trouble-shooter Father Burke and novitiate Sister Irene travel to Romania to investigate whether or not a convent/abbey has fallen from Grace. Boy, has it ever! With some help from a local French-Canadian played by a Belgian actor and nicknamed 'Frenchie'* (whew, the creativity), they do battle with the Forces of Evil.
The movie occupies an uneasy and often counter-productive realm between the Roman Catholic horrors of The Exorcist and the demon zombies of the Evil Dead franchise. It all really becomes quite silly, especially once a holy relic containing some of the blood of Jesus Christ shows up. The demon's powers wax and wane according to the plot -- it can seal someone in a grave and bury them, for example, but its minions can be dispatched by ax and shotgun.
Taissa Farmiga is as cute as a button as novitiate and later Sister Irene, sent to fight evil because she had visions as a child. Demien Bichir does what he can with his underwritten priest. Frenchie is, well, Frenchie. What, there were no real French-Canadians available? A few effective jump scares are about all the horror this entry has to offer. Not recommended.
* Alas, not the Jon Lovitz character.
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| I'm Frenchie ! |
Hereditary (2018): written and directed by Ari Aster; starring Alex Wolff (Peter), Gabriel Byrne (Steve), Toni Collette (Annie), and Milly Shapiro (Charlie): As in The Shining or The Exorcist, Hereditary puts a family under malign supernatural pressure and sets the burner to 'Boil.'
Things start slowly but eerily. You get a somewhat weird adolescent daughter (a terrific, odd Milly Shapiro). You get a stressed-out Mom (Toni Collette, superb as usual). You get a well-meaning but somewhat ineffectual Dad (Gabriel Byrne, channeling Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People). And you get a really stressed out teen-aged son (Alex Wolff).
Around the 40-minute mark, something awful happens. Is it just random, horrible luck? Is the supernatural at work here or are we seeing a family whose members -- especially mother and son -- have serious, unresolved psychological issues?
Well, the next 80 minutes or so provide the answer to those and other questions. Hereditary does a nice job of eventually inverting our assumptions about who or what is responsible. It also has more beheadings than A Tale of Two Cities. Along with graveyard robbing, naked cult members leering from the shadows, mysterious lights, impotent authorities, ghostly drawings and writings, people burning alive, and so on, and so forth.
Told in an almost stately, deliberate manner, Hereditary nonetheless traffics in the stuff of Gothic nightmares as it draws to its tense conclusion. It may be too deliberate for some -- I found it exhilarating. I hope to see more from writer-director Ari Aster. He treats both the horror genre and the tropes he used with respect and diligence. Highly recommended.
Veronica (2017): written by Fernando Navarro and Paco Plaza; directed by Paco Plaza; starring Sandra Escacena (Veronica), Bruna Gonzalez (Lucia), Claudia Placer (Irene), Ivan Chavero (Antonito), Ana Torrent (Ana), and Consuelo Trujillo (Hermana Muerte):
Set in 1991, Veronica is vaguely inspired by a 'true story.' It's about as truthful as The Exorcist -- the events of the film are entirely the invention of the Spanish director/co-writer best known for the found-footage horror film REC.
The real events involved the death of a young woman. So even with the names changed and the events leading up to that death entirely invented, there's more than a whiff of exploitation to the film. That's too bad. It's a solid supernatural thriller with a sympathetic teen-aged protagonist (Veronica, that is). Traumatized by the recent death of her father and overwhelmed by doing the majority of the care-giving for her three younger siblings, she's gradually going adrift.
And then she and two friends decide to consult a Ouija board.
During a solar eclipse.
Oops.
And there's also a somewhat sinister, elderly, blind nun at Veronica's school who warns her of tampering with the supernatural. Too late!
The result is a movie that conveys creeping, escalating dread quite nicely. Though it's no wonder there's a blind nun at the school -- the protocols the school follows for watching that eclipse would result in a whole lot of visually impaired school children. It's a pretty distracting sequence, really, because it's born of inadequate research and not intentional horror.
Boy, do those nuns not understand how the sun during an eclipse works! Maybe they should have consulted a Ouija board! Recommended.
A Head Full Of Ghosts (2014) by Paul Tremblay: A Head Full Of Ghosts feels like part of a fictional conversation that began with Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan (1962) and continued through William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) and on into all those found-footage possession and ghostly infestation movies in the Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Conjuring franchises.
It's a superior novel that deals with its own possession case even as it also interrogates and discusses how possession cases have been represented in various media, whether presented fictionally or as "based on a true story." People don't remember now that The Exorcist itself was repeatedly framed by Blatty and the film-makers as being inspired by a "true story" of possession.
Like Great Expectations or To Kill A Mockingbird, A Head Full Of Ghosts is a retrospective narrative. 23-year-old Meredith "Merry" Barrett tells the "untold story" of her 14-year-old sister Marjorie's possession to a writer working on a book about that possession, a possession which occurred 15 years earlier when Merry was 8.
Tremblay's first bit of play here is to have the present-day of the novel be in "our" future, with the events of the past apparently occurring some time around 2014. He clearly wanted this possession to occur in "our" media world of the Internet, Twitter, YouTube, cell phones, and so on, and so forth. He does not invest "the future" with any flying cars or space colonies, so don't get too excited about that "future retrospective."
But wait, there's more! Posts from a blogger named Karen Brissette are interpolated into Merry's narrative. Brissette synopsizes and analyzes the possession, or more accurately, The Possession. That would be the six-episode reality series that made Marjorie and the rest of the Barretts a five-week media wonder.
Among other things, Brissette's blog evaluates The Possession as a narrative structured around father John's economic and social "failure" as he's a white, middle-class man who's been recently put out of work by downsizing and who, in his woes, has returned to a fervent, retrograde Roman Catholicism to explain Marjorie's condition which, as Merry's retelling begins, has been diagnosed as some form of mental illness -- perhaps incipient schizophrenia.
Sarah Barrett, still holding down a job, doesn't believe any of the religious crap her husband increasingly extols. But she's also rapidly being exhausted by being the sole breadwinner in the family while also trying to deal with the time and mental demands of whatever the Hell is making Marjorie's life miserable.
Got all that?
So as A Head Full Of Ghosts writes its own narrative of demonic possession, it also evaluates many of the narratives of possession Pop Culture has dropped on us over the years. And it evaluates the media. And religious faith, and religious mania. All while Tremblay creates convincing, complex characters -- especially with Merry and Marjorie.
There are several major interpretations of what "really" happened offered by the novel, but they are intertwined and not necessarily mutually exclusive of one another. Marjorie may really be possessed. Marjorie may be mentally ill. John Barrett may be possessed. John may be mentally ill. Merry may be possessed. Merry may be mentally ill.
At the very least, even Merry isn't entirely certain of the truthfulness of all her memories during that traumatic five weeks. And she's also aware that certain things remain unexplained or unsolved. The ambiguity Tremblay creates actually increases the horror of the situation. The Exorcist offered proof that there really was a demon at work inside Regan's head. A Head Full Of Ghosts offers no such certainty. Or does it?
The recent HBO adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel Sharp Objects seems to have brought the generally lamentable fictional trope of the evil child/ teenager back into prominence, as seen in Flynn's book and in novels like Lionel Shriver's ludicrous, over-praised We Need To Talk About Kevin. Of course, The Exorcist's Regan is a forerunner of the mysteriously evil child/teen. So, too, the potentially possessed in The Case Against Satan. And on to the army of demon-haunted or demon-following or demon-possessed children in the Insidious movies and so on, and so forth.
However, Tremblay's Marjorie is a believable, sympathetic character whose ultimate spiritual and moral states are haunting and, possibly, left to the reader to decide upon. Merry, in her 23-year-old self remembering her 8-year-old self, is also a believable creation whose memories may or may not be believed. This is adult horror in the sense that it doesn't cheap out with a melodramatic teen monster collecting the teeth of her victims in a doll house. The ending chills the reader, and then chills the reader just a bit more. Highly recommended.
The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty: The best-seller that spawned a movie mega-hit (adjusting for inflation, its domestic box office would today be in the $400-$500 million range. That's domestic B.O. only!). It holds up well today, though a lot will be familiar if you've seen the movie -- William Peter Blatty adapted his own novel for the screen. Blatty was a screenwriter, so this makes a lot of sense.
Indeed, his most famous screen-writing assignment prior to The Exorcist was on the second Inspector Clouseau movie. Some of the movie-comedy stuff appears in The Exorcist novel, quippy exchanges and some lengthy comic riffs that didn't make the movie. Blatty liked a couple of them enough that he would use them 19 years later in The Exorcist III, which he wrote and directed. Apparently he didn't want the world to miss his 'Lemon Drop' and 'There's a carp in the bathtub' comedy stylings.
Do I need to recite the plot? The daughter of a Hollywood star falls ill while she and her mother are in Washington, D.C. filming a movie. Really ill. Possession-level ill!
Most of the novel builds up to the climactic exorcism, which takes place with great brevity in the last 30 pages or so of the novel. Father Damien Karras, so hauntingly portrayed by Jason Miller in the movie, works to determine whether the possession is a possession or not. So, too, doctors.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Kinderman investigates the death of a Hollywood director who fell to his death on those crazy stairs beside the Hollywood star's rental. Fell. During a time when he was alone in the house with the daughter. Hmm. And his head was twisted all the way around.
Blatty keeps things humming along to the violent climax. The theological discussions are a bit half-baked, but this is a popular horror novel, so we'll give it that. As in the movie, Karras towers over everything as a tortured, sympathetic hero. Lieutenant Kinderman is a much larger presence here than in the film (played there by Lee J. Cobb and in The Exorcist III by an incandescent George C. Scott), which is too bad because he's really, really, really annoying. So annoying. He's half comic relief, half dogged detective, and all annoying.
But The Exorcist holds up, and popular novels generally don't. Hell, critically praised novels generally don't. Well worth a read, if only to discover the name of the demon afflicting Regan. Recommended.
Outcast Volume 2: A Vast and Unending Ruin (2015): written by Robert Kirkman; illustrated by Paul Azaceta: If you've watched the first season of Outcast, Volume 2 of the comic book collections is sort of beside the point. You've seen it all, and surprisingly, the TV show is better than the comic. Robert Kirkman's other supernatural series (a little thing called The Walking Dead) is a lot less interesting to me than this one.
Outcast involves the supernatural, though what's really going on remains unclear 12 issues into the story (or one season into the show). There's a demonic invasion, there's one man who can drive the demons out of people (the titular Outcast), and there's a lot of murkiness about what these demons really are.
Paul Azaceta's artwork is a bit too mundane for the story: the mundane works well right up until something supernatural has to be represented, at which point Azaceta doesn't seem to know how to combine the normative with the fantastic.
Kirkman's writing is solid so far as it goes, but this volume seems much more padded and attenuated than the first one. Or 'decompressed' as we say in comic-book land. Where there should be a density of information that drives a story forwards to a conclusion in 20 issues or so, Kirkman instead doles out the material parsimoniously, apparently aiming at something more along the lines of The Walking Dead's nigh-endless run. But the material here, presented as it is, doesn't warrant the drawn-out treatment. We're far further ahead in the story after one season of the TV show than we are here after 12 issues of the comic book. Lightly recommended.
The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell (1962): Published nine years before William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist became a best-seller, Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan bears a marked similarity to that far better-known work. A doubting Roman Catholic priest finds himself called upon to investigate what may be the demonic possession of a teen-aged girl. Soon, he'll be forced to perform the Rite of Exorcism in concert with an older bishop whose faith is far more secure. But is the doubting priest's faith up to it?
Russell was the fiction editor for Playboy in the 1950's and 1960's. But he was also a skilled writer whose legacy lives on primarily because of his clever horror stories, most notably "Sardonicus," which spawned a William Castle movie but also remains a triumphant homage to the writing style of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Russell often seemed more at home in the skin of other times, as a period piece ("Sanguinarius") about the bloody Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, was also a model of how to stay true to the style of an earlier era.
The Case Against Satan isn't an homage or a pastiche, however. It's a pretty thoroughly modern novel -- for 1962 America -- with a thoroughly modern protagonist, Father Gregory Sargent. He's plagued by doubts and drink and an abiding lack of faith in the existence of evil as a being, Satan, rather than simply a random, mindless thing.
Russell allows for more ambivalence than Blatty did: even at the end of the novel, some doubts could conceivably remain about who or what Father Sargent has been exorcising. Real-world psychological trauma seems to have instigated the possession. Human evil is at work in the life of 16-year-old Susan Garth. Is it all simply human?
The possession and exorcism scenes are effective and often chilling. Indeed, one of the most chilling moments comes when the Bishop acknowledges that the exorcism might kill Susan -- and chooses to go on anyway because the alternative is far worse in his eyes. Anyone who's heard of the deaths of people being exorcised, even in the past ten years or so, will probably find this decision to be extremely disquieting. But this is a novel, not a pro-exorcism pamphlet or a news story: demons can exist with certainty here. Perhaps.
The characters and situations sometimes tend towards the melodramatic. This is a novel about exorcism, after all, the most potentially melodramatic Catholic rite I can think of. Father Sargent is skillfully drawn, however, as a sympathetic and flawed figure whose doubts seem to have been designed to mirror the doubts of the casual reader.
Susan Garth is a little more sketchily drawn -- our sympathies for her emanate from the terrible things she's being put through far moreso than they do from any development of her character. Only an almost stereotypical housekeeper (seriously, I swear she's Mrs. McCarthy from the BBC's current Father Brown series) needs greater depth and clarity; that she's also there to provide a miraculously well-timed anecdote about exorcism in the small (Irish?) town of her birth does not help one's suspension of disbelief.
Of course, our priest and our bishop also ponder the coincidences required to set up the events of the novel, and decide that God has been putting things in place. Metafictionally, that God is of course Ray Russell.
The Case Against Satan also brings in a brusque but ultimately sympathetic homicide detective; an inquisitive Roman Catholic layperson who's a pillar of the Church community and knows it; a squirmy widower as Susan's father; and a former priest of the parish, Father Halloran (Stephen King, take note!), with something to hide. Only an anti-Catholic pamphleteer seems like a complete misstep. He serves a plot function that could probably have taken care of itself.
He also seems anachronistic to us now, which couldn't have been helped: this was an America of 1962 that had just gotten used to the idea of its first Roman Catholic president, after all, with all the debates and acrimony over the suitability of such a religionist for America's highest political post. How time flies. American Roman Catholics were yesterday's American Muslims.
In all, The Case Against Satan is a brisk and entertaining read. Some intellectually interesting questions arise as the plot progresses, most interesting a discussion about the Seal of the Confessional. Russell works for the most part in a plain style, putting the ideas and characters at the forefront. The Case Against Satan may be a better novel than The Exorcist. It certainly got there first. Highly recommended.
Annabelle: written by Gary Dauberman; directed by John R. Leonetti; starring Annabelle Wallis (Mia), Ward Horton (John), Tony Amendola (Father Perez), and Alfre Woodard (Evelyn) (2014): With the budget of a TV movie (about $7 million, which is probably less than the catering budget for an Avengers movie), Annabelle was hellaprofitable both at home and abroad. And while reviled by many of the same critics who praised the first movie in this 'series' (The Conjuring), Annabelle seemed more than adequate to me. It also lacked the almost programmatic replication of The Amityville Horror that ruined The Conjuring for me.
Unlike The Conjuring, Annabelle is "completely fictional." Ha ha. That creepy doll drove its own sub-plot in The Conjuring. Here, it's the star! The film takes place in the studio's version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- a horror universe based on the career of the regrettable Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were at least pretty good at selling themselves as ghost-busters. They're referenced in this movie but aren't part of the main plot, which is instead an origin story for that creepy doll.
Ah, that creepy doll. In 'reality,' the creepy doll was a large Raggedy Ann. Such a representation would aid with my suspension of disbelief, but the copyright holders of the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls wouldn't allow the producers of The Conjuring or Annabelle to use their doll in the movies. So instead we get a doll which looks ridiculously malevolent even before it turns into a Hell-powered terror-machine. Anyone who wanted this doll would have to be insane. There is probably a better movie in that concept somewhere.
The plot revelations and narrative beats of Annabelle are familiar, though delivered with a certain level of competence. The lead actress (hilariously named Annabelle in real life) carries the weight of the often ridiculous narrative well; the other actors don't have a lot to do, though old pros Alfre Woodard and Tony Amendola do as much as they can with the material. I wish the creators of movies that use Roman Catholicism would at least take time to read Roman Catholicism for Dummies. I really do. Lightly recommended.
The Devil's Labyrinth by John Saul (2006): John Saul's horror-thriller writing career spans about 35 years (and counting). Somehow I've avoided him until now, primarily because there are only so many hours in the day. This mid-to-late career novel is an entertaining dandy, however, a slice of Roman Catholic horror that manages to wring some new scares and concepts out of the nearly exhausted sub-genre of possession and exorcism.
Be aware that Saul works very much in the plain style. His strengths lie in plot and characterization, with style being pretty much kept as quiet as possible. This works for Saul because he indeed does have strengths in those two areas. A couple of plot twists truly do surprise, and the characterization, especially of the teenagers trapped in the titular labyrinth, rings true throughout.
Bullied and beaten at his regular high school, a 16-year-old boy gets sent to a private Roman Catholic high school in Boston by his mother on the advice of her new boyfriend. St. Isaac's sprawls across several acres, and its underground rooms and tunnels, built and rebuilt-upon over a couple of hundred years, form one of the meanings of the 'labyrinth' of the title.
The new kid, still suffering over the death of his soldier-father in Afghanistan several years earlier, soon begins to see that something odd is going on. And as the oddities and sinister activities increase, so too does the Vatican's interest in St. Isaac's. One of the new pope's main interests is the history of exorcism in the Roman Catholic Church. And when one of the priests at St. Isaac's send the papal office a videofile of what appears to be an ancient, near-mythical ritual involving demons, the Pope's interest is piqued.
But the kids are not all right. To resurrect an old phrase yet again, this novel is a page-turner and a humdinger. The climax gets a little bit too gimmicky, but otherwise a solid read. Recommended.
Raising Hell: The Unmaking of Ken Russell's The Devils by Richard Crouse (2012): Fascinating account by the ubiquitous Crouse about Ken Russell's The Devils, possibly the most controversial film ever released by a major studio. And I was fascinated even though I, like a lot of people, have never actually seen the movie.
Russell was a stylistic iconoclast in even his most pedestrian films, but never moreso than in The Devils, which adapted a non-fiction-based Aldous Huxley book about a possession frenzy in a 17th-century French nunnery into a metaphysical and carnal horror story about faith and politics.
Widely reviled by critics and moral pillars alike when first released in 1971, The Devils was cut and recut by the studio afterwards. Today, I'm pretty sure it's still impossible to get a non-bootleg director's cut of the film. Puritanical Warner Brothers has spent 40 years trying to pretend the film doesn't exist. Nonetheless, it's a cult film among viewers and film-people alike, as testimonials in this book to its greatness from Alex Cox, Guillermo del Toro, Joe Dante, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, and many others show.
Crouse also does a solid job of demonstrating how studios have changed since 1971, and not for the better in an artistic sense: no major studio would even think about making or releasing an expensive, controversial 'Art' film like The Devils today. The blockbuster mentality has pushed most movies that aspire to do something more than sell action figures to the fringes, while 'serious' studio movies must be dignified or feel-good in their quasi-artistic pretensions. Because as we all know, mental illness can be cured by ballroom dancing. David Cronenberg taught us that in Spider. Oh, wait a minute, no he didn't.
If there is such a thing as an auteur, Russell was one, though Crouse does a fine job of laying out the necessity of Russell's collaborators, most especially the protean wild-man actor Oliver Reed and set designer (and later director) Derek Jarman. Man, I really want to see The Devils now. Highly recommended.
Rec 3: Genesis: written by Luiso Berdejo, David Gallart and Paco Plaza; directed by Paco Plaza; starring Leticia Dolera (Clara) and Diego Martin (Koldo) (2012): Enjoyable fake-found-footage Spanish horror movies Rec and Rec2 become a less enjoyable horror movie combining found footage and traditional narrative elements.
There are nice gory and goopy bits scattered throughout, but an awful lot of this is just rote zombie action set at a wedding. The interesting religious reveal at the end of the first Rec has become here a shovel hitting us in the face over and over again. Lightly recommended for people who have seen the first two and will see the fourth (and ostensibly final) installment.
The Big Sleep: adapted by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman from the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler; directed by Howard Hawks; starring Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (Vivian Rutledge), John Ridgely (Eddie Mars), Martha Vickers (Carmen Sternwood), Louis Heydt (Joe Brody), and Charles Waldron (General Sternwood) (1946): Perhaps the most indispensable hard-boiled detective film of all time -- only Chinatown rivals it, though The Maltese Falcon too has its champions.
Screenwriters Leigh Brackett (who would thirty years later work on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back) and Jules Furthman and Chandler's original novel supply most of the verbal fireworks, William Faulkner having wandered back to Oxford, Mississippi in the middle of screen-writing to drink, hang out with his wheelbarrow, and inspire Barton Fink. Virtually all the dialogue crackles with wit and substance; the plot is twisty but ultimately perfectly logical (though depending on which version you see, the mystery of the chaffeur's murder may or may not be fully explained).
The performances are stellar throughout, with lengthy reshoots a year after the original completion of filming to beef up the badinage between Bogart and Bacall. Hawks directs with his trademark rapid-fire dialogue, and the black-and-white cinematography is beautifully deployed by Syd Hickox. If for no other reason, one needs to see The Big Sleep to fully appreciate the Coen Brothers' gonzo homage/parody, The Big Lebowski, with its warped parallel characters and situations (and use of the word 'shamus'). Highest recommendation.
Poltergeist: written by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, and Mark Victor; directed by Tobe Hooper; starring Craig T. Nelson (Steve Freeling), JoBeth Williams (Diane Freeling), Beatrice Straight (Dr. Lesh), Dominque Dunne (Dana Freeling), Oliver Robins (Robbie Freeling), Heather O'Rourke (Carol Anne Freeling) and Zelda Rubinstein (Tangina) (1982): Stephen Spielberg essentially co-directed Poltergeist and controlled its post-production, and it shows: this is very much a mirror image of E.T., released within a week of Poltergeist in 1982.
Much of the early material with the family soon to be beset by vengeful spirits works pretty well; we're in Spielberg suburbia, where the Dad is distant (figuratively here; literally in other Spielberg films) and the Mother is the spiritual head of the family. The supernatural starts with what seems to be a furniture-moving poltergeist ("Noisy ghost") but soon moves into high-tech pyrotechnics, rubbery models, stop-motion trees, and large accumulations of skeletons rocketing up from the muddy ground.
I can't say the Spielberg kitchen-sink approach works all that well in horror -- indeed, many of the later effects here would be spoofed to a certain extent by Evil Dead 2. There are brief moments of wonder, but the Spielbergian need to underline every effect and every emotional sequence with music, flashing lights, and endless close-ups of people looking awestruck quickly dissipates that wonder.
One of the elements of the main plot -- the disappearance of the little girl from her own house into an alternate dimension, with only her voice being able to be heard in our dimension -- is lifted pretty much wholesale from the Richard Matheson short story and, later, 1962 Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost." Besides being afraid of old Twilight Zone episodes, original story-writer Spielberg was also apparently scared of trees, his face melting, clowns, and really large faces. And getting trapped in a crowd of skeletons. It's amazing how many of the horror tropes here previously showed up in Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lightly recommended.
