May 27,2015
Released last Friday, the remake of the 1982 horror classic Poltergeist was greeted with a lukewarm response from critics.
In fairness, it was always going to be hard for director Gil Kenan to
match the heights reached by the original, which was written and
produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper.
Both movies depict the terrifying ordeal of a family whose suburban house is haunted by some very angry ghosts. While the new Poltergeist saved
money by shooting in Ontario, Canada, the original stayed in
Hollywood’s backyard: The neighborhood depicted at the beginning of the
film was located in Agoura Hills, a small town in Los Angeles County.
Meanwhile, the house that is supposed to belong to the Freelings — the
haunted family at the center of the original — was actually located in
nearby Simi Valley. Yahoo Movies recently talked to the original movie’s
production designer, Jim Spencer, about how they chose the ultimate
house from hell.
“Steven
liked that house because it was the end of the road,” Spencer recalled.
“It was a two story Valley-type mock Tudor and it just fit everything.
The neighborhood [was what] we call ‘Spielbergia,’ where E.T. and a couple of his other films were shot. He always wanted to be in normal residential areas.”
In some ways, Poltergeist is the polar opposite of E.T., which was shot soon after the horror film wrapped. While E.T. celebrates the quiet suburban world in which Spielberg himself was raised, Poltergeist can
be read as a criticism of the cookie-cutter neighborhoods that were
rapidly claiming what little was left of undeveloped Southern
California.
“The
movie made the area look like it was over-developed. But in actuality,
it’s a beautiful bedroom community surrounded by rolling hills, dozens
of hiking trails, parks, and playgrounds and hundreds of historic oak
trees,” Harry Medved, the co-author of Location Filming in Los Angeles, told Yahoo Movies. “With all the surrounding green space, you wouldn’t recognize it from Poltergeist’s establishing shots.”
Watch the trailer for the original ‘Poltergeist’ below:
As
is revealed late in the film, the unsettled souls that torment the
Freelings belong to the bodies that were buried in a cemetery that the
newly-built community had just displaced. Oddly enough, in 1969, an old
Native American cemetery was unearthed
while excavating land for a Vons supermarket in Agoura Hills. There’s
nothing to suggest that the graveyard inspired the film, or that
Spielberg even knew about it while writing the screenplay, but it
certainly adds a dose of realism to the supernatural story.
While the Poltergeist
exteriors were shot on location at the house, most of the film was made
on the sound stages at MGM Studios in Culver City. (After all, they
couldn’t exactly destroy a perfectly nice home in the suburbs.)
Spencer worked with George Lucas’ effects team at Industrial Light and Magic
to design the sets so that they could accommodate the massive machines
built just for the film. In fact, every set was built 10 feet off the
ground, so that they could shoot things like coffins through the floor.
One
of the most memorable set pieces (above) involved little Robbie
Freeling (Oliver Robins) being pulled from his bed by an evil tree that
busts through his window. While this would now be done quite easily with
computer animation (see: Groot), the scene required ILM to build an
entire mechanical tree that could actually grab the kid. “We built a
special part of his room just for that,” Spencer recalled. “If you look
at the scale of him to the fingers of the tree, those things were about
eight feet long. It was all mechanical.”
Robbie’s
little sister, Carol Anne, also fell victim to thieving demons on the
night of the tree attack. And while the film showed the siblings sharing
a bedroom, each had an entirely separate set built for their half of
the room. Carol Anne has the misfortune of being sucked into the endless
void in her closet (above).
“We
put the set on a huge revolving gimbal that turned 360 degrees so all
the stuff just fell into the closet,” Spencer explained (a brief glimpse
at the effect in action can be seen here).
“We designed it so it would funnel that way. It was a 90 degree tilt
and so everything just fell into the room and we sprinkled really small
confetti to add to the lighting aspect of it as all the stuff went into
the closet.”
The
production team didn’t just re-create the interior of the house — they
also rebuilt the backyard on the soundstage. The big climactic scene,
when a pounding storm hits the quaint neighborhood, required turning a
pool into a mud-filled pit from which coffins and angry skeletons rise.
While
they dug a hole behind the actual house for an earlier scene (in which
construction workers dig out a pool, they couldn’t exactly wreck a real
backyard. Even less feasible: Sucking an entire house into a hellmouth.
Instead, the production built a miniature house out of balsa wood and
corn flakes, then sucked it up with a vacuum — a sequence they filmed at
half-speed, then sped up to highlight their detailed work and the
marvelous destruction.
The real house in Simi Valley is still standing today, and is a minor tourist attraction (see below). The current owners allegedly don’t much like the attention. But as Poltergeist shows, curious movies fans aren’t the worst kind of unwanted visitors.
No comments:
Post a Comment