Heads up, this episode includes terrified screams, demonic moans, exploding graves, and scariest of all. Spoilers. All right, everybody. Your host Rico Goliano here. And I'm talking to you, while standing just across the street from a house that when I was a kid in the 1980s, scared me to freaking death. It is here in Simi Valley, California, just about an hour's drive north of where I live in L.A. And if you didn't know anything about it, it definitely wouldn't seem scary at all. It was built in 1979, and it looks like it. It's two stories, kind of beige, stucco, shingled roof. It's kind of big and blocky looking. Pretty much the same as every other house in this very unassuming suburban track neighborhood. I'm standing in. There's a guy a few feet away from me, you know, cleaning his car this morning. But that's exactly what was so freaky about it when it played the starring role in a movie I could not stop watching when it came out in the summer of 1982. The house looks just like the one next to it. And the one next to that. Back then, I was living in an unassuming suburb on the East Coast, in a smaller but equally plain mid-century house. So even though I was an easily frightened kid, one thing I knew I didn't have to worry about was that my house was haunted. Because like that could only happen in super old houses, where people died a long time ago, surrounded by like gas lamps. Right? Poltergeist was a kind of haunted house movie that had never seen before. One where the house, looked like mine. Poltergeist, it knows what scares you. That was fascinated and also totally terrified. And it's still kind of terrifying looking at it right now. But years actually decades later, on the other side of the world, a very different kind of kid watched that same movie and had a very different reaction. Her name was Anna Bogotskaya and she's grown up to become an amazing UK-based critic, author, film programmer and podcaster. She hosts the horror movie podcast, The Final Girls. Her new book, Feeding the Monster is all about horror culture. She's an expert on all things terrifying, is what I'm saying. And is she about to learn in just a few seconds? Unlike me, she ain't a friend of no poltergeist. In fact, when all of us at Moobie looked at the calendar and we saw Halloween was coming up, she is the first person we thought of to guest host our new season all about creepy homes like the one right across the street from me. You will be in frighteningly good hands with her. I will be back as usual in November to host our next season. Meanwhile, take it away, Anna. And now I'm going to get the hell out of here because frankly, it feels like this house is looking at me. Thanks Rico, it's an honor and people as far back as I can remember, I want it to be haunted. I know I'd go from rags to returns. Ever since I saw my first horror movie, H9, which if you're wondering, was Wes Craven's 1924 Dream Horror Nightmare on Amstereet, I wanted to know if there were ghosts and where it could meet them. But like Rico, I figured that the only houses that got haunted according to the movies were ancestral old homes. Not new apartment complexes in the Olympic Village in Barcelona. That's where I lived. That is until poltergeist. In which a sweet little suburban house, newly built, paint still fresh, got invested with nasty meddling ghosts, the poorer out of the bedroom TV and a duck little carolan frilling, sending her family into frenzy, trying to find a way to bring her back from the ghost I mentioned. I had a small box TV in my room and at night much like carolan, I would often tune into static, trying to make our premium cable channels through the fuzz. Unfortunately, no ghost ever emerged from that television. But that's the TV that I first watched poltergeist on. The movie that took away the safety net of suburbia, it made it so that every house was at risk of being haunted. Including mine. A girl can dream, right? Welcome back to the movie podcast. Movies to streaming service at Champions Great Cinema and on the show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Today, we'll launch season 6, we're calling it haunted homes. And for the next five episodes leading up to Halloween, I'm going to tell you the stories behind some of the most terrifying and impactful haunted house movies ever made. In the last couple of years between the pandemic, the housing crisis, the loneliness of the pandemic, the economic collapse, the other economic collapse, the rising rents, impossible mortgages and just the general state of the planet, our relationship with our homes and our houses has completely fractured. And in times of crisis, we, well, may at least, turn to horror. And there's nothing more terrifying than being scared of your own home. It has to do with the fact that the house of course is a shelter from the outside world, but invariably horror emerges from within. So it may be a shelter, but it also becomes a container for the horror that's inside ourselves and we tend to project ourselves on our environments. That's Vincenzo Natali, writer and director of such horrors as cube and splice. And it was also in his own words. "Colored guy's expert." Vincenzo is one of a bunch of folks I talk to, including Poltergeistar, Joe Beth Williams, about the making and the meaning of a movie that changed the whole haunted house genre and spoke to the changing state of mind of America in the 1980s. It was very exciting for young couples and young families to be able to afford a shiny new, spanky new home. And that's why I think one of the reasons it's so shocking, because you think, "Okay, these spirits can't have lived here that long because this house isn't very old." Oh, but they could live there. So Lock your bedroom closet, trim the tree branches outside your window and cover up any clown dolls that you might have lying around. In this episode, we invite ourselves over to Poltergeist's house. Horror and houses have always been intertwined even before the movies. In fact, horror is a genre comes from Gothic novels, which were named after an architectural style. So the first Gothic novel, so named because it took place in a Gothic building with a castle or tramto by Horse Walpole, which was written in the 18th century. And the haunted house movies have been around as long as cinema itself. One of the first horror films ever made was sort of a haunted house movie. The House of the Devil, circa 1896, was made by film pioneers George Milliers, considered by some more of a trick film that a horror film with others calling it a vampire film, because there's a bad that turns into a guy. Regardless of that, the most important part for me is that it takes place in an ancient, dusty building. And with that, it firmly established what a haunted house is supposed to look like in a movie. Even now, when I ask my guess, what do you think of when you think of a haunted house? The answer was nearly universal. This day, I think it still conjures a Victorian house or an older house. Yeah, I probably think of an old Victorian house at the end of the street at night, and there's a storm brewing behind it and probably a flash of lightning. That made my my classic. And it looks like everything inside from the outside, you can tell everything inside would be covered with a thin layer of dust and cobwebs. Well, when I think of a haunted house, I think of haunted house movies. There was an outlier, Joe Bat. I think of Walter Geiss, because I lived through basically feeling haunted for three months. But it actually took filmmakers a long time to populate the humble, decidedly not Gothic American suburbs with ghosts. Maybe because they were the last place anyone thought of as scary. That is, until the imaginations of two suburban nights who grew up in the 50s joined forces and made a film that changed haunted house movies. It's a movie about tightening your stomach muscles and keeping them there for two hours. You know, until something gives you the movie or stomach. That is Steven Spielberg from from an interview in 1982.
talking about poltergeist, which he co-wrote and produced. Spielberg grew up in the suburbs, and they formed his imagination. Just sort of based the lifestyle and lifestyle, I'm familiar with growing up in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, in tracked homes, with cul-de-sacs and two cargarages, and this suburban lifestyle breeds a certain kind of individual. A child of divorce himself, suburbia, with its promise of safety, coupled with the darkness lurking underneath the white-pick and fence lifestyle, is what Spielberg knew best, and it informed a lot of his work. Starting with his 1977 alien passion project, closing counters of the third kind, that's the film in which a small suburban community becomes obsessed with the unidentified flying objects that suddenly appear in the skies of Indiana. He was a hit, and landed Spielberg his first best director on scotomination. But Steven had a problem. The studio that released closing counters wanted to sequel immediately. That seems like a good problem to have, right? Well Spielberg's issue was that he'd been burned by the sequel to his first blockbuster jaws. He had no approval or input on them, and he wanted to avoid the same happening to closing counters. So Spielberg was keen to be involved. For quality control. He started working on a dark companion piece to that film. Jumping off from the UFO research he'd already done, he came up with a story about a malevolent little alien that tormented a family and invaded their home. It was to be cold, night skies. We will witness the arrival, the search, the desertion, the idea, marinated, it developed, the malevolent alien turned into a nice one, a lost little creature trying to get home. That, of course, would become the script written by Melissa Matheson who gave it a new title. Steven Spielberg's ET, the Extra to Restraile. In Columbia Pictures, passed on it. Because it was too quote, "wimpy." Spielberg moved the project to a different studio, Universal, but ET and Poltageist were birthed from the same germ of an idea. The core of night skies stuck with him, the concept of malevolent forces terrorizing as a bourbon family. The idea morphed, the aliens became ghosts. Spielberg pitched it to another studio MGM who quickly snapped it up, which created another problem for Steven. He couldn't direct both movies. Enter Toby Hooper. Of course, if you're Steven Spielberg and you're about to make a great haunted house movie, and here comes the director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is made with such cinematic boldness and know-how and it works so well, why would you not hire Toby Hooper? That's the voice of Megaris, a doyan of horror film, screenwriter, producer, director, podcaster and close personal friend of Hooper. They met actually on the set of Poltageist. Make was the movie's publicist, and it was there that they quickly bonded. On first glance, Hooper wouldn't seem like an obvious partner to Spielberg. In 1974, he had launched himself onto the scene of American independent filmmaking with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a violent, verite-style slasher that channeled the rage that young generations felt about the Vietnam War. He also made the hotel horror eatin' alive, and the circus theme slasher the funhouse, while spectacle and childhood wonder are the key ingredients of a Steven Spielberg movie. Insanity is certainly one of the hallmarks of a Toby Hooper film. The idea that, "Oh my God, are you gonna go there?" or not even having an idea of where there is. The marker is so far beyond what your imagination can take you to. But characters, in both of the Texas Chainsaw movies, are so out of control nuts and entertaining and you buy them as actual characters. There's a fearlessness and a relentlessness, but also a really dark sense of humor. And there's politics in there as well that may be pretty well hidden, but there's social commentary all over the Toby Hooper movies. And if you're a good spulunker, you can excavate some really good political messages from what he had to say. Hooper likes Spielberg was also a child of divorce. Like Spielberg, he was a lifelong movie obsessive. His mother supposedly went into labor in a cinema. And like Spielberg, he too, spent his childhood in a suburb. In his case, outside of Austin, Texas. Bottom line, it makes sense that Spielberg gave him a call. The timeline here gets confusing, but Hooper said that Spielberg pitched him the dark aliens' equal to close encounters, but he wasn't interested in aliens. This thing was ghosts. Hooper had been interested in the paranormal for years since his father died when he was just a teenager. He told Fengori, magazine in 1982 that he had been working out of what had been Robert Wise's office in the Universal Studios. Wise had famously directed the haunting. One of the most influential haunted house movies ever made. The only thing that Wise left behind the net office was a book on poltergeists. Hooper was fascinated by the technical challenge of ghosts, how to get the audience to feel the poltergeist's presence. And so I spent a lot of time going to say answers. They yielded nothing. It wasn't quite close enough to give you like, what am I, what am I seeing? He worked for a while on his own ghost story with his mentor William Friedkin. This is the director of the exorcist. No biggie. But who could resist and offer from Steven Spielberg to work in a big budget studio movie that just happened to align with what you wanted to do anyway? And so, poltergeist had its director. What it needed next was a family for the ghosts to terrorize. The first person they cast was Joe Beth Williams. Joe Beth was mostly a theater actress at this point. She'd done a soap opera to make money because theater doesn't pay very much. And a few movies, Kramer versus Kramer, where she played Dustin Hoffman's new girlfriend. And the rich are prior to the scene while the capers were crazy. She'd never had a leading role until poltergeist. Originally he had wanted Shirley McLean for that part and she turned it down and she later told me, years later told me she turned it down because she didn't feel comfortable being involved in anything where paranormal involved children. Joe Beth had her own misgivings when she got the script. Frankly, I had never been a fan of horror movies. So when I was offered the movie, I said, "Oh, I don't, I'm an actor so I don't want to do a horror movie." And my agent said, "Well, it's produced by Steven Spielberg." And I said, "Okay then, send me the script. I think this could be interesting." And it was, Joe Beth would be cast to play the matriarch of the film, Diane Freeling. "Oh, shit, Twitty, couldn't you have waited for school day?" She's a homemaker and a mother to three kids, a teenager who disappears from most of the movie due to being a teenager and not because she's abducted by ghosts. A young boy who's terrorized by the enormous creepy clown doll he keeps in his room at all times for reasons and little Carol Anne, who is actually abducted by ghosts. Diane's husband, Steve, played by Craig Tinellson, is a successful real estate broker, as his boss Neurotar is a reminding him. "I'm just not a developer." "You're responsible for 42% of sales. That's almost half of everything down there, almost $70 million worth of dwelling in properties." He sells houses, likes football and Ronald Reagan, apparently. When their children are kidnapped by ghosts, they are distraught, but they stick together. Their house might be haunted, but they sure aren't. They are a picture perfect nuclear family. If they bigger and tease each other, it's always in a fun, loving way. "We would all like to have Craig Tinellson and Joe Beth Williams as our parents." "Can you see me? Can you see mommy?" In fact, it was a family angle of the film that appealed to its star, Joe Beth Williams. What took me by surprise was how much I liked the script and how drawn into the family itself.
I felt the dialogue with the family and the family story and the sense of having a child that's gone missing really appealed to me and I felt emotionally connected to it. "Can you find me? Can you find a way home to it?" "I can find you, I can't." JoBef's character, Diane, is the beating heart of the movie. Diane, who is at first, excited about the idea of paranormal activity in the house playful even. "Okay, now just look. Just watch." She is positively giddy when she shows her husband how the poltergeist moves chairs around the kitchen, the chairs and her kid. It's worth underlining how important the feelings are to the enduring success of poltergeist. They were a fictional family you wanted to root for. They weren't troubled or haunted, neither literally or metaphorically. "You know, often haunted houses in particular surround the concept of troubled people, or some kind of emotional disturbance. So it doesn't follow that usual pattern that haunted houses tend to have. And Stephen and Diane, the father and mother of the Freelings family, are ex hippies. I mean, they're smoking dope in their bedroom, famously while reading Ronald Reagan's biography or something." That's an incidentally, it's my favorite moment of the entire movie. It happens before all of the supernatural shenanigans start kicking off after Stephen and Diane have put the kids to bed and are having some time to themselves. The chemistry between Craig T. Nelson and Joe Beth Williams is so charming, warm, effortless, and mostly improvised. I remember Craig coming up with that great bit where he's standing looking in the mirror and he's poking his stomach in and out and in and out. And you know, this was not scripted, this was Craig. "You're diving, Dave. We're talking about life, it's time. Okay?" "Let me hear it talk." "We can jackknife into the swan, twist, turn, and experience." "I think we felt that these were very hip people who were parents young and had smoked hot in college and that's what allowed me to go with the idea when Diane is in the kitchen and Carol Ann is sliding across the kitchen floor. It's what allowed me to go, wow, this is so cool, it's so amazing. So I was able to roll with it because we were young and groovy and there were the cool parents." "We were cool, exactly the cool parents." The joking around with the ghosts stops after the kidnapped Diane's youngest daughter, Caroline. Mediums and clairvoyance come to their house trying to pinpoint who or what is haunting the fralings. But in the end, it's Diane who goes into a literal hell mouth to get Caroline back. "Caroline, listen to me. Do not go into the light. Don't worry you are. Turn away from it. Don't even look at it." I loved the idea that she would go into hell to bring her child back. I wasn't a mother at that time, but I wanted to be a mother and so it called to a certain part of me that thought, "Yeah, that's what mothers do. They undergo any kind of horrible situation in order to take care of their children." So I was very drawn to her and frankly identified with her in the way I sort of hoped I would be when I became a mother. "What are you doing? I'm counting and I'm counting!" "I'm counting you! Let me go! You're not the captain of our living room you!" A family that even ghosts can't tear apart is the divorce kids fantasy. But there's more to boulder guys than just the Norman Rock will like all American family. "Actually consciously or unconsciously, boulder guys is kind of about that. Like it's actually tracking what's going on in America culturally and socially at that time." When we return in a minute, boulder guys drips up the foundations of suburbia itself. Movie is the global film company that champions great cinema bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters, movies from any country, from legendary tours to brilliant first-timers. We've always got something new for you to discover. And regular movie podcast host, Rico Gogliano. Oh hi, didn't see you there. "Hi, I've joined you here in this special. Let's just tell everybody it's a giant cathedral and there's like a glitter ball. Why not?" "It's absolutely not just a Google meme." You're doing great by the way. Thanks for a guest hosting. So anyway, what is up in the movie multiverse this week? This week I'm heading to the theaters I'm going to see the new movie, The Substance. This is a movie released directed by Corley Farja, one best screenplay at Cannes this year, starring Demi Moore as an aging film star who decides to take a medicine that will create a younger version of herself and then all body horror hell breaks loose. I'm assuming that this is on your radar being the hard way in that you are. If you think that there's a Demi Moore starring film that I'm not aware of, you have not met me or know me at all, she used to be her favorite actor growing up and she's phenomenal in The Substance. Yeah, I'm glad you saw it. She absolutely kills it. Margaret Quali plays the younger her. She is also amazing and this movie is so off the chain in saying there's nothing like I think singing in a theater is essential. It really is. By the way, but actually one other thing I'm psyched about this week is you have a piece in our online magazine notebook. Yes, I do introduce saying this entire series that we've been doing. It's all about haunted house movies and how they've changed over the recent years. As always, you'll find all the links you need and that we've referenced in the show notes for this episode, speaking of which, back to it. See you. [Music] Walter guys starts with a black screen and then a fuzzy shot of a static TV as the station signs off for the night with America's national anthem. The movie opens with the Star Spangled Banner and it ends with a TV being pushed out of a hotel room like it starts with the dual American icons of the Star Spangled Banner and television. It's a Boomer horror film. That's by design because Walter guys is as much about the fake promises of 80 suburban America as it is about an ectoplasm infestation. But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, god blessed and teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace. That's Ronald Reagan, former actor and former president in his infamous 1989 speech defining his vision of America. For decades by that point, his shining city on the hill largely took the shape of suburbia. After World War II, there was a real problem with overpopulation in the cities and suburbs started developing rapidly, responding to a huge demand from returning veterans. Large numbers of cheap identical houses popped up quickly. Melvin and Reynolds sang about them in 1962. By the early 1980s, the suburbs were the place to be. The decades started off with a recession. Cities were seen as derelict corrupt places. The suburbs represented the American ideals of homo-norship, safety and complete autonomy. Even poltergeist credits take place over a montage of a suburb on the construction, with model houses still up for sale. The Freelings completely buy into it. In fact, Steve Freelings' job is selling it. Well, you know, actually, we were the first family to set up housekeeping in the Quest of Iridesate. They're pioneers with a commission. Yeah, it has that, but I think in a couple of months you're not going to be able to distinguish phase one from phase three to phase two. Families like the Freelings could move to the suburbs and own their own little part of the land. It's the suburban fantasy, and more space is clean, it's safe to me. Some are seem like a nightmare. I never, ever want to live in that place. But for those people, it was an opportunity and kind of a dream come true. And as they are kind of on
the upside of the curve, things are great and they're looking up and you know social justice, what's that? You know we have a saying around here, the grass grows greener on every side. Yeah, that's why I feel that. I can't tell when it helps from the dust. Made out of tiki-taki and they all look just good. But the suburbs were not all new kitchens in sunshine. And now if anyone in the world have a problem, they're like this. The developments that were popping up all around America and the government effort to provide housing were mostly aimed at white families. The discriminatory practices of redlining made sure that Ceberby remain mostly white, while African-American families and other people of color remain concentrated in urban spaces. The suburbs were idyllic for some. But there was a growing sense that something was wrong with this picture. Actually, if you look at both Poltergeist and ET, it's like Ceberby is under construction. Oh, hi Rico, nice of you to drop by. That's of course Rico Gulliano, host of the movie podcast. It hasn't taken over the entire landscape. It's starting to spread further than it has ever before. But I think in Poltergeist, it's also kind of like, yeah, right outside where your neighborhood is, there could be like a giant graveyard or just like an empty expanse of wilderness and forces that are unknown, maybe beyond it. And in Poltergeist, there are literally dead bodies buried underneath the tiki-taki houses. The Freelings have fully bought into the American Dream. They're fully selling it to others. But they're ignorant of the fact that those pretty little houses are built on death. The entire development is built on a cemetery, which isn't on the brochure, not exactly. No, but I never heard anything about it though. It's not the sort of thing when it goes around advertising on a billboard or on the side of a bus. Because the real villains in this film are not the ghosts. It's the real estate company that is building these tracktoms on top of graves that they haven't moved. That they haven't told anyone about. They haven't told anyone that they've built this entire thing on a graveyard. And the guy literally says who runs the real estate company, he literally says. And even as all of this is going on, this being older, ripping off faces, ghost kidnapping, and creepy clowns stacking children, the big real estate boss is still planning to build more houses. The expansion never stops. And it's in this moment that the Freelings dad realizes that. They kind of acquired their wealth in a ill-gotten way, even if they weren't aware of it at the time. And so it's saying a lot about not just that generation, but about America. The Freelings success literally turns against them. The TV swallows their daughter. The tree attacks their son. And the swimming pool they're building overflows with mud and rotting corpses. Your TV set is a threat. The swimming pool is a threat. And all the nice things that you enjoy in your home become malevolent. And the film is really great at that. I mean, you basically have a gateway into hell. In the closet. It's not the Freelings that are being haunted. It's the whole of suburbia, the whole idea of success. And in a way, the whole of America. Poltergeist was a new kind of horror film. Not only did it move the action to the suburbs, the very image of safety, but it also substituted atmosphere for spectacle. Usually haunted house films rely on atmosphere. Like it's all about what you don't see, you know, like the innocence or the haunting. Being the two sort of prime examples of great haunted house movies. It's what's implied that it's frightening rather than what is seen. But in Poltergeist, you see everything. And more, like it's one amazing visual or mechanical effect after another. And like the movie itself, making it was both a dream and a nightmare. I mean, it was probably the most exhausting shoot I've done in my career. A lot of things were demanded of Joe Beth Williams in particular. Take the single line in the script. Diane's feet lose her footing in the mud and she falls into the shallow end of the unfinished swimming pool. Sliding all the way down the wet mud to the puddle and the deep end. The muddy swimming pool became much more than that one line in the script seemed to indicate. They turned this pool into this muddy hole that was supposed to be our swimming pool that we were digging behind our house. And they filled it with mud that was made from peat, which was hideous. And it began to smell like I don't think I even need to say it. They had huge 16 foot fans all around the pool to blow the wind all around. And I was terrified that these giant electrical fans were going to fall into the swimming pool while I was in there and I'd be electrocuted. So Steven Spielberg said, "Look, I will come into the pool with you when we start shooting and I guarantee you will be safe." And he put on waders, these giant fishermen's waders and he waded into the swimming pool and stood there on the edge while I was in the middle of the pool with these skeletons that they were popping up around me. Which I thought, of course, were prop skeletons. And about five years later I learned from the prop man that they were not in fact prop skeletons. They were real skeletons that had been bought because they were much cheaper than making the individual skeletons. And there was the weak long stint on the gimbal set, a purpose built, fully rotating replica of the parents bedroom that was built to shoot Diane being thrashed around by ghosts. Which was again like a ferris wheel. So I literally, for 50 takes, got dragged around this set. And the poor camera operator had to, he was bolted to the set. So I was kind of staying in place and the set was dragging underneath me. But Dennis, I think, was his name. He had to go round and round at one point he had to get off and throw up poor thing. And of course, all the screaming. Oftentimes screaming is nothing in particular. Steven Spielberg would hold up a stick, a big pole and he'd say, "Okay, so look up to the tip of the pole and scream." And Craig and I would look at each other and one of us would say, "What exactly are we screaming at?" And they'd say, "Well, we don't know exactly, but it's going to be very scary." And scary it was. Poltergeist took horror seriously. Even though at that time, movie studios didn't. The studios were very snobbish about the genre audience and they ignored them. They did not give them the information they wanted. They didn't give them access to doing interviews and the like. It makes job to change that, connecting the movie with the horror community. To have the director of JAWS producing this new ghost story movie with the director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it reached both the mainstream and the independent side of fandom. They interconnected at times and overlapped, but never more than in this movie. So it was a very easy sell. The results were spectacular. Craig and I had a joke between us that it would wind up being like a sea movie that would show only in drive-in theaters. We weren't seeing daily, so we had no idea how the movie looked. I mean, we felt okay about what we were doing, but I was actually shocked that it was as big a hit as it was. Not just big, it was huge. Poltergeist came out on June 4, 1982 and ET hit cinemas just a few weeks later on June 11. The so-called Summer Spielberg overtook everything. For an entire summer, you couldn't get away from him. It was the barbed-higher of its time. That summer solidified Steven Spielberg as the movie maker of his generation. He was on talk shows. He was in the cover of Time magazine. He was in 60 minutes. Spielberg became the poster boy for filmmaking itself. I don't remember there being a lot of coverage of the directors in mainstream American media. It was all about the stars. Between Poltergeist and ET.
that summer was transformative for the movies. - It was the beginning of the summer that brought us road warrior and the thing and Blade Runner and Tron and of course, D.T. and many others. So it was a very exciting time. And I also think, although I wasn't aware of it, that that was a moment where culture was transitioning. Movies in particular because coming out of the 1970s, which was a great era of course, as a 13-year-old kid, those films didn't excite me. They excited, the films that were made in the 1970s excited me as I got older. But in the 1980s, it was great if you were a young person. - What a time to be a teenager and love with cinema. - I remember walking out with my friend, thrilled and amazed by what I had seen and probably not fully appreciating what I had seen. Not really, like, thinking of it as fun and great, not really understanding that, well, this is something that I would be talking about well over 40 years later. It sounds lovely and simple, a huge success for everyone involved. First even Spielberg, for Toby Hoober, Joe Beth Williams, who got the big chill off the back of her work in Poltergeist and Cretty Nelson, who became the lead in the long-running sitcom Coach because of the film. Even Columbia Pictures, the studio who had originally passed on the germ of the idea that would become ET, one sort of, they retained a percentage of the profits and made it killing despite not releasing the movie. Top marks for everyone. However, even during production, a room has started burying that has continued to plague Poltergeist for over 40 years. And it's not about ghosts, it's about credit. - There was a camera assistant who said, "Nana, Steven Spielberg directed the movie." And he was very actively involved and very visible on set. - Because Spielberg was not only the co-writer of the script, he was a very involved producer. But this was not an uncommon thing for Spielberg to do in other sets too, like on the set of used cars, sorry, Kurt Russell, which Robert Zamekis directed and Spielberg produced. - The same thing happened and Steven was very involved in suggesting shots and the like. And Kurt Russell said, "Look, I can take direction from one person. I don't care if it's Bob Zamekis or you, Steven, but I can only do it from one." And Steven backed off and said, "You're right, you're right, you're right." There was nobody to do that on Toby's set except himself. - The rumors around directing credit have tainted Poltergeist for 40 years now. And at the time, they sparked an investigation by the DGA, the director's Guild of America. - I myself would see Steven on the dolly and working out, we can push into a two shot here and Toby watch and be agreeable to it. So there were certainly times where Steven's influence was strong, but Toby's was also equally strong. He was an innovator, but when rumors catch fire, they really can spread. And this was one of those that was too delicious for people not to devour. (gentle music) - If you ask me, it's much more interesting to look at it as a pure collaboration between two singular filmmakers. Both Spielberg and Hooper brought their unique sensibility. Spielberg, the spectacle and sentimentality, and with Hooper, the visual audacity and political undertones. - The appearance, the look of it, the photographic qualities of it, very much show Spielberg's influence, but there is a viciousness to it and a willingness to go there and an explicitness to it that is almost unheard of in a PG-13 movie, the coffins in the rainstorm coming up out of the swimming pool, the ripping the face apart fantasy. By the way, those are Steven Spielberg's hands ripping the face apart. - No way. - Yeah. Those are Steven's hands ripping it apart. - Amazing. - But there is a sense of anything goes here. When you watch Texas Chainsaw, you think anything can happen and Jesus Christ, it does. In this, it needed to have that sense of tension running throughout that Toby provided to the movie. It's one thing to set up a shot. It's another thing to conceive of the hills and valleys of tension and release that make a really great horror movie. And that, that's Toby Hooper right there. There are plenty of naysayers and Reddit threads out there about who really directed "Polta Guys." I say there would be no "Polta Guys" without either of them and without "Polta Guys," the horror and the haunted house movie would not be the same. We can see the influence of "Polta Guys" everywhere in the huge exorcism spectacle of the conjuring films, where a married, demonologist couple helps families possessed by miscellaneous spirits, as well as in the insidious franchise from the same filmmakers, which take its medium and her assistance directly from "Polta Guys." Even the kids film imaginary was hugely inspired by the 1982 film "In How It Captures Childlike Fear," and you can even see the influence in the ectoplasm of ghostbusters, which came out only two years after "Polta Guys," before then, the ghosts were never gooey. But more than anything before "Polta Guys," ghosts mostly belong to the realm of the Gothic. What Toby Hooper and Steven Spielberg did was bring them into your living room through the TV, through the crack and the closet door. Your childhood home would never be the same, would never be safe again. (upbeat music) And that's the "Maybe Podcast This Week." Follow us to hear more stories about houses and how they haunt us at the movies. Next week, we'll explore how haunting can be a mystery in Guillermo little tourist, a devil's backbone, solve it and the ghosts will leave you alone. - There are things to be frightened of, which are fantastical, monsters, ghosts, powers beyond our realm. But there are also things to be frightened of, which are perfectly ordinary. And that's quite often adults. - Follow us so you don't miss it. Until then, this episode of the movie podcast was hosted and written by me, Anna Bugutskaya. Kier or McKennaf as our producer, Christian Coons, as our editor, our original music was composed by Martin Auswig, additional music by the band, "People with Bodies." Things this week to mate to high. And if you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen. Let 'em know we're not your standard movie podcast. And if you've got questions, comments, or just wanna tell us about how your house is haunted, I'd love to hear it, really. email us at
[email protected]. This show was executive produced by Rico Galiano, John Baranacia, F.A. Checker-L, Daniel Casman, and Michael Taka. And of course, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the films we mentioned in this very podcast, subscribe
[email protected]. Thanks for listening. Stay haunted.
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