“We’ve been trying to hold ourselves together as a family,” says Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams) to a team of paranormal investigators in 1982’s Poltergeist. By the time she utters those words in the film, director Tobe Hooper and producer/co-writer Steven Spielberg have shown the Freelings — matriarch Diane, patriarch Steven (Craig T. Nelson), teenage daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne), middle child Robbie (Oliver Robins) and the youngest daughter, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) — to be a tight-knit, functional, loving family unit whose rough spots carry an undercurrent of affection. There aren’t any obvious cracks in their familial armor to begin with, which is what makes the intrusion of their perfect suburban existence by a group of mostly malevolent ghosts so pointedly violating. While Poltergeist is controversial for a few reasons, chief among them is a debate about its ownership and which auteur the movie should belong to. This debate is nullified when considering how well it works as a blend of each filmmaker’s sensibilities: it brings together the chocolate of Spielberg’s otherworldly awe and sentimentalized Americana with the peanut butter of Hooper’s scathing critique of the United States, especially the conservative 80s. As such, the film is an attack on the traditional family unit (white, middle class, etc.), rotting it from the inside out thanks to a mixture of internal strife and outside forces, spirits filled with rage due to injustice and evil perpetrated by the country. While the sequels (1986’s Poltergeist II: The Other Side and 1988’s Poltergeist III) were plagued by production problems and casting issues, such things resulted in the follow-up films continuing this theme to increasingly more potent degrees, and even the 2015 remake picked up on the films’ social commentary. Poltergeist and its sequels tell a story about the erosion of a family by mysterious, pervasive and uncontrollable forces for no better reason than because of where they live — Anytown, USA. 

Despite its broadly relatable setting, Poltergeist is technically set in the fictional Cuesta Verde housing development somewhere in California, a quaint (and blatantly homogenous) series of tract homes built on top of an old cemetery. That latter fact is a mystery to the Freelings until it’s too late, as Steven eventually discovers that the company he’s been working for moved the headstones but not the buried corpses when they relocated the cemetery. “It’s not ancient tribal burial ground. It’s just… people” explains company head Mr. Teague (James Karen), continuing a grand American tradition of committing atrocities in the name of financial progress (hence Hooper’s ingenious idea of beginning the film with “The Star-Spangled Banner”). Not that the Freelings were initially complaining: the kids live comfortably (Dana has her own phone to talk on endlessly, Robbie’s room is littered with pop culture memorabilia, Carol Anne gets a couple of brand new goldfish after her pet bird dies) and Diane and Steven act as perfect examples of 70s children made good, adults shaped by the tail end of the hippie movement and sexual revolution, with Diane smoking pot in bed while Steven reads a biography of Ronald Reagan. The 80s were a time when a wounded America sought to recapture its identity — that is to say, its false utopian/nostalgic identity, pushing away the anxieties and hardships of the prior decade (a conservative movement that reared its ugly head again very recently). It’s no mistake, then, that the ghosts who abduct Carol Anne into their dimension emerge from the television — like the internet would become a decade and change later, a piece of technology that should’ve been a fount of artistic expression and information became a tool of placation, distraction and manipulation, beamed right into the familial living room. The Freelings are distracted by the Spielbergian sense of wonder at the presence of the supernatural in their home, allowing the poltergeist to literally break up their family by kidnapping a member. 

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The ghosts, then, are enacting revenge for their displaced and ruined “family” by breaking up another’s, an extradimensional example of the rot at the center of Cuesta Verde. The poltergeist is adept at breaking up groups and units, as evident by its psychological attack on the paranormal researchers sent to help the Freelings. The ghosts’ power at eroding family is unconsciously passed on — Steven’s job selling real estate is no less than a sales pitch for American values that’s founded on a pack of lies, more than even he knows. The neighborhood is outwardly picture perfect, but friendly neighborliness is almost nowhere to be found — Steven has a TV signal war with the man next door, Ben (Michael McManus), and later that man and his family refuse to believe (much less help) Steven and Diane when they complain of strange occurrences. The Freelings — the kindest, most empathetic and open-minded family on the block — are put through hell, regaining their daughter with the help of the medium Tangina (Zelda Rubenstein), but the neighborhood still hasn’t learned its lesson. Thus, the buried corpses are thrust up from beneath the ground for everyone to see, right before the Freelings’ home is literally consumed by a dimensional portal, the symbol of safety and insulation from the horrors of the world eaten up and destroyed.

With Poltergeist II: The Other Side, the series lost its sense of verisimilitude, taking a left turn into vague, ill-defined mythology as a result of post-production issues and the like. Fortunately, the theme of family — both the power of familial love and the attacks on it — remains strong. Traumatized by the events of the first film, the Freelings are still an affectionate unit, but are down one member (originally, a line of dialogue explained away Dana’s absence due to Dunne’s tragic real-life murder, but it was deleted) and are in dire financial straits — no longer the wealthy middle class family, the Freelings are living with Diane’s mother, Jess (Geraldine Fitzgerald). After Jess’s passing due to natural causes, the “Beast” of the first film attacks, revealing himself to be using the form of the deceased Reverend Kane (Julian Beck), a mad medium and religious cult leader from the mid-19th century who led his followers to suffer and die in a tomb beneath what eventually became Cuesta Verde. The strain of Kane’s attacks (both directly and indirectly) causes Steven to begin losing his grip on himself as he gives in more and more to exasperated, sardonic despair that curdles into bitter anger, resulting in alcoholism. Kane uses this weakness to briefly possess Steven, during which time he not only attempts to rape Diane but reveals that Diane secretly had thoughts of wishing Carol Anne had not been born. It’s only due to the Freelings drawing on their love for each other that these sick emotions and thoughts can be purged — literally, into a creature that then becomes a Final Boss for the family to fight (at least it’s a super gnarly-looking one, designed by H.R. Giger). 

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Poltergeist II: The Other Side doesn’t explicitly address American history as contributing to the Freeling’s continued ghost problems, but the subtext and implications are still there, especially with the character of Taylor (Will Sampson). A Native American shaman, Taylor is fully comfortable with the existence of the supernatural, completely confident in his abilities, and generally nonplussed by the Freelings. He’s there to help them, but doesn’t let them off the hook: during one conversation with Steven, he explains how the patriarch likes to feel sorry for himself, and demands that Steven take “responsibility for everything. Everything in your world.” Taylor’s presence in the film and moments like that harken back to the image evoked in the first movie of white America displacing the Native Americans, a practice that created such a build up of negative energy that has now resulted in these poltergeist attacks. Kane, by contrast, is a representative of all the lies Americans like to be sold: fervent religious beliefs about uncomplicated salvation and other brands of snake oil, all from the mouth of a genteel old white man. Kane’s success at this — building his own version of a family and leading them to destruction — is revealed as the origins of the series’ trauma.