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Uppercut

by Ryan N. Wilcox

Was that you or the TV grabbing my leg? This is the time of year that we tend to watch scary movies. Though I don't run out looking for the next big horror flick, I do have a great respect for those movies that hit on a nerve that causes true fear. Typically, I see many horror movies as a cliché of other horror movies, but there are a handful that really freaked me out growing up. Above all others, the movie that has scared me the most was 1982's Poltergeist. Poltergeist begins with the Freeling family. They have just moved into a new subdivision and think it's the perfect home and community for their three children, Dana, Robbie, and Carol Anne. It doesn't take very long for the family to realize that the house has other things living in it. Otherworldly things. Strange and mildly humorous things start to happen, but quickly escalate to odd and scary. Then it gets to the point where a group of paranormal psychologists, and a psychic have to come in to help out. All that does, of course, is make the ghosts upset, so they really make life a living hell for the Freeling family. They kidnap the youngest daughter, Carol Anne, and hide her in the TV. After that, pretty much everything starts to go wrong. As a ten year old, living in an old historical community with many ghost stories of its own, I was in the perfect place and the perfect age to see Poltergeist. Ready to believe in ghosts and anxious to see what life in a haunted house was like. I had seen several other horror movies by then. I had seen The Shining with my beautiful babysitter, Jaws was enough to make the world fear the shark, and Friday the 13th was only a couple of years old, and after seeing that with my father was told not to see it again on my own. However, these movies lacked one thing that Poltergeist possessed, those items you see in your everyday life. The old gnarled tree in the back yard, the freakishly scary stuffed clown, the monster inside the closet, and TVs were all things that kids my age had surrounding them. Not to mention the new subdivision with the modern appliances also made a community that the rest of us hoped to one day live. As the movie begins to turn sour, we begin to see how these everyday luxuries have now turned against us and become something bad. Another factor that made Poltergeist so frightening is the technology used by the parapsychologists. At the time, this was how people hunted ghosts. This is what was used to record the events that people had experienced in their houses. This was the technology used to communicate with the dead. As producer and writer of this movie, Steven Spielberg is notorious for making his worlds accurately reflect the one we live in. The new suburb was the perfect community in the perfect location, but the contractors got greedy and they didn't want to take the time or expense to move the graves. Instead they just moved the headstones. We see this type of shortcut on a daily basis. As children, we are scared of the creepy stuffed animals or the shadows of the trees in the back yard. Our imaginations run wild with these types of scenarios, but in this one movie, we see these things come true, and it's terrifying. Though the technology has changed a great deal today, this movie still has legs. It was an account of several individual instances as well as combinations of many ghost stories that together make it one awful scary thing after another. It captures the things that are truly scary to young children, and those things are the items we see everyday. Worst of all it involves the television, which was still pushing its way into our living rooms in the early 80's. I've seen this movie many, many times over the years, but I always watch it with someone else because it's a very frightening one for me. As I get older, I remember things that happened in my old house in small town America, and after seeing this movie, made me think maybe I wasn't just imagining things. All I know is that something in this movie gets me every time, and I can do nothing but recommend it to you this time of year.