Fabulous Folklore with Icy16 Aug 2025

How does 'Poltergeist' draw on actual poltergeist accounts?

Poltergeist marked Hollywood's big-budget engagement with the ghost film in 1982. Produced by Stephen Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, it took the haunted house film and mashed it together with the family adventure film. Throw in some special effects courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, and you end up with the film that relocated haunted houses to the suburbs.

The film obliquely references the settlement of land in California and a failure to acknowledge earlier inhabitants of that land. It also explicitly engages with the growing consumer boom of the 1980s, using technology - here in the form of the TV set - as a means to communicate with the other side. It's a film worthy of study for various reasons.

But one of the talking heads in the special feature on the 25th anniversary edition of the film exclaims that everything in the film 'really happened'. Does the depicted activity bear any relation to historically recorded cases of poltergeist activity? Where does the film draw on this record? What are these earlier cases? Let's find out!

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