Poltergeist (1982)

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ When I saw Silent House yesterday, I thought of this 1982 classic. In fact, whenever I see a horror movie, I think of it. Not because haunted house films today are strikingly similar to Poltergeist but because they are not. This fact will eventually weigh heavily on some production company and a reboot is inevitable.

I think it was David Ansen in Newsweek who called Poltergeist "a roller coaster ride of spills and chills" and,unlike any haunted house story before or since,this is true. But it is not the only thing that makes it unique. Unlike films of its genre, Poltergeist was not scary in the Gothic sense, and I am always amazed when people declare it was so scary, or it was the scariest movie they ever saw.

What made Poltergeist scary in a different way was how much you cared about the Freeling family in peril and how desperately you wanted to see them survive the demons that plagued them. This of course is Spielberg's creative stamp on a film he wrote, produced (and perhaps de-facto directed). Sorry Tobe Hooper, but it looks and feels like Spielberg.