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At the center of both E. T. and Poltergeist is the suburban family, as normal and American as Pop-Tarts. In Poltergeist, Dad (Craig T. Nelson), late 30s, sells tract houses, reads biographies of Ronald Reagan and furrows his brow to watch his hairline recede. Mom (Jobeth Williams), early 30s, keeps house, sings TV beer jingles and tucks in her son under a Star Wars bedspread. If this seems the derisory stuff of sitcoms, it is not. "I never mock suburbia," Spielberg declares. "My life comes from there." He likes these people and communicates that affection. Faced with balky children or a restless preternatural presence, the parents demonstrate their go-with-the-flow resilience. And when things get climactically hairy, these people can be roused to fear and anger, can summon reserves of surprising strength They are the movies' favorite species: ordinary heroes.
Spielberg's heroes, whom he sees as extraordinary, are children. At the emotional center of each new film is a trio of siblings: a teenager, a nine-or ten-year-old boy, a fair-haired preschool girl. To the awful pull of the forlorn or malevolent spirits residing inside the Poltergeist house, each child is differently attuned. The teen-age girl is too involved with growing up to take much notice; the boy, Robbie (Oliver Robins), can be reached only on the frequency of fear; but the five-year-old, Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), is unaware and unafraid of the spirits' terrible power—and is theirs for the taking. It is she who releases the poltergeists (literally, noisy ghosts) from their long bondage between this world and the next. Drawn to the blankly fuzzy, humming screen of the living-room TV late one night, Carol Anne speaks to them, and is heard and seduced and swallowed by them into the restless heart of the house. The film's last hour documents a harrowing tug of wills between Carol Anne's from and the spectral army surrounding them; between the spirits and two specialists, a parapsychologist (Beatrice Straight) and a child-voiced psychic (Zelda Rubinstein), who exert their powers to "cleanse" the house; and ultimately among the spirits, fighting to release the child or forever claim her for their own.
At first and final glance, Poltergeist is simply a riveting demonstration of the movies' power to scare the sophistication out of any viewer. It creates honest thrills within the confines of a P.G. rating and reaches for standard shock effects and the forced suspension of disbelief only at the climax, when we realize that the characters are behaving with such obtuseness precisely because they are trapped inside a horror movie. On the plot level, Poltergeist is a warning against trying to build a mobile modern life over the . unquiet graves of the past. The picture can also be seen as a sly comedy supporting the proposition that violence on TV—or, more precisely, in it—can have a dire influence on children who watch it. (Spielberg calls Poltergeist "my revenge on TV.") Whichever, when the demons escape the TV set, careering around the room like puffs from a deranged steam engine, the little girl turns to her parents and blithely announces: "They're here!" Right inside the mind of a sensitive child.