Poltergeist at 40: Spielberg’s haunted house hit brought horror home
Jun 04, 2022
3 minutes
In the summer of 1982, Steven Spielberg released two movies in consecutive weeks, Poltergeist and ET the Extra Terrestrial, that now seem like mirror images of each other. Both are about suburban enclaves visited by supernatural phenomena – one a haunting, the other a close encounter of the third kind – and both are ultimately storybook affirmations of the American family, which is made stronger through crisis. The California suburbs were a playground for Spielberg, who grew up in them, and these films were like new subdivisions in his personal colonization of Hollywood.
The nature of Spielberg’s
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