If They're Here, I'm Gone!

Poltergeist, a film that instilled in my generation a deep fear of clowns and carnivorous trees, can essentially be broken down into three distinct movements. In the film’s largely expository first movement, we are introduced to a handsome, likeable family living in a cookie-cutter suburb somewhere in California: architect Dad, spunky housewife Mom, pretty Big Sister Dana, dorky Big Brother Robbie and, finally, little Carol Ann, the most adorable “creepy kid” in all American cinema. After Carol Ann’s parakeet dies, things get spooky: spoons and forks bend by themselves, unseen forces stack kitchen chairs into a pyramid, and Carol Ann, beckoned by Casper-like spirits to a blurry television set in the middle of the night, turns to us forebodingly and announces, “They’re heeere.”

Thus begins the second movement, in which Big Brother is nearly eaten alive by a tree and Carol Ann is kidnapped. We’re scared, sure, but when Mom and Dad enlist the help of a team of paranormal researchers to find Carol Ann, we suspect a happy ending lies around the corner. And we’re right: the spirits return Carol Ann to her mother, the music swells, Mom and Dad cry with joy, the paranormal researchers cry with joy, we cry with joy. All good in the world is restored! What a nice, heart-warming movie!

Not so fast.

When I was little, HBO played this movie ad nauseum. I’m serious. Saturday morning, Thursday afternoon, Monday night—it didn’t matter. HBO, it seemed, was enslaved to Poltergeist. Whenever I stood before the cable box surfing through the channels, Poltergeist was playing. And for whatever reason, it was never the cutesy first movement or the tense, triumphant second movement I caught: it was always the sinister, scared-the-living-hell-of-me third movement. You know what stuff I’m talking about. Toy clowns coming to life. Some dragon-canine-ghost thing keeping anybody from entering the children’s bedroom. Skeletons slithering in mud pits. Houses crumpling like kicked-in tents and disappearing into thin air. And lots and lots of screaming.

One afternoon, a girl in my neighborhood was having a birthday party. I arrived at her house to find a bunch of kids congregated in her living room. “Guess what movie my parents are letting us watch?” Emily asked excitedly.

“What?”

“Poltergeist!”

“Ahhhhh!”

I recall nothing else of that little party, so chances are, I ran back to my house on the next block and cowered in my bedroom, a room perfectly television-less. “You’re not allowed to watch that movie,” my mother once told me in a tone that implied I’d be punished if I did.

If my mother or father uttered the name of the movie, even to tell me I was forbidden to watch it, my body filled with dread and panic. It got so bad that my parents eventually cancelled HBO altogether (how I missed Fraggle Rock!) and took down a clown painting that hanged on the wall over my bed.

Years later, when I was a teenager, I watched the movie in its entirety. By this time, I’d heard all about the so-called “Poltergeist Curse.” Apparently, during filming, odd, seemingly-supernatural occurrences disrupted the set. Dominique Dunne, the actress who portrayed Carol Ann’s big sister, was murdered by an ex-boyfriend shortly after filming wrapped. And of course, Heather O’Rourke, the girl who played Carol Ann, died during the making of Poltergeist III.

As an adult viewer, I’ve learned to appreciate the film as more than just a horror flick. (I should mention, too, that a very wild drinking game can ensue if you take a shot every time one of the characters yells, “Carol Ann!”) If I do get choked up, it’s because the movie makes me so ridiculously nostalgic for my childhood. I see Robbie’s Rubix Cube and think about my own, how solving it made me feel as though I’d climbed Mount Everest. I get nostalgic for the clown painting. Life was certainly easier, back then. All a kid worried about was lightning. And carnivorous trees. And clowns.

And when I hear Jerry Goldsmith’s beautiful score, my eyes sometimes glaze. The music makes me think less of Poltergeist and more of Heather O’Rourke herself. If she were alive today, would she still be acting? Would she have earned an Oscar by now? Would she have put acting on the back burner and decided to devote her life to something scholarly, like mathematics or literature? At any rate, if she were alive today, she would be in her early thirties.
I’m thirty.