[9.3/10] *Poltergeist* breaks so many rules for the sorts of films I like. It relies more on traditional familial archetypes than thoroughly-developed characters. It opts for the big and brash rather than the subtle and subdued for most of its runtime. It’s more apt to go with screeches or speeches than to commit to naturalistic dialogue. Its emotions come in four colors; its approach is forceful, and it plays things loud and proud throughout.

But damnit, I loved it. There is something elemental about *Poltergeist*. The film has a surface simplicity -- of hauntings and a family in crisis -- that makes it more approachable, more accessible, in its horror in suburbia setup. That’s not to say there isn’t complexity to what *Poltergeist* is doing. Beneath the scares and big emotions, there’s baked in commentary on the state of the nuclear family circa 1982, metaphors for motherhood and fatherhood that are viscerally felt, and even some manifest subtext.

Yet what the film does best is draw you into these scenes of standard if droning domestic felicitude and then startle you, frighten you, and hearten you as it all comes crashing down and needs unlikely souls to come to the rescue. At base, the premise of the film’s story -- a daughter is kidnapped by ghosts -- is almost laughable. But amid the heightened emotions of parents desperate to save their child, investigators shocked to see the paranormal manifest, and allies standing firm against the unspeakable, it compels the viewer to invest in the people, passions, and parlor tricks the film puts on display.

And what parlor tricks! There’s a danger of effects-heavy movies not aging well, particularly in the 30-40 years ago range where the effects aren’t advanced enough to seem modern but not rudimentary enough to seem charming. But *Poltergeist* comes out as scary and impressive as ever. Sure, there’s some rudimentary CGI, fake-looking skeletons, and obvious rubber masks here and there. But on the whole, the practical and other effects are as striking today as they were when the film was released.

That’s because director Tobe Hooper (rumored to have an assist from producer Steven Spielberg) is as inclined to use tension, well-framed shots, and judicious editing to maximize the impact of whatever spooks and spectacle his team creates. There is a living tree that reaches in and snatches one of the children, a fright bolstered by the desperation and fraughtness of his parents’ attempts to rescue him. There is a run down a long, rouge-lit hallway that seems to expand into forever that underscores the way the laws of nature no longer have purchase in this home. And even when the effects are chintzier, just the suggestion of faces falling off with chunks spilling into the sink, of spectres slipping through the stream, of a pulsating maw threatening to suck your loved ones into another realm, is enough to carry the day with implication.

It helps that *Poltergeist* is a fantastically-shot film. Almost every frame of the movie is blocked and staged for maximum impact. Hooper arranges his actors at different depths of frame, making the house feel tighter, the spaces more dramatic, from the visuals alone. He uses light and shadow to give the doorway to another place a perfectly otherworldly feel, and to heighten the drama of moments put into relief by its blinding flash. And the film is rife with reaction shots, human moments of response to inhuman developments that drive home the feeling of what happens as well as any special effect can.

That’s one of the most interesting things about *Poltergeist* -- there is barely any exposition. The parapsychologist gives a little detail, but she and her team mainly affirm that something abnormal is happening and their aghast reactions say more than her words. The medium who comes to help gives the film’s clearest statement about what’s occurring, but speaks in poetry and heightened rhetoric more than she lays out details for the audience. And the Freeling patriarch excoriates his boss for not moving the bodies in the cemetery the house was built on for anyone in the cheap seats, but it’s a small detail as the house is combating and collapsing on its owners.

Instead, *Poltergeist* resists the urge to have anyone explain who these characters are, how they got here, or the raw specifics of what’s going on. It’s content to show rather than tell, letting the disconnected but familiar family interactions; the shaken, disquieted, or frantic reactions to Carol Anne’s disappearance, and the sense of relief and exhaustion once it's all over clue the audience in to what’s important about the story, beyond the bare facts and figures.

That’s helped along by composer Jerry Goldsmith’s tremendous score. Given its essentialist approach, the film leans on the score a great deal to heighten scenes and scaffold the emotional impact of its big moments. Whether it’s the foreboding hum that tells you something bad is about to happen, the bursts of sound that kick the horror into overdrive, or the dramatic swells that underscore the love and catharsis among those fighting the film’s good fight, Goldsmith’s music is an absolutely essential ingredient to what makes the film work.

All of these features combine to tell a story that is more visceral than spelled out, very big but also very human, and suffused with enough comedy to let you exhale and enough horror to keep you frightened for one desperate family and their baptism-by-fire compatriots. It is a quietly feminist film, foregrounding four distinct female characters, and orbiting around notions of motherhood as it sets up its thefts and recoveries. It is also a message suggesting a certain staidness and bankruptcy in suburban life, reinforced by the electric hum of the television and its palliative glow that seems the key to the malevolent powers beyond infecting an otherwise safe home and loving family.

But at base, it is just a damn compelling story, buoyed by creative effect after creative effect, founded on cinematography that grabs ahold of the viewer and never lets go, and built around characters and reactions that are grand and dramatic, while perfectly calibrated to the tone and touch of the film. Even thirty-five years later, *Poltergeist* is terrifying, tense, bold, and cathartic, and sets a high water mark for filmic tales of the supernatural disturbing, but also reaffirming, the heart of domestic life.