Poltergeist: Of Gods and Clowns

Here is the third and final part of Lowcoolant's re-viewing of "Poltergeist" as an adult.

Of God & Clowns

I probably should have called this post something like "The Final Chapter" because I'm writing about a horror movie. But no.

The most unexpected moment for me - as an adult watching "Poltergeist" with his eyes open - was the mother's desperate appeal to God. Rare in movies. I had to run it back and watch the scene a second time, because I wasn't sure what I'd just heard. But sure enough, when the mother is trying to rescue her children from The Beast in the final scene, she screams "GOD! HELP ME!" begging The Almighty to give her strength. It almost seems inappropriate, like a lens that suddenly focuses all the spookiness into a real struggle of good and evil where a woman is saving her kids from the jaws of Hell. Though I guess it completes the momentum built throughout the movie, hitting you over the head that this is not a joke. This ghost is not a prankster. Look, you're not listening. I'm a bad ghost. I'm not just here to hide your car keys. I'm the devil. The fucking DEVIL! Do you hear me? You people never LISTEN to me! Gosh!

And I guess that's the real genius of this production - that it starts out as a harmless ghost story with humorous family elements, and ends up in a very dark, religious-and-therefore-serious place. The appeal to God drives the point home that this woman is really at her wit's end, she's got nothing left and CAN'T DO IT. Rather than conveniently overpowering evil and saving the day she shows a bit of struggle and weakness. Even though I don't believe in any of it, I felt somehow comforted watching that scene.

Just before the climax there's another pants-soiling scene where the clown doll attacks the son. As in, it comes to life and drags the boy under the bed. Refer to my previous statement about total hell. When we, the audience, saw that the clown's chair was empty and collectively wondered "hey where's the clo-- UH-OH!" the crescendo of fear just made everything worse. We wailed and whimpered while simultaneously wishing everyone would shut up because it was making us more scared. Every second between that sight and the eventual attack was like suffocation, as we watched and waited, too young and stupid to realize we could physically exit the theater. (In fact it wasn't until "Ghostbusters" that I actually did exit a theater. Those hellhounds were just too darn mean looking. I did go back in and finish the movie.)

So the clown attacked. I never saw what happened next because I was hiding my face, which in hindsight was unfortunate, because witnessing the boy's next move probably would have helped my developing psyche. After a good minute of screaming in absolute helplessness, the boy decides he's done playing the victim and channels his fear into a berserker rage, tearing the fluffy white guts out of that clown. It almost looks like the film was sped up to accentuate his anger. "I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU" he screams while shredding the doll to pieces. I really wish I'd seen that when I was 7, so I'd know what to do if I got jumped by a possessed clown doll. Not that it ever hap... FYI, I just looked over my shoulder while I was typing that, I really need more lights on in this room... not that it ever happened, but little boys need all the help they can get fighting evil.

the eternal struggle of man versus clown

Doctors have told us time and again that the scarring situations in our youth are sought out in our adult lives on a constant loop. People who are sexually abused subconsciously seek out more sexual abuse. People who competed with their siblings for the last cookie or greater approval from the parents end up as fiercely competitive adults who just don't get things like sharing or cooperation, or maybe they never feel like they're good enough no matter what they win or achieve.

Those of us who were always scared as children grow up subsisting on fear, surfing on it and wielding it like a flaming sword, I guess. As adults we laugh at the prospect of safety or predictability in anything because we can't control our own fear and can't fathom a world without it. We like reading Nietzsche or Kant, or Revelation. I know I sure do. We like scary movies. We take it in like fuel and serve it up, sometimes artistically, sometimes physically. We like scaring others, because the fear is still with us. Or maybe we're just trying to feel less alone by forcing that fear into our surroundings.

At some point our nerves became overloaded and our circuits fried, maybe due to a low capacity for shock. As adults our capacity is limitless because our meters are busted. It's like the strained emotional transmission eventually faltered and quit, so we've grown into things unable to trust or love, paranoid and nihilistic to the point of suicidal bouts of depression and an inability to understand emotional bonds.

Fuckin' Spielberg. :)

"Low Coolant" writes at www.lowcoolant.blogspot.com, and doesn't care who the harlequin belongs to or how cute it is, it's toast.

"Poltergeist" was written and produced by Steven Spielberg, and directed by Tobe Hooper

Poltergeist: It Knew What Scared Me

Here's Part Two of "LowCoolant's" wrestling with "Poltergeist."


It Knew What Scared Me

So there I was. 32 years old, climbing back into the ring with my own personal heavyweight champion of fear. You know what they say about anticipation often being worse than the experience itself? Several moments had me cringing and pushing my lips together because I knew what was going to happen. But in many cases it wasn't that bad. In fact, when the giant head lunged out of the closet I actually ran it back and paused it, marveling at the low-budget embarrassment it really was - a pinata? A giant paper-mache thing with... what is that... a car tail light in its mouth? Seriously, a red light in its mouth?

scary as hell to seven-year-old boys

Another revelation was the tree's arm-like branches reaching in to grab the boy - arms obviously mounted on a forklift driving up to the window. Despite my adult brain deducing these things almost immediately, my child brain remembered the fear precisely. I found myself taking extremely deep breaths and leaning away from the monitor when those moments filled the screen. I can still remember the sounds inside the theater - total hell.

No, I never experienced Vietnam, or the Holocaust, or the mall where parents got trampled trying to get the Cabbage Patch Dolls, but those two hours in that theater were total hell. Dozens of children just like me screaming themselves shitless. Little did we know we would be the last generation to sit through a psychologically-scarring movie like "Poltergeist" before the standards would forever change and force kids to become jaded 13-year-old teenagers before they could see scary movies. Say what you will about 13-year-olds still having the capacity to get scared - there's a world of difference between 7 and 13, and you can go eat a decroded demon clown if you disagree.

The first scene that made me jump, like way back from my monitor with matching verbalization, was the hand coming out of the television. Once my pulse returned to normal I realized that I had no memory of that scene. Either I was covering my eyes when it happened in the theater, or I blocked it out. I'm going with Option B. The music on that scene has to be some of the most disturbing stuff ever. No wonder Jerry Goldsmith got more work. I thought back to Scotty Walsh (also an adult) exclaiming in the middle of "The Changeling" as we watched in 2006, "Why are we DOING this to ourselves?!" I also thought about my friend John pointing out that my sociopathic fantasies all seem to revolve around making other people feel scared.

Much of the terror in "Poltergeist" is compounded by the reactions of the people in the movie. Not just "whoah! a gargoyle!" with crappy acting and all the emphasis on the gargoyle, but "whoah! that guy is so scared he puked and then his head exploded!" For example, when the father screams as the giant head lunges out of the closet, it's repeated from several angles in a rapid-fire style that makes your own scream struggle to keep up. The little girl's scream is particularly piercing. The little boy's scream is coupled with a look of serious fear. The girl's facial expressions, eh, limited at best. But the boy? Those eyes! That mouth! He looks like he's staring at THE DEVIL HIMSELF!

Speaking of the devil, I was too young to know what "the beast" referred to. I now know what it means. It makes the story way more interesting.

ooh! ooh! And when the husband says "Never!" to his wife just before she enters the closet! Doesn't that just make you say awwwwwww? Leave it to Spielberg to blindside the audience with a glowing romantic moment in the midst of dimension-shredding chaos. I bet the new "Indiana Jones" will have something like this. But oh yeah, I totally remembered that line and said it as it happened. And it felt great! I still got it! Of course it probably helped that the father's name was Steven.

"Low Coolant" (aka "Steven") writes at www.lowcoolant.blogspot.com

Poltergeist: The Original Demon

I read this re-examination of "Poltergeist" (with hands removed from eyes) and enjoyed it so much that I asked the author if I could steal it from him and re-publish it here. With his kind permission, we'll be presenting it over the next three days. Here's Part One.

The Original Demon

As part of a video project, yesterday I had the pleasure... well no, it wasn't pleasure. More like dread and mild nausea. Let me start again.

Yesterday I had the dread and nausea of watching "Poltergeist," a movie I kind of saw in a movie theater in 1982 and haven't seen since. I say "kind of" because there were parts I didn't see - I was too busy covering my eyes, or putting my head down into my knees to insure zero visual input, or in some cases having out-of-body experiences brought on by cardiac arrest.

So yeah. Video project. Nice opening credits. Nice font choice. I captured three good visuals that happen early in the movie - the static-filled television, the clown doll just sitting there, and the spooky tree outside the boy's room. And that was all I needed or wanted to see. I ejected the disc.

I had the DVD in its case and made it all the way to my front door, intent on driving straight to Blockbuster, when a voice in my head snarled, "You COWARD!" I couldn't tell if it was my father's voice or my own, but it stopped me.

I stood there with my hand on the doorknob. It's a rare thing when you insult yourself and know, through and through, that you're absolutely right. When you stop yourself at a pivotal moment and commence to wrestle internally. We hear all kinds of internal things about daily errands, what to say on the phone, instructions for small talk, etc, but it's mostly harmless. And our courage gets challenged by others all the time - come on, chicken, do it! But when the calm subconscious addresses the surrounding haste and denial, it's pretty powerful.

"You miserable sacka shit pathetic loser," it continued. How convenient that my subconscious was as eloquent as my mouth. "Go the fuck back in there and watch this fucking movie. Swallow it whole, like the tree tried to swallow the kid. Make some fucking popcorn and BE A MAN FOR ONCE." I furrowed my brow and gritted my teeth a little and, well, made some fucking popcorn.

Folks, in 1982 I was but a wee lad. A mere seven years old, with soft, angelic sensibilities. A mind full of curiosity and wonder. Ripe for traumatization at the hands of frightmaster Steven Spielberg.

It scared the hell out of me. This movie took my happy kid brain and splattered it all over the sharp rocks of holy shit horror. This movie didn't just give me phobias, it cleared a whole swath of my cerebral cortex and built a state-of-the-art neurosis facility just to store the phobias, then special-ordered a dozen previously-unknown phobias and installed them free of charge. Anyone who invents a time machine and takes young children back to see "Poltergeist" - you're going to burn in hell. Because no child needs that much so soon in life.

In fact, this movie and its misleading PG rating were what spawned the PG-13 rating back in the 80s. Millions of parents, disgusted with the vast gray area between PG and R, and understandably furious over the widespread psychological trauma that resulted from this movie, demanded a system upgrade. (They were infuriated even further when they learned that "Poltergeist" was originally going to be rated R but somehow managed a PG, for reasons only Satan fully understood.) While "Gremlins" was the eventual nail in the PG coffin, "Poltergeist" launched the movement with a nuclear thunderclap.

Childhood phobias created by this movie included, but were not limited to: large spooky trees, television sets in empty rooms, closets, the space under the bed, thunderstorms, clown dolls, pink attic insulation, and dark places in general. I guess every child has a "first fear" experience that turns normal things into paranormal, dangerous things. Prior to that experience, things like darkness might be just fine. Then the child witnesses something come out of the dark in a scary movie and, well, suddenly the dark's not okay anymore. (For example, I know people who liked meeting stray doggies until they saw "Cujo" or read the short story "The Stuffed Dog.") In my case the first taste of the emotion we call terror was "Poltergeist." It was a baptism by fire for the entire theater.

Note: my refusal to own a television doesn't come from this movie, but that's a good guess. ;)

"Low Coolant" publishes at www.lowcoolant.blogspot.com