People in movies often refer to movies.  And why, not?  They are a big part of our lives.  However, when it comes to remakes, it is necessary that the characters in those movies be unaware of the original.  For example, in the remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the characters exist in a world much like our own with one notable exception:  it is a world in which the original movie does not exist.  Of course, the 1978 version alluded to the original when Kevin McCarthy was seen running down the street screaming, “You’re next!”  But that was just an inside joke with the audience.  No one in the movie said, “Isn’t that the actor who was in that body snatcher movie?”

Remakes aside, the characters in a horror movie are usually unaware of horror movies in general. The very title I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) tells us that this is a late entry into the genre.  And yet, it appears that no one in this movie has ever seen a werewolf movie.  When law enforcement officers are perplexed about the nature of a recent murder, Pepe the janitor (Vladimir Sokoloff), having looked at a photograph of the murder victim and crossed himself in terror, says he knows what killed the boy.  He tells Officer Stanley (Guy Williams) that the boy was killed by a werewolf.  Speaking with an East European accent, Pepe tells of a how in the Old Country, when he was a little boy living in a village in the Carpathian Mountains, there was a story, passed down from generation to generation, of men who became like wolves when the evil eye was upon them.  Stanley acts as though he has never heard of such a thing, and Pepe has to explain to him what a werewolf is.  In real life, Stanley would have said, “Oh yeah, there was a wolf man in that Abbott and Costello movie I saw last week at the Bijou.”

In defense of this decision to make characters in a horror movie seem to exist in a world where no one has ever seen a horror movie, the reason is that it would be like breaking the fourth wall, which interferes with our ability to suspend disbelief.  Had Officer Stanley alluded to having seen a werewolf movie, it would have reminded the audience that what they were watching was also just a movie, which would undermine the movie’s ability create an atmosphere of terror and suspense.  When this happens, the movie tends to also be a comedy.

I can’t say that An American Werewolf in London (1981) is the first movie in which people have an awareness of werewolf movies, but it is the first one to do so in a big way.  Two American college students, David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) are hiking through England.  They stop at an inn called the Slaughtered Lamb, and one of them comments on the pentangle on the wall, saying, “Lon Chaney Jr. at Universal Studios said that’s the mark of the wolf man.”  After they leave, they are attacked by a werewolf.  Jack is killed, but David is only wounded.  Jack comes back from the dead to tell David that all that stuff about werewolves is true, and that David has become one himself.  It is interesting that though these two characters are Americans, yet the setting is in England, much in the way that the Lon Chaney character, Lawrence Talbot, in the movie referred to above, The Wolf Man (1941), returns from America to his ancestral home in Wales, and it is there that he first learns about werewolves.  In other words, in the Old World, they know about werewolves from legends they are told from the time they are young; here in the New World, we know about werewolves from the movies.  Unless we are in a movie, and then we might be oblivious.

In Fright Night (1985), teenager Charley Brewster suspects that his new next-door neighbor, Jerry Dandridge, is a vampire.  That would be scary enough, but the real dread is oedipal.  Vampires in the movies always seem to have sexual implications, and Charley’s mother, who is divorced, is attracted to Dandridge.  It is not uncommon for a teenage boy to be disturbed by the prospect of his mother having sex with another man, especially an attractive mother who tells her son in the middle of the night about a dream she had:  “I was at this white sale and suddenly realized I was stark naked.”

Now, you may be thinking I’m going overboard with this Freudian interpretation.  And indeed, if such a thing happened in real life, a mother telling her son about a dream she had in which she didn’t have any clothes on, it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything.  But writer and director Tom Holland, who also was the writer for Psycho II (1983) and Child’s Play (1988), a couple of other movies about a boy and his strange relationship with his mother, deliberately wrote that line into this movie.  He could have had Charley’s mother tell her son any one of a hundred other dreams, but Tolland, with malice aforeplay, decided to have her tell her son about a dream that encourages him to imagine her naked.

Anyway, Charley consults his friend, Evil Ed, who knows a lot about vampires from watching movies on the eponymous late show.  One item on Evil Ed’s list of vampire traits is that a vampire cannot enter your house unless invited in.  Wouldn’t you know it, no sooner does Charley get back home than he finds Dandridge in his house, having been invited in by his mother, who seems to find Dandridge quite charming.  In Freudian terms, the house represents her vagina, which Dandridge has entered after having been invited to come inside.

But while Charley is apprehensive about his mother’s fondness for the vampire next door, Dandridge is smitten by Charley’s girlfriend Amy, who reminds of his lost love.  Charley’s unconscious desire to keep his mother to himself is recapitulated openly by his jealousy over the fact Amy also desires Dandridge, even to the point of having sex with him, something she never did with Charley. Of course, that was actually Charley’s fault.  Just as Amy was taking off her clothes so that they could finally have sex for the first time, Charley lost interest in her when he looked through the bedroom window and saw that a vampire was moving in next door.  Dandridge’s sexual relationship with the two women in Charley’s life, merely suggested in one case, fully consummated in the other, establishes a psychological identity between Charley’s mother and Amy.

As informative as Evil Ed has been, Charley turns to Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowell), former actor in vampire movies and host of Fright Night, which features vampire movies.  He also claims to be a vampire killer.  He is a Van Helsing character, except that in the old movies, Van Helsing’s knowledge about vampires came from books, but now such knowledge comes from the movies.  Vincent helps Charley kill Dandridge, allowing Charley to regain possession of both his mother and Amy.

The next stage in the evolution of movie awareness in horror films came with There’s Nothing Out There (1991).  The movie begins in a video store in which Sally, a teenage girl that works behind the counter, is all alone.  There is a television in the store featuring a movie in which a girl is apparently being chased by a mad slasher, since the store seems to feature almost nothing but movies of mad slashers chasing pretty girls.  Someone enters the store and begins chasing Sally.  It turns out that she is dreaming, having fallen asleep at the wheel, and the car crashes in the woods.

Presumably, she does work in such a store, which has led her to have a dream in which she is threatened by a mad slasher, just like all those movies she is surrounded by every day.  This scene makes us aware of the interaction between art and life, between dreams and reality, something that has always existed, but by this time has become intensified by the invention of the videotape recorder.

By coincidence, a large space frog has fallen from the sky and lands right near her car.  It further damages the car trying to get to her so that, as we later find out, it can mate with her; for it is a given in such movies that teenage girls are the most sexually desirable creatures in the universe.

Meanwhile, seven teenagers decide to spend spring break in a house in the woods, owned by the parents of one of the teens.  As they pass by Sally’s deserted and demolished car, surrounded by a police car and an ambulance, Mike says it’s a shame that this has spoiled their plans, but they must turn around and go back home.  The others in the car think he has just been spooked by the scene itself, but Mike points out that it is suffused with meaning that he has gleaned from renting every horror video that has ever been made.  The scene with Sally’s car, he avers, is what is technically known as the warning stage.  It is worth noting that the other six teenagers are couples, and that Mike is the only guy without a girl.  This is significant for two reasons:  first, only a nerd who can’t get a date would have the time to see all those horror films; second, virgins stand a better chance of surviving a horror film than their sexually active companions.  Anyway, they ignore his foolishness and press on, with Mike saying, “There’s mistake number one.”

When they arrive at the house, Mike enunciates some rules needed to stay alive, such as not wandering off by yourself in the woods and not going skinny dipping.  Later, another group of teenagers arrive.  They appear to be low class and scroungy, all doped up on marijuana, and they go skinny dipping in the pond.  Turns out they thought they had arrived at the “camp by the lake,” undoubtedly an allusion to Camp Crystal Lake of Friday the 13th (1980).  They leave when they realize their mistake.  Mike declares that this is a foreshadowing, saying, “Those kids were born to be murder victims and just paid us a visit.”  As for Mike’s friends, one couple does go skinny dipping, and another couple does wander off into the woods, all destined to become victims of the space frog.

At first, Mike uses his horror-movie knowledge to thwart the alien, but he eventually comes to suspect that he and his friends are actually in a movie.

In the end, Mike comes up with the idea of using mirrors to confuse the space frog, allowing him and two remaining companions to trap the frog in the oven.  And thus it is that by reflecting on horror movies, Mike kills the frog through reflections in the mirrors.

The ideas in this film reached their apotheosis in Scream (1996).  The movie begins with a scene in which Casey (Drew Barrymore) is home alone at night in a fully-lit house that almost seems to have more windows than walls.  She receives an ominous phone call, and instead of hanging up immediately, she keeps talking to the caller.  This is typical of women in movies who receive such phone calls, where they say things like, “Why do you keep calling me while I’m naked?”

But instead of the creep on the phone asking her what color her panties are or whatever, this guy asks her trivia questions about horror movies.  And this is just the beginning of such allusions.  As audiences of Psycho (1960) were said to be shocked by the fact that a major star like Janet Leigh was killed off early in the movie, so too is Drew Barrymore’s character Casey likewise killed off earlier than one might expect for a star of her standing.

Casey and her boyfriend are killed by a character that eventually came to be referred to as Ghostface, who is both scary and funny.  When thwarted in his attempts to stab someone, he takes what might be called variations on pratfalls.  And yet we are brought back from these scenes of mirth to horror when he succeeds in plunging his knife into one of his victims.

Though seemingly a minor character, the most essential person in this film is Randy, a teenager that works in a video store and is an expert on horror films.  He is like a combination of Sally and Mike in There’s Nothing Out There, except more so.  He enunciates the basic rules for surviving a horror film:  don’t have sex; don’t drink or do drugs; and never say, “I’ll be right back.”  But even he fails to take advantage of his own expertise in such matters, as when he is is drunk, watching a horror film, presumably Halloween (1978), yelling at Jamie Lee Curtis to “Look behind you!” while he fails to look behind himself, where he would have seen Ghostface standing behind him, holding a knife.  Nevertheless, his expertise in this area allows him to correctly identify one of the two killers early in the movie, and he further acts as a guide through the movie by drawing inferences from horror films to the situations the teenagers find themselves in.  In the sequel to this movie, he draws inferences from sequels, and in the third film he draws inferences from trilogies.

But Randy is not the only one doing this.  The two killers, who take turns dressing up as Ghostface, are also guided by their study of horror films.  One of them says that they even took notes while watching them.  And just as Mike in There’s Nothing Out There wonders if he and his friends are actually in a horror movie, one of the killers in Scream tells his girlfriend Sidney, protagonist and ultimate target of Ghostface, that life is a movie, “Only you can’t pick your genre.”

Going one step further, the sequel to Scream includes as a plot point a movie called Stab, which is based on what happened in the movie Scream, and it has sequels paralleling the sequels to Scream.  So, not only are the characters in these movies aware of the horror movies that came before, but they also live in a world where there are movies based on what happens in this movie, not external to it, like Scary Movie (2000), but within the movie itself.

I suppose it is possible to go even further with this principle of people in horror movies referring to horror movies, shaping their behavior according to what they have seen in horror movies, and even believing they are in a horror movie.  But the question is whether it is possible to do better than Scream with this idea.  I don’t think so.

It is set in Derry, Maine in the late 1980s.  Ben, a chubby kid who has recently moved there, says, “Derry is not like any town I’ve ever been in before.”  Well, that’s for sure.  In Derry, the bullies-to-victim ratio is so high that bullies have to stand in line to get their turn at tormenting their victims.  Said victims belong to a group known as The Losers Club.  Ben quickly gets to join, for it is clear that he is Loser material, especially when the chief bully, Henry, carves his initial into Ben’s belly.

Another new member of the group is Beverly, who was introduced to us sitting on the toilet while mean girls poured filthy water on her for being a slut.  At least, that’s the rumor.  What those girls don’t know is that Beverly could not have been having sex with half the boys in town, because her father has been molesting her for years, and he is too possessively jealous to allow her to have anything to do with boys.

And she is not the exception.  You see, in the town of Derry, after the Losers spend the day being bullied by all the kids in school, they get to go home and be bullied by their parents.  Actually, even the bullies get bullied by their parents in Derry, Maine, as when Henry’s father ridicules and humiliates him in front of his friends.  But it’s not just parents.  All the adults bully the children in this town, because it takes a village.  For example, when we first meet Ben, he is in the library reading about the history of Derry.  The librarian belittles him for spending time there reading books.  “Don’t you have any friends?” she asks derisively.

In other words, Derry is a nightmare town, a place where children are continually tormented by those around them.  So, Ben was exactly right when he said that Derry is not like any town he had ever been in before.

Oh wait!  I almost forgot.  Ben wasn’t talking about all that.  He was talking about the way people, especially children, disappear at a rate of six times the national average, and it is especially concentrated in recurring periods of twenty-seven years.  As he and the other Losers soon find out, the culprit is Pennywise, the Dancing Clown.  You see, it’s not enough that they have to live in a town where the natural torments of bullying and child abuse are unrelenting.  They get a bunch of supernatural horrors piled on top of that.

Well, there’s a lot of running around and being scared by special effects, especially when the Losers finally decide they have to do something about Pennywise.  They figure out that he is in this old house enclosing a well.  At one point, Pennywise gets hold of Beverly and puts her in a trance, at which point she begins to float slowly upward.  Her friends realize that all the other children that have gone missing over the years are floating above her.  They pull Beverly down, but she is still in a trance.  Then Ben kisses Sleeping Beauty, and she wakes up.

You see, Ben has had a crush on Beverly for a long time, and he gave her a postcard with a love poem on it.  Beverly was deeply moved.  And so Ben and Beverly fall in love, right?  Wrong!  How could you possibly think that little chubby kid would get the girl?  Obviously, it is Bill, who is slender and a little taller, that Beverly wants.  In fact, she was disappointed to find out that the poem was not sent to her by Bill, but rather by Ben instead.  And so, poor Ben is bullied not only by Henry and his gang, and not only by the librarian, but also by the people that made this movie, who deliberately added to his torment by making him a loser when it comes to love on account of his looks.

We don’t get much by way of explanation as to the how or why of the supernatural in this movie.  There is some suggestion that Pennywise feeds on fear.  Well, no wonder he thrives in Derry!  Other than that, we never really find out what’s going on.  I admit that I have never read the book on which this movie is based, nor have I seen the miniseries based on this book.  Maybe there is an explanation somewhere in all that, but you won’t find it in this movie as a stand-alone story.  At the very end of the movie, the words “Chapter One” threaten us with a sequel, so maybe everything will be explained in that movie, but I doubt it.  In any event, I’ll never know, because I certainly won’t be watching it.

After Pennywise is dispatched, presumably because the Losers are not afraid of him, though they damn well should be, the floating children start to descend.  What does that mean?  Are they going to be brought back to life?  Are they going to be able to go back home so they can be bullied by their parents?  Are they going be able to go back to school so they can be bullied by their classmates?  Are the bullies that went missing going to be able to return and start making other children miserable again?  The missing children may not be left hanging in the air, but we are.

One more thing.  Beverly finally got tired of being her father’s sex slave, so she killed him by hitting him on the head with a toilet lid, leaving his body in the bathroom.  There is no hint of an investigation of this homicide.  I’m not saying this movie was obliged to present us with a big trial like the one in Peyton Place (1957), but without there being even a reference to what happens when you leave a skull-crushed father lying around, such as Beverly saying she’s glad that the grand jury believed her story, that too is left hanging in the air.  She just tells Bill she is leaving town to go live with her aunt.  Then they kiss.  Too bad for you, Ben.

Let us step back for a minute and examine the theme of this movie, which is fear.  Fear is a useful emotion, causing us to avoid danger or to flee from it.  But it is the dangers of this world that cause our fears, not the other way around, as this movie seems to suggest, which is that it is our fears that cause the danger, and that if we could just get rid of our fears, the dangers would go away.  There is such a thing as being unduly afraid of something, as in the case of phobias or superstition.  But Pennywise aside, the dangers in this movie are real.  They are not the imagined fears of a neurotic.

Now, it is certainly true that we sometimes have to overcome our fears in order to eliminate the danger, as when Beverly splits her father’s skull by whacking him with the lid of a toilet.  But it was not her fear of her father that caused him to molest her.  Or consider Ben’s situation with the gang of bullies.  Are we to believe that if he had not been afraid of them, his troubles would have been over, that they would not have held him while Henry carved his initial in his belly?  This movie conflates the perfectly reasonable notion that we sometimes have to stop being afraid of our enemies in order to defeat them with the nonsensical notion that our enemies exist because of our fears and that they will be eliminated by the mere absence of that emotion.

When it comes to atmosphere and creepiness, It Follows does such a good job that one can only be dismayed by the inclusion of a couple of unnecessary absurdities.

Jay is a young woman in college who has sex with a guy named Hugh.  Then he chloroforms her, takes her to a remote location, and ties her up to a wheelchair.  Eventually, a slow-moving, zombie-like ghost appears, heading in their direction.  Hugh explains to Jay that this ghost will follow her unrelentingly until it catches her and kills her.  She must avoid it until she has sex with someone else, thereby passing the curse on to him.  The only people that can see this ghost are those who are presently being pursued, like Jay, and those who have been pursued by it in the past, like Hugh.

Needless to say, it is an act of evil to pass this curse on intentionally, so at first one wonders why he didn’t just have sex with Jay and then leave her to her doom.  The reason, as Hugh explains, is that once it kills Jay, it will then go back to the previously cursed person and follow him.  So, Hugh wants Jay to know what is happening so that she will avoid being caught by this ghost long enough to pass the curse on to someone else.  In other words, he wants Jay to stay alive and pass it on for his own selfish reasons, not out of any concern for her.

The first absurdity in all this is the whole chloroform-and-tied-to-the-wheel-chair bit.  Hugh could have had sex with Jay and then explained what he had done to her while waiting for the ghost to show up without bothering to drive somewhere else. Since the ghost was already on its way to him anyway, there would not have been much of a wait.  Furthermore, he must have known that Jay was sure to tell the police after being abducted, whereas if he had simply told her the story and let her see the ghost, the police would have ignored her had she repeated it to them.  There would have been less risk for him that way.

Those unnecessary melodramatics aside, the next absurdity is Hugh’s encyclopedic knowledge on the subject.  In the novel Dracula and in many vampire movies based on it, there is a Van Helsing character, a learned professor who, among his many accomplishments, happens to be an authority on vampires.  He explains all the rules, the ones involving crosses, mirrors, sunlight, and wooden stakes.  So informed, the characters in the movie and we in the audience know what needs to be done.  The question is, how did Hugh become the Van Helsing to this ghost that follows people around?  How does he know all the rules?  In particular, how does he know that if Jay dies, the ghost will start pursuing him around again?  Later, Hugh, whose real name turns out to be Jeff, says he caught the curse from some woman he picked up in a bar whose name he didn’t even know.  So, how did he know that sex with her was the cause of his troubles?  Did she chloroform him and tie him to a wheelchair too, perhaps bequeathing those items to him, saying, “Here, you can have these things now, I won’t be needing them anymore”?  And for that matter, why didn’t Hugh/Jeff pass these items on to Jay?  After all, when she gets through passing the curse on to some hapless fellow who just thought it was his lucky night, won’t she need to chloroform him and tie him to a wheel chair too?

If the curse is passed on through sex, there must have been a first person who acquired it spontaneously and not through sex, otherwise, we would have an infinite regress.  There is no reason to think this first person would have known the rules, even if he had lived long enough to pass it on, which seems unlikely, since no one would have told him why some slow-moving ghost was walking toward him, especially since no one else could have seen it.

There was no need for the abduction scene, and there was no need for Hugh/Jeff to have Van Helsing-like knowledge, only what he had acquired from personal experience, which need not have been much.

Nosferatu has the most horrible looking vampire of any movie ever made. It is hard to believe that when they made Dracula in 1931, they just picked Bela Lugosi and let it go at that. The connection between the Black Death and vampires, which antedates this movie, is emphasized. It suggests either that vampires were a supernatural explanation for the plague or that deaths from vampires were dismissed as being the result of disease. This combines ominously with the movie’s suggestion that there is a connection between the vampires’ need for blood and sexual desire, in which case vampirism might be a metaphor for syphilis. Count Orlok (Max Schreck) gets very excited when he sees a picture of Ellen (Greta Schröder) and speaks of her beautiful neck. The fact that she is a “sinless maiden” makes her especially erotic, so much so that she is able to keep Orlok drinking from her neck when he knows he should be getting back to his coffin where he will be safe during the day.  As a result, he gets caught by the rising sun and is destroyed.

A point of trivia: this vampire casts a reflection in the mirror, unlike in Dracula, for we see his reflection while he is drinking Ellen’s blood.

In Repulsion, a movie written and directed by Roman Polanski, Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a woman with some kind of psychological problem concerning sex. She lives with her sister, whose sexual relations with her lover disturb Carol. Carol is very much upset that her sister is going on a two-week vacation. During that vacation, Carol descends into madness. A man who has been harassing her and stalking her breaks into her apartment because he just had to see her. She bludgeons him to death. Then the landlord stops by to get the rent and decides to rape her as long as he is there. She slices him up with a razor and he bleeds to death. Then her sister returns to find the corpses and a catatonic Carol. In the very last scene, we see a photograph, previously alluded to from a distance, of her family taken years ago. In it, we see everyone smiling and looking at the camera, except for a pre-adolescent Carol, who is looking with dread at a man to her left, presumably her father. In real life, such a picture would mean nothing, but its emphasis in the movie after what we have seen tells us that she was molested as a child, which further explains why she was so upset that her sister was going away. As a child, she would have been safe from her father as long as her sister was around.

The idea that Polanski, having made this movie illustrating the terrible consequences of child molestation, would then go on to molest a child himself is ghastly. Having made such a movie, he doubtlessly had thought the matter through. For him to molest a thirteen-year-old girl when he believed that such an act could produce consequences like those in this movie is especially disturbing.

There are two mad scientists at Miskatonic University, and that is one too many.  First, there is Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), a member of the faculty, who is motivated by lust, fame, and power. Not unsurprisingly for a man driven by such strong passions, the principal goal of his research is the location of the will in the brain.

The other mad scientist is Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), a medical student. West is dedicated to the truth, and cares nothing about women or fame. The principal goal of his research is reanimation, bringing dead people back to life, for which he has a reagent. Hence, he is the title character in Re-Animator, the movie based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft. West is so cold and devoid of sympathy that he is indifferent to the pain he causes when he reanimates the dead, supposing himself to be doing them a favor.

West is openly contemptuous of Hill, whose intellect he regards as inferior to his own. Hill finds out about West’s reagent and tries to coerce West into letting Hill get credit for it. While Hill’s back is turned, West chops his head off. Then he reanimates the separated head and body, all in the name of scientific research, of course. The body knocks West out while he is examining the head, and then it picks up the head and the bowl it is in, which is filled with the reagent. All this leads to a final struggle between these two mad scientists, with Hill in control of reanimated corpses from the morgue. The movie is replete with hilarious horror and gore, including Hill’s body holding Hill’s severed head so that it can violate the Dean’s daughter, Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton).

It is unfortunate that the director’s cut resulted in many deleted scenes that should have been left in. First of all, these include scenes that make it clear that Hill has mesmeric powers. It is fitting that the man whose research focuses on the location of the will in the brain should have the power to control the will of others. More importantly, it helps us understand why Hill has so much influence over Dean Halsey (Robert Sampson); we understand how he can control his own body with his severed head; and we understand how he can control the corpses he has reanimated in the morgue. Without these scenes of mesmerism, we don’t fully understand how he can do these things.

Second, several of the deleted scenes further develop West’s character. Both in his physical appearance and his manner, he reminds me of Dean Stockwell’s portrayal of Judd in Compulsion. Judd, of course, was that movie’s version of Leopold in the notorious Loeb and Leopold case, in which two psychopathic geniuses decide to commit the perfect crime in order to prove they are Nietzschean supermen. Without seeing the deleted scenes, I might not have made that connection.  It may be that the director, Stuart Gordon, never intended such a connection, but he should have, because it fits perfectly.

Third, there is a great scene where West is discussing with Dan (Bruce Abbott), his roommate, what they are going to do about Dr. Hill. West seems to be bothered in some way, and he lurches to the bathroom. When Dan goes to see what West is doing, he finds him with a syringe of reagent, about to mainline himself. West assures him it is just a weak solution, just enough to keep the brain sharp, so he won’t have to sleep. Dan helps his shoot up, after which West is all pumped up and ready to go.

Gordon said he deleted these scenes because he felt that they slowed down the pacing, and that is a shame. The scenes are included in the second disk of the DVD, and it is worth making the effort to watch them. Not every deleted scene should have been kept in, of course. The dream sequence, in particular, does not belong in the movie, and its deletion was appropriate.

It is still a great movie, but with some of those deleted scenes left in, it would have been greater still.

In producing the movie Poltergeist, Steven Spielberg employed the structure that worked for him in Jaws. In the latter movie, there is an Everyman, Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider), and his family, corresponding to Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams) and her family in the former. The shark is a monstrous creature terrorizing Amity Island just as the demons terrorize the Freeling household. In Jaws, we have the mayor who lets the expected revenue from tourism jeopardize the safety of those who plan to swim in the ocean, while in Poltergeist, Steve Freeling’s boss jeopardizes the safety of the Freeling house and the entire neighborhood in an effort to save money by not moving the bodies of a cemetery before building houses on top of them.

Once the shark proves to be too menacing to ignore, a scientist, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), is called in from the Oceanographic Institute, just as three parapsychologists are called in to investigate the weird happenings in the Freeling house (one gets the feeling they inspired the movie Ghostbusters (1984)). But science alone cannot do the job. Therefore, someone with personal, practical experience is needed. In Jaws, this takes the form of Quint (Robert Shaw), an old salt who has been a sailor all his life and has dealt with sharks many times. In Poltergeist, we have Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), a woman with psychic powers, who knows how the other world operates.

Ultimately, however, it is Everyman Brody who kills the shark, when science and practical experience fail, just as Diane must save her children herself after the parapsychologists and the psychic have failed to completely do the job.

Unfortunately, the final attack by the demons after everyone thinks it is safe is a little too much. It would be like having the shark make one more attack after Brody thought he had finally killed it.