An initially anomalous project by Spielberg which later became a success
In 1982, the fame of director Tobe Hooper (who passed away in 2017) was mostly linked to his first two films, both nihilistically extreme and cult: the epochal “Don’t open that door” (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974), full stop of origin (and of no return) of the horror saga about the anthropophagous family of the terrible Leatherface armed with a power saw, and the perhaps less celebrated but equally disturbing “That motel by the swamp” (Death Trap / Eaten Alive, 1977). Two examples aimed with extraordinary ferocity at representing the dark side of contemporary America, sick, violent and still traumatized by Vietnam, but also two “political” reconnaissance and in their way subversive in the very status of genre cinema of the time. Two works also subtended by a hidden and perverse irony, and explicitly inheritors in their stylized and bloody forms of a very distant tradition: that of the most bizarre examples of fantastic pre-war visionary, but also of the harshest Hitchcockian drifts (“Psyco”) or of the provocations of the pioneer of the “splatter” Herschell Gordon Lewis. 1982, however, was the year in which Hooper, who had hitherto moved in the sphere of exceptionally cheap productions, made a leap (ephemeral and “impermanent”) into the high-budget Hollywood mainstream.
After “The Horror Tunnel” (The Funhouse, 1981), another less fortunate horror but even more marked in its spectacular measure by a semi-serious approach to the subject, Steven Spielberg (simultaneously engaged in the realization of the masterpiece “ET the extra-terrestrial”) in fact hires him to direct “Poltergeist – Demoniache presenze”, an initially personal project although in some ways anomalous and partially unrelated to his poetics (the director had written the subject and the screenplay, then developed with Mark Victor and Michael Grais) which he renounces for lack of time (or courage) to direct. It is the story of the spouses Steve and Diane Freeling (Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams), who have just moved with their three children to a house in the Californian town of Cuesta Verde, who see their very peaceful bourgeois existence upset by a series of supernatural manifestations announced by the little Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) plunged into a kind of trance in front of the TV. Initially, the bizarre phenomena don’t seem to bother the family too much; but after son Robbie (Oliver Robins) is violently attacked by a garden tree that comes alive with a life of its own and Carol Anne mysteriously disappears sucked into another dimension, things get complicated. The paterfamilias thus decides to ask for help from a team of investigators of parapsychology and the powers of the medium Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein): discovering not only that there is an afterlife where the souls of the dead still unaware of their own death wander in pain, but also that in this limit-zone resides a parasitic demonic entity that has found fertile ground in the child’s psyche. And while Tangina tries to allow Diane with her as a conduit to penetrate that dimension to save the baby, Steve makes another macabre discovery: the construction company he is also a part of has built his new mansion on a cemetery. , of which for economic reasons he only moved the tombstones but not the buried corpses.
It premiered in the United States on May 21, 1982 and then released in theaters two weeks later (we were instead distributed in September), “Poltergeist – Demoniache presenze” has become over time a small classic of the genre and a source of countless citations or even of learning crypto-remakes or tout court remakes (such as the demeaning “Poltergeist”, 2015, by Gil Kenan); and much of its charm is based precisely on the strange and euphoric hybridization between the fantastic “Spielberghian” aesthetic that innervates above all the first part and the advancement of gloom (also “gore”) into which the second one sinks, literally, albeit distant for storytelling times and visionary ignitions from the wild and iconoclastic nature of Hooper, clearly unable to replicate his style “on a big scale” and ultimately relegated to (however iconic) yes man. Compelling and tight, initially distracted and threateningly “fairytale” (as in the sequence of the tree, introduced by a disturbing puppet-clown; or the one in which the at first apparently harmless sprites send toys, compasses and vinyl records flying around the room), progressively gives way to more disturbing forms (such as the famous hallucinatory scene “of the sink” in which the face of one of the technicians of the team unravels in a pulp of blood) and then throws itself into the epilogue (when the decomposed or skeletonized corpses of the “Inhabitants” without peace of the land on which the villa was built emerge from the mud) in a saraband that made the film risk a ban on minors by the censorship commission of the then powerful MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). If her narrative scheme, also profoundly Spielbergian, inevitably hides familist echoes (it is only thanks to the love and comfort of the family, rather than the intervention of the medium, that Carol Anne can escape the manipulation of the demon), some notations metaphorical, however, are unusual for the director and more similar (even ideologically) to Hooper’s sensibility: such as the idea of letting “Evil” pass through the television screen (a crystalline intuition, which does not require any comment) or the underlying (more inconvenient) that American well-being and prosperity were literally “built” on death.
Despite having fatally lost some charm both on the narrative level and on the purely technical one (revised today, all the special effects are very aged), “Poltergeist – Demonic presences” (the title referred to the German term with which the “spirits noisy “, that is, those phenomena hypothesized as mediumistic related to the” paranormal “movement of objects accompanied by noises or the unmotivated switching on of electrical equipment) remains a small classic of the Eighties around which sadly sad legends from” cursed films “have also unfortunately arisen. after the untimely death of several members of the artistic and technical cast. It became one of the highest grossing of the season, as well as one of the highest box office results ever for a horror movie; nevertheless, it did not affect too much either on Spielberg’s career (who never returned to the “pure” genre, not even as a producer) nor on that of the shy and problematic Hooper. Not only, in fact, the director was not called back to the set on the occasion of the making of his inevitable sequels (“Poltergeist II – The other dimension”, 1986, by Brian Gibson; “Poltergeist III”, 1988, by Gary Sherman), but continued his inexorably waning career with three films for the legendary Cannon by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus: first crashing into the phantasmagoric high-budget flop of “Space Vampires” (1985), then trying to amend the disaster with a tiny remake of the William Cameron Menzies’ classic B-Movie “The Space Invaders” (“Invaders”, 1986); and then gloriously returning to its roots with the misunderstood and flamboyant “Don’t Open That Door – Part 2” (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, 1986). But the latter was the extraordinary final example of his never sufficiently probed potential, then definitively crushed by clumsy, very poor and unpresentable productions that never put his figure back on the shields.
May 19, 2022 (change May 19, 2022 | 07:49)
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