I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: as a kid who was terrified of the mere idea of watching a horror movie, little on this Earth distressed me more than the horror aisle at our local video store.
Not watching a movie was easy— I spent most of my childhood doing that. But what I couldn’t control was the power of an image once it was inside my brain. All it took was a glance in the wrong direction, a slight pause as a rectangular slice of terror penetrated my peripheral vision and that was it. I was infected.
So it was that my relationship with Poltergeist (1982) began with an image. A small girl surrounded by darkness, her hands placed against a glowing television screen as a discarded teddy bear lay forgotten beside her. Above the image sat two words: “They’re here.”
I hated that cover. Shuddered at the mere thought. Such a cover was the stuff of nightmares, surely, and had a tendency to creep back into my consciousness late at night when I least expected it, just as I was attempting to fall asleep. There was something oddly familiar about it, relatable in a way that was a step or two too close to home. Maybe it was the fact that it was a kid on the cover, or the large console TV that looked like the TV that sat in every middle class American’s living room at the time. Either way, it was dangerous and I wanted no part of it.
Over the years I saw snippets of the film. The type of random clips you used to catch flipping through channels on a lazy day. A creepy clown doll here, a monstrous tree there. The film was present enough in the lexicon to pervade even my own sense of strong disinterest. When I finally came around to horror and watched the movie in my late teens, I was surprised at just how familiar the experience felt. As though I were visiting with an old acquaintance rather than experiencing it for the first time.
Even in the early days of my horror education, it was clear that Poltergeist was a monumental film for a multitude of reasons, primarily because it was told so gracefully through such a personal lens. The film spends a great deal of time and effort populating itself with characters who feel real and lived in, making for a family that is deeply relatable and providing an emotionally resonating backbone to the narrative.
It’s the sort of movie that feels oddly safe and comforting since it so closely resembles the mood of 80’s family films that I knew and loved growing up. Of course, it’s for precisely that reason that when the needle drops and the terror enters in that the film succeeds in being so intensely disturbing. Plus, it’s peppered with some of the best practical and special effects work of its time, adding further to the spectacle which amplifies the story to something that feels much bigger in scope than it might have otherwise.
The film’s ghostly activities are brought to life by way of many cinematic tricks, all of which continue to impress to this day (the scene where all of the chairs miraculously stack themselves atop a kitchen table in the span of one, quick pan springs to mind). Still, when considering the horror and stakes that the effects often suggest, it’s the scene where Marty, one of the paranormal investigators, succumbs to the fear and paranoia of the entity in the house that left a lasting impact on my mind during my initial viewing.
Beginning with the desire for an innocuous midnight snack and concluding with the act of tearing his own face off, the scene is quick, mean and shocking in the context of what had been a fairly careful, reserved climb toward horror. It breaks the mold of expectation given the film’s PG rating and reminds the viewer what the invisible beast who resides in the house is capable of.
From the sturdy roadmap of the script, in large part coming from the mind of Steven Spielberg, to the careful and bloody screen execution shepherded by director Tobe Hooper, the scene is one of the best effects sequences the movie has to offer and a real turning point in the horror it represents. For all of my misconceptions about the genre as a kid, this was the kind of scene I had always assumed was in movies like this and precisely why I stayed the hell away.
It’s a scene that echoes the unnerving tagline which always stared back at me from that VHS cover. After all, in light of watching the skin being torn away from his face, I think Marty needed little convincing otherwise that they were indeed there.
THE SCENE
Marty enters the kitchen. He opens the refrigerator and shuffles around for a snack. He takes a chicken leg and puts it in his mouth before removing a steak and placing it on the counter. He crosses the kitchen and sets a pan on the stove. He pauses due to a strange sound. He shines a flashlight on the counter and watches as the steak moves itself along like a slug. It stops and begins to expand, more meat churning and bursting from its center. He spits out the chicken leg and stares at it on the kitchen floor. It’s covered in maggots. He runs to the utility room, coughing into the sink and splashing water on his face. He turns to the mirror and notices a gash. He pulls at it and proceeds to pull the skin off of his face, exposing muscle sinew and bone beneath. There’s a flash and he’s fine, alone in the bathroom, feeling his face.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
The refrigerator is the perfect target for Tak’s housebreaking skills.
The script is written through a blue-collar lens, describing the scene as the character might describe it, rather than breaking it down practically. This perspective allows for nuance and creativity in the filmmaking as well as a more engaging experience for the reader, further bolstering the everyday relatability which makes the overall story so effective.
Tak takes out a salad bowl and noshes from that, but his chewing is too loud so he opts for a beautiful New York steak wrapped in cellophane.
In the film, Marty, referred to in the script as Tak, enters the kitchen and gravitates toward a box of Ritz crackers on the countertop. He reaches in and eats one somewhat distractedly. The camera tracks with him as he moves to the refrigerator. He opens it and bends down to look inside. He shoves a chicken leg in his mouth as he moves before finally landing on a large steak. He pulls the meat out and sniffs it, putting it down on an adjacent countertop.
The mood in the script and on the screen are in line with one another, boorishly following a guy tooling around in the kitchen late at night for a bite to eat due inconclusively to either boredom or hunger. The shot is uninterrupted for this portion of the scene, following Marty after the counter as he crosses back across the kitchen and places a pan on the stove. It’s not until a foreign, squelching sound interrupts the monotony of his chewing on the chicken leg that Marty turns distracted and the image cuts away.
The protracted entryway into the scene puts the viewer in Marty’s headspace. Sure, what’s happening onscreen isn’t anything special, but it’s small, quiet moments like this which lend credence to the overtly supernatural terrors juxtaposed against it.
The sound he hears is wet and gross, referred to in the script as A CRAWLING GUSHY SOUND that bubbles and softly hisses. In the script, Marty can’t make out what it is that’s making the sound at first, seeing a shape moving along the counter before shining his flashlight over to get a good look. In the film, the image cuts directly to the steak which slowly slithers, slug-like along the countertop, the sound protruding from it as unpleasant and unappetizing as the script suggests.
The screen cuts back and forth from Marty to the steak for a moment, before landing on the flashlight. The light clicks on and the camera pans up to Marty’s face, illuminated as if he’s about to tell a ghost story to some unsuspecting kids at summer camp. At that point the steak stops and, now spotlighted, begins to bubble and curdle in its center. Meat bursts forth from within, reproducing itself and churning outward in a kind of grotesque, low pressure geyser of raw, chopped flesh.
The script describes this under the heading Tak’s POV”, reading, The New York Steak is alive with CANCER! It actually crawls over and over its own rampant cell growth. The imagery coupled with the suggestion of cancer specifically, speaks to a catered attack on the character’s imagination that is not immediately apparent onscreen. If Marty has a potentially deep seated fear of cancer or disease, then the event is far more terrifying than it even appears, as is what follows next.
He starts to gag looking at it and realizes the chicken is still in his mouth.
In the film, Marty spits the chicken out in response to the bubbling steak certainly, but the act feels more mechanical, despite it clearly coming from his feeling of revulsion. Still, he looks down and shines his flashlight atop it, almost in knowing response given what happened to the other piece of meat he had intended on eating.
A thousand maggots crawl away from it into the dark corners of the kitchen.
While the maggots Marty sees onscreen do not range in the hundreds, let alone a thousand, the effect is the same. He gasps and runs into the utility room adjacent to the kitchen. The film excises his scripted retching in favor of some coughing as well as a cut away to his counterpart still surveying the monitors near the stairs. Staying in the moment at this point is one of the key reasons the intensity ratchets up so successfully.
In the script, Marty is said to be checking his complexion in the mirror before SMASH CUT TO: HIS MIRRORED REFLECTION. The reflection staring back at him is a ROTTING CORPSE, hair wild and streaming, his mouth open in a crazy way, teeth hanging by leathery threads, a funeral suit from the neck down. An extension of Marty’s scripted fear of cancer, decay and death, the scene even alters his dress to evoke his own burial.
Onscreen, this evolved into a very different manifestation of death and decay. The light intensifies, altering from soft white to a bright orange and red hue, something suggested at the tail end of the scene by the script, as Marty notices a gash on his cheek and prods at it. Blood leaks out, dripping into the white sink.
The scene continues to cut back and forth from Marty’s face to the sink as he further digs at the gash. At first, the intercutting is spaced out by several seconds, the image holding on Marty for a moment or two. As it progresses however, the cuts come faster and faster, only snippets of his exposed sinew, skull and slightly dangling eye ball emerging from the torn, leathery skin visible at any given time. Every time the sink is shown larger and larger chunks of bloody flesh fall into frame, evoking thoughts of the hideously bubbling steak from just moments before.
All told the 26 second sequence contains 16 different cuts before finally holding on Marty’s bloody, fleshless skull, its jaw agape in utter horror, appearing as a reanimated corpse that feels like it stumbled off of an R-rated Italian Zombie picture. Then, the red light intensifies once more and suddenly normalizes, leaving Marty to stand before the mirror as he was, unscathed. In the words of the script, BACK TO NORMAL.
While perhaps less subtle than originally scripted, this version offers a visceral, mounting terror that leans in to the grotesquery employed. It calls attention to the disturbance in a way that echoes through the remainder of the film and feeds into the potential for danger that every person who enters the Freeling’s house is subject to.
The final frames of the scene find Marty feeling his face uncertainly, looking around the utility room and then back out into the kitchen and the rest of the house. He knows what they who reside in the place are capable of. His fear has been redefined.
It’s another step toward understanding what it is the characters are up against. After all, it’s not all chair stacking and floating toys, there’s something darker and far more sinister at play… and whatever expectations they might’ve had going in, are about to be defied.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“It’s sort of a land Jaws for me,” producer and writer Steven Spielberg said in a 1982 interview for Entertainment Tonight (Found here), referenced in a Poltergeist retrospective David Weiner wrote on his It Came From Blog (Found here). “You know, you can watch Jaws and Poltergeist like this,” Steven Spielberg continued, covering his face with his hands in mock fear, “I think that’s fun, people like to get on a downhill run and stay there.”
From the damning inferences I made given the simple image of a girl with her hand on a fuzzy television screen in the dark to the moment I finally saw Poltergeist, I was taken in by everything the picture had to offer. The relatability, the family element, the everyday nature of it all— each component served to indoctrinate the movie into my subconscious, adding credibility that made the drama more poignant and the horror more palpable.
Still, it’s the moments of grandiose terror that heighten the normality of the characters and the setting, allowing the film to evolve beyond standard 80’s family fare and become a staple of the horror genre. Little represents this better, than the moment when Marty begins to dig into his own skin.
As scripted, the scene stops short a bit, revealing the character in the mirror as a decaying body rather than graphically showcasing the decay by way of grasping hands. When it finally landed on celluloid, under the guidance of Tobe Hooper’s brilliant sensibilities for horror, the scene was something else entirely, brought to life through practical effects and blue-collar ingenuity, from the top of the production to the line level.
“Spielberg was literally hands-on during the scene where Marty rips his own face off,” Gary Sussman wrote in a 2017 retrospective of Poltergeist for Moviefone (Found here). “The effect was accomplished with a model bust of the actor’s head, but he was nervous about handling the only bust the production had, so those are Spielberg’s own hands you see tearing at Marty’s flesh.”
The moment works and feels tangible, much like the normalized setting. The movie taps into small truths of the moments which comprise the average, humdrum day. I think we’ve all reached into the refrigerator in the middle of the night, searching for a snack in the darkness all the while staying aware of what lies in our peripheral. There’s something about the darkness that makes you question even the safety of your own home. It’s not the belief that something is there, it’s the thought that something might be.
There’s a power to that kind of belief. That brand of fear. And when you combine the inviting warmth and wonder of Steven Spielberg with the beautifully disturbing realness of Tobe Hooper, what emerges is not just a great horror film, but a great film.
As a kid, very little got under my skin more than the horror aisle at the video store. Not because of the one’s I had seen, but because of all that I hadn’t. What those mysterious VHS tapes might entail. Thinking back on it now, I wonder how many of those boxes scared me far more than the movies inside ever could.
Still, at that age, I suppose being afraid of what might be in that TV was probably better than seeing a guy rip his own face off. Either way, once I laid eyes on it, the movie, like its villainous entity, was there. Present in my world. And, like all the best movies, always would be… whether I was afraid or not.
Poltergeist (1982): Written by Steven Spielberg & Michael Grais & Mark Victor & Directed by Tobe Hooper
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