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.”
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