The 80s classic gets a Halloween re-release for its 40th anniversary: a supernatural chiller and anti-gentrification satire that came out the same year as ET – Mr Hyde to that film’s Dr Jekyll, perhaps – and one of the most Spielbergian films not actually directed by Steven Spielberg. It is also a movie with its own particular flavour of sadness, owing to the early deaths of two of its stars: Dominique Dunne, daughter of author Dominick Dunne and niece of Joan Didion, killed in the year of the film’s release by her violent ex-boyfriend, and Heather O’Rourke, who died in 1988 at 12 years oldafter suffering cardiac arrest and septic shock connected with a bowel condition.
It was directed by horror maestro Tobe Hooper, who claimed to have had the basic story idea himself; nonetheless, the credited lead screenwriter and producer is Spielberg. Spielberg’s auteur fingerprints are all over Poltergeist, but some of the residual creepiness and brashness must be Hooper’s – particularly the scene in which one of the “ghostbusters” rather gratuitously claws his own face off. Yet there is a key moment where these two film-makers’ sensibilities fuse.
