1. Poltergeist (1982)
The 1980s saw an explosion of horror and slasher movies, electrifying a genre that is still ongoing today. Credit is often given to John Carpenters Halloween (1979), a movie Roger Ebert called an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary thatI would compare it to Psycho. Numerous franchises took off during this time, including the successful Friday the 13th series and the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. 1982 saw a run of successful horror films, including Halloween III, Friday the 13th 3D, Creepshow, Amityville II: The Possession, Slumber Party Massacre, The Entity, The Beast Within and Visiting Hours. But it was Steven Spielbergs Poltergeist, released in June of that year, which proved to be a huge box office hit and spawned two sequels of its own. But Poltergeist is more of a ghost story movie that a horror film, dealing with the haunting of a home in a California housing development that was built over a cemetery. The souls of the dead are restless spirits, and visit their agitation upon the Freeling family who live there. Poltergeist grossed $75 million and is still chilling today, thanks in part to the spooky performance by Zelda Rubenstein as the dwarfish medium who cleans the house. Its a movie thats seeped in legend for two reasons one being the Poltergeist Curse, which has since become more urban legend than anything, and the other being the controversy over who actually directed the film. One can read all about the details of the curse on the Internet. The curse makes use of a number of coincidences and exaggerations that surrounded the production of the three Poltergeist films. The basic facts that fueled the curse legend are as follows: Actress JoBeth Williams reported that she would return home from the set each day and find the pictures on her wall askew, and would have to straighten them on a daily basis. Actress Dominique Dunne (daughter of author and film producer Dominick Dunne) was murdered in her driveway on October 30, just five months after the movie was released. Actress Heather ORourke, who played Carol Ann, died suddenly at age 12. Many of the human bones that appear in the swimming pool during the films climax were actual human bones, which the filmmakers found were cheaper than plastic ones. Reportedly the cast was unaware that some of the bones were real until after the scenes were shot. The subject of who actually directed the film is more than just urban legend. It caused some controversy at the time, so much so that the Directors Guild launched an investigation (following the publication of a TIME magazine article about the film) which publicly came to nothing, although rumors of a sealed settlement persist to this day. While Steven Spielberg both wrote and produced the Steven Spielberg Production, Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) is credited with directing the film. Poltergeist is stylistically Spielberg: its camera placement, the way the camera moves through a scene, the nuanced performances by children in the filmall hallmarks of a Spielberg-directed feature. Yet Spielberg did place a full page ad in Variety giving credit for the films direction to Hooper. There are, however, a number of points to consider: Spielberg was responsible for storyboarding the entire film. Spielberg was on set every day, and cast and crewmembers report that he would tweak the camera setups once Hooper was done with them. Spielberg supervised the editing of the film and the score by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith has said that in his experience he has worked closely with film directors in fashioning music for films, but that with Poltergeist he dealt exclusively with Spielberg, who was the producer. Much of Poltergeist and E.T. The Extraterrestrial were produced simultaneously. (They were released within a week of one another.) Spielbergs contract with Universal prevented him from directing a film for another studio until his contract was fulfilled with E.T. Crew members have come forward and said that Hooper did little on set but call Action, though this is perhaps an exaggeration. So despite screen credit, who actually directed Poltergeist? Watch the film for yourself. The answer seems fairly obvious.