POLTERGEIST

This should come as absolutely no surprise, and it’s entirely possible I’ve mentioned this many times before, but I was a huge scaredy cat of a kid. Absolute biggest coward going. I was scared of the dark. I was scared of wolverines for some reason, like actual wolverines, not the X-Man. I was scared of satanic cults. And after seeing Poltergeist at a sleepover when I was a kid I was terrified of even the idea of horror movies.
 
At the sleepover, I remember the options for movies to watch were Poltergeist, which was on the TV and all the other kids wanted to watch, and a movie called Monkey Trouble about a girl and her monkey who is a pickpocket. I campaigned hard for Monkey Trouble “I don’t know, guys, this monkey looks like he’s up to something, maybe we should watch and find out.” But I was overruled and my little imagination was not prepared for what at the time I thought was the scariest thing anybody had ever put on film.

It’s hard to talk about Poltergeist without talking about the ‘curse’ – which is that cast members from this film and its sequels died in tragic ways – but I don’t really want to because obviously curses aren’t real, and all this ‘curse talk’ does is trivialize the sad deaths of real people. We can however talk about the use of ‘real skeletons’ in the movie. 
 
There’s a scene in the movie where the Mum falls into a half built swimming pool that’s been filled with rainwater and skeletons start popping up out of the water. Anyway, people were like “THEY USED REAL SKELETONS” in the movie. The prop guy from the film was all “yeah, we did, they were from a medical and science supply company that sold human skeletons for use in medical schools because it was cheaper than making rubber skeletons”. I think people thought maybe Steven Spielberg dug up some graves himself to use in the film.

Where would I fit into all of the ‘house gone nuts’ mayhem of Poltergeist? This is about a regular normal suburban family in a regular normal suburban home that just happens to have been built on a former cemetery. Well, let’s throw ten-year-old me back into the mix and make him face his fears. I wouldn’t be a member of this family, but I could be a kid in the neighbourhood. Let’s put me next door and see what happens.

IF I WERE IN 'POLTERGEIST' I WOULD: NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. WELL, THAT’S NOT TRUE. I’D SLEEP FINE A WEEK LATER BUT THEN THREE DAYS AFTER THAT WOULD HEAR A DOG OUTSIDE AND BE CONVINCED IT WAS A WOLVERINE AND THEN NOT SLEEP FOR ANOTHER WEEK. AND THEN SLEEP FINE. AND THEN SEE AN EPISODE OF ‘UNSOLVED MYSTERIES’ ABOUT SATANIC CULTS AND NOT SLEEP FOR ANOTHER WEEK. AND THEN BE FINE AGAIN FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS UNTIL…