Poltergeist III: Déclassé, Perhaps, but Great

No one ever told me that Poltergeist III is a great film—quite the opposite. Whenever the 1988 movie comes up (which rarely happens), it’s usually because someone wants to point out how Heather O’Rourke, who played little Carol Anne Freeling, died during its making, a tragic incident that contributed to the superstition that the Poltergeist franchise is cursed. Otherwise, the movie is maligned, the same way that Poltergeist II: The Other Side is maligned.

Well, I can’t really defend Poltergeist II, which is mostly a mediocre retread of the original 1982 classic, dignified only by Julian Beck’s performance as the evil Reverend Kane. But Poltergeist III, while exceedingly different from the first film, is a classic in its own right, and deserving of greater recognition.

Here’s why.

(But before we begin—be warned! This article discusses Poltergeist III in its entirety, which means that there will be spoilers. But come on: the movie is nearly thirty years old!)

Poltergeist III opens with Carol Anne living in Chicago, having been sent there by her parents, Steve and Diane, to stay with her Aunt Trish (Diane’s sister). Aunt Trish, who now prefers to go by Pat (her given name is Patricia), is newly married to Bruce Gardner, the manager of a luxury apartment building. (This building is played by the John Hancock Center, although it’s never identified as such.) Bruce also has a teenage daughter from a previous relationship, Donna.

So the movie is what we might today call a soft reboot, relocating the action and changing up the cast. Pat is played by Nancy Allen, Bruce is played by Tom Skeritt, and Donna is played by Lara Flynn Boyle, in her first film role. (This is but the first hint that David Lynch saw and loved this film.)

Pat and Bruce send Carol Anne to a school for “gifted children with emotional problems,” the province of a man named Dr. Seaton, who is played by an actor named Richard Fire. And boy is he ever on fire, performing the part with a decided theatrical flair, creating a pompous prick of a character whom you spend the whole film yearning to slap. He’s piously dismissive to everyone around him, including his obviously beleaguered wife. (Stepping out, he instructs her: “Put dinner on a low flame. And don’t forget the cilantro.”)

But Dr. Seaton is cruelest of all to poor Carol Anne, whom he believes responsible for the mayhem of the previous Poltergeist films. He tells everyone who will listen that the ghosts weren’t real, but rather figments of Carol Anne’s imagination, which she projects onto others via “mass hypnosis.” As he puts it, “That seems to be one of her dubious talents: making people believe things.” According to him, Carol Anne convinced her family and everyone else in Cuesta Verde that their suburb was haunted.

Dr. Seaton persists in this belief throughout the film, even as evidence to the contrary piles up around him. Because wouldn’t you know it, the titular ghosts are once again drawn to Carol Anne, swirling and gathering about her, in the process wreaking havoc with the skyscraper. At first there are only small indications of their presence: cracks in the mirrors, and rooms that are oddly cold. Since Pat and Bruce believe Dr. Seaton, they make nothing of these ominous signs, leaving Carol Anne with Donna in their apartment in order to attend the opening at the art gallery that Pat runs inside the building. Once they’re gone, Donna shirks her responsibility, dashing off to a party of her own, eager to see a boy she’s been making eyes with.

The only person who believes Carol Anne, then, who believes the ghosts are real, is Tangina, played once again by Zelda Rubinstein, who was nominated for both a Saturn and a Razzie for her performance. (The latter nomination seems rather mean-spirited to me, perhaps even a harbinger of modern Reddit trolls who love nothing more than harassing people who are different from them.) Sensing that the poltergeists have once again found Carol Anne, she abruptly jets to Chicago, arriving to engage in a battle of wits not only with the ghosts, but with Dr. Seaton.

This sets up an intriguing dynamic, one that invites close reading. But before we get into that, I want to state for the record that I understand why audiences back in 1988 didn’t go for Poltergeist III. The first Poltergeist was a realist ghost story, set in a house that looked homey and lived-in (a Steven Spielberg specialty c. 1982), and featuring characters that were likeable and friendly, portrayed by actors whose performances were relaxed and natural.

Poltergeist III, which was co-written and directed by Gary Sherman, is the opposite. The acting is broad throughout, and the setting is mostly chilly and sterile, presented in shots that are self-consciously composed.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Poltergeist III is a parody of the first film (the way that Gremlins 2: The New Batch is a parody of the first Gremlins), it is a fundamentally ironic film.

OK, so now on to the close reading. We know from the previous films that Carole Anne and Tangina are psychics, capable of perceiving the spirit world that others are oblivious to (at least initially). Recall how the very first Poltergeist opened: with all of the Freelings asleep except for Carol Anne, who begins conversing with the ghosts via a staticky television set. (See the image above.) The task of Tangina and Carol Anne is to convince everyone around them that the ghosts they see are real, even as Dr. Seaton smugly dismisses their claims, insisting that the ghosts are imaginary—hallucinations, fictions.

What’s interesting about this conflict (besides its gender dynamic) is that Dr. Seaton, while an annoying, pompous prick, is technically correct. The ghosts are fictitious, at least from the perspective of our world. As far as Dr. Seaton is concerned, they’re a bunch of hooey that Carol Anne made up in California. Which honestly isn’t that far from the truth: they’re a bunch of hooey that Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper (et al.) made up back in California. In Poltergeist III, then, Carole Anne stands in for those filmmakers, her talent being the power to make others see the ghosts and think that they’re real. Dr. Seaton is right to call what she does projecting: she’s like movie projector. (He calls this talent “dubious” because he doesn’t see any value in it. He doesn’t like Hollywood movies.)

The film does not discourage this reading. The poltergeists who show up to torment Carol Anne in Poltergeist III repeatedly appear in mirrors, where they hijack people’s reflections (what Tangina calls “stealing images”). In other words, the poltergeists spend the movie pretending to be people that they’re not, the same way that actors do. And whereas in the first film, Carol Anne spoke with the spirits in the TV set (“They’re here!”), in this film she speaks with the spirits in the mirror, which suggests an association between the two.

So Carol Anne can see the “other side,” the world of fiction, of Hollywood horror movies—reflections that aren’t quite reflections. Dr. Seaton’s own talent is that he can see in the opposite direction, out of the film itself. While he never directly turns and stares into the camera (the way that Eddie Murphy and Eriq La Salle do in Coming to America, which also came out in 1988), his dialogue, when you stop and listen to it, sounds like a running metatextual critique of the film that he’s in, an ongoing effort to dispel its illusions:

She gets you to believe in things that haven’t happened.

Enough of this stupid sideshow. Oh, it’s a great act—

This is stupid, idiotic! What’s the matter with you people? Can’t you see that Carol Anne is behind this? She’s making us believe this is happening! It’s all a hypnotic—

That’s a lot of crap that doesn’t mean anything.

You’re just having a bad dream. We’re all having a bad dream.

If the poltergeists want to drag Carol Anne into their world (the world of fiction, the world of acting and genre movies), then Dr. Seaton wants to drag everyone into ours. It’s almost as though he’s standing up in the theater, waving his arms, chastising everyone in the audience for believing the events unfolding onscreen, scolding us for believing a silly ghost movie. (What a killjoy!)

That alone is pretty clever, but Poltergeist III goes one step further. The character most persuaded by Dr. Seaton turns out to be Aunt Pat, who gradually takes up the man’s running criticism of Carol Anne. Even by the end of the film, despite her having survived numerous poltergeist attacks, she’s still referring to her niece as a “brat” who’s playing “sick little games,” and whom she can’t wait to ship back to California. (She can’t wait for the movie to be over.) As it happens, Pat, too, has a wonderfully metatextual line, during the very first scene of the film, in which she declares that she’ll be playing “my favorite role, the wicked stepmother.”

Through Pat, Poltergeist III syncs up Dr. Seaton’s critique of Carol Anne (and his critique of Hollywood movies) with a broader critique of art and class. Recall that Pat was once Aunt Trish, Diane Freeling’s sister. Presumably, she was once more like the Freelings: middle-class, suburban—the kind of person who watches popular movies like Poltergeist. But now she’s married to Bruce Gardner, the manager of a ritzy apartment building in downtown Chicago, a marked step up from Craig T. Nelson’s beer-swilling Steve, whose suburban homes all collapsed. She has her own art gallery, which serves sushi at its openings, and which gets written up in the society pages for displaying the latest, trendiest stuff: sculptures by snobbish artists, as well as “postmodern neo-abstraction.”

Trish, having married up, is eager to leave her old life behind. In the movie’s first scene, Bruce reminds Carol Anne that her aunt now goes by Pat, and not by Trish, since she thinks her old name “déclassé.” Furthermore, Pat spends the movie wearing a dress that Bruce bought for her, which he reminds her cost him “last year’s salary.” It’s a sign of her glamorous new life, but also a sign of her dependence on him—did he arrange for her to have an art gallery in his building? Their marriage, while by all appearances happy, is still something new, precarious. (Bruce spends the movie wearing the tux that he wore at their wedding.) Carol Anne, therefore, reminds Pat of her older, lower-class life as Trish, which is why she wants the movie to end, and the young girl gone. How much easier things would be if the ghosts were just fictions that could be disbelieved and disregarded, allowing Pat to forget the low art of her old life (Hollywood genre movies), and thereby focus on the serious, high art in her gallery!

I’m happy to say that by the end of the movie, Aunt Pat comes around, saving Carol Anne, declaring in the process that she not only loves the little girl, she would “do anything to prove that!” Unlike Dr. Seaton, Pat realizes that she can have both the high end art gallery and the ghost movie, art both high and low. Indeed, there isn’t really any conflict between the two, because while Poltergeist III is a perfectly enjoyable ghost movie in its own right—

—it’s also a serious work of art, as serious as the works on display in the Patricia Wilson-Gardner Gallery.

To its credit, Poltergeist III understands itself as such, repeatedly positioning itself as heir to a long lineage of great horror movies. A looped recording on the apartment building’s PA system welcomes visitors “to a glimpse of the future,” the building being “a city, a safe, efficient metropolis that will take us into the 21^st century.” The choice of the word “metropolis” can’t be accidental, especially since it’s contrasted with a shot of the building from outside, which with its naked tree limbs and streetlight reads like an update of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari:

(Note how the shot further invokes German Expressionism by asymmetrically framing the John Hancock Center, creating crazy angles out of the building’s signature X-bracing.)

These references are telling. Despite its possessing all the latest amenities (“shops, offices, restaurants, condominiums”), the apartment building is just the newest wrinkle on cinema’s old, dark house. And the poltergeists, being actors, spend the latter half of the film bringing other horror movies to life, reenacting them before our eyes. Bruce and Pat, assailed by the ghosts, wind up trapped in a meat locker (à la The Shining)—

—where they’re laughed at by the carcasses of dead animals (à la Evil Dead 2)—

—and then, after they escape, chased by living cars (à la Christine).

(I also have to wonder whether Tangina’s monologue about Carol Anne’s “life force” isn’t a reference to Tobe Hooper’s 1985 film of that name.)

Poltergeist III is literary through and through. The film’s intricate mirror play seems an homage to Through the Looking-Glass, a novel that haunts the whole film as surely as any poltergeist. References to classic myths also abound. In an early scene, Donna adjusts her makeup in a compact that she’s borrowed from Pat. Her father, Bruce, reminds her to “remember what happened to Narcissus.” Donna objects: “Only a boy could be that clumsy.” She later runs off to party with Scott and his friends, in scenes that recall a John Hughes film, as the preppy gang sneaks about the building, filching cans of beer and going swimming in the pool on the 44^th floor.

But eventually Scott and Donna notice, via the building’s closed-circuit television system, Carol Anne on the run from ghosts—which is to say, they see Poltergeist playing on TV. Leaving the John Hughes movie, they follow Carol Anne back into her Poltergeist movie, only to get pulled down into a puddle (just like Narcissus).

As for Dr. Seaton, he gets pushed down an elevator shaft, which might be a nod toward L.A. Law?

Lest you think that Poltergeist III is nothing but allusions to other works, and didn’t have any influence of its own, you should know that Donna and Scott later emerge from the fantasy world on the other side of the mirror, only to turn out to be evil doppelgangers, lustful and giggling, the letters on their clothing reversed.

Well, I told you that David Lynch loved this film! (Note, too, the backward text on the back of Scott’s shirt. I guess that makes Donna Scylla?)

I hope that by now I’ve convinced you that Poltergeist III is not only worth seeing, but worth taking seriously as art. Don’t be like stuffy Dr. Seaton! Poltergeist III is a great film.