“About my fear”: the movie Steven Spielberg called his personal nightmare
For all the success that Steven Spielberg has achieved throughout his trailblazing career, he has also had to battle through some truly challenging productions to get there. Sometimes, it has to do with technical issues like the ones that plagued the infamous production process of Jaws, but that’s not always the case since the subject matter can be difficult as well.
The latter was what Spielberg experienced when he tried to translate his childhood fears into a horror movie, deciding to pour the visceral nature of those memories into the Tobe Hooper-directed 1982 work Poltergeist. While Hooper was listed as the sole director, Spielberg played a major role in the actualisation of the project as the story’s creator and co-writer.
Initially planned as a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist has a straightforward plot for a horror flick, following the trials and tribulations of a suburban family who are tormented by evil entities. However, it meant a lot more for Spielberg, who was trying to extract the essence of what his childhood had been like.
While discussing it with Rolling Stone, Spielberg said: “E.T. is my personal resurrection, and Poltergeist is my personal nightmare. A lot of things in both movies really came from my growing up. Poltergeist is about my fear — of a clown doll, of a closet, of what was under my bed, of the tree in New Jersey that I felt moved whenever there was a windstorm and scared me with its long, twiggy fingers. But Poltergeist is just a suburban ghost story. It’s meant to be a thrill a second, with humor. The most important thing that I wanted to do with this movie was portray a simple, suburban American family that has a sense of humour about life and about science.”
The filmmaker added: “My favourite part of the movie is from the beginning until they get the kid back. My least favourite is the last 15 minutes. It was fun; I really didn’t take it that seriously. After most movies, you can return to the safety of your house. For this movie, I would have liked to steal the ad line from Jaws II: ‘Just when you thought it was safe to go home… Poltergeist.'”
Spielberg’s emotional proximity to the subject is why he even reached out to Stephen King to write Poltergeist with him, but unfortunately, that never panned out. Instead, we have a collaboration between Spielberg and Hooper that’s interesting in a lot of ways, not only because of the creative decisions but also the behind-the-scenes drama.
When it was released, many insisted that Spielberg should have received a co-directing credit because of how hands-on he was with Poltergeist, reinforced by some comments the Jaws director himself made. Eventually, both parties admitted that Hooper deserved the directing credit on his own, while Spielberg’s enthusiastic involvement can only be explained by the screenplay’s personal significance for him.
