Poltergeist (1982)

Poltergeist is a 1982 award-winning horror film directed by Tobe Hooper. It is an acknowledged horror classic and would be a good one to watch if you want to see the more important films in horror history. I watched it on HBO Max.

trailer:

1000 Misspent Hours says,

Poltergeist is still one of the stronger haunted house films of the 1980’s. What I appreciate most about it is that the nature of the Freelings’ paranormal persecution is never conclusively explained. Several characters have their pet theories ... but all of these hypotheses have troubling blind spots, and are unable to account for at least one major aspect of the haunting. That reticence on the filmmakers’ parts permits Poltergeist to play as broad a field of supernatural manifestations as possible without suffering from the sort of logical inconsistencies that helped scupper [other such films].

Moria says,

Poltergeist is a film that often plays on childhood fears and its most effective parts are early on when it ventures into these – the gnarled proto-human tree in the backyard, thunderstorms, the shadows in the half-open closet, the clown that becomes a grinning monster in the dark, the thing under the bed. It delves into the dark side of the cosy child-like sentimentalism of Steven Spielberg.

Roger Ebert says,

"Poltergeist" is an effective thriller, not so much because of the special effects, as because Hooper and Spielberg have tried to see the movie's strange events through the eyes of the family members, instead of just standing back and letting the special effects overwhelm the cast along with the audience.

Filmsite calls it "memorable" and says, "This classic 'haunted house ghost story' is fascinating to watch, with its extraordinary special effects". Rotten Tomatoes has a critics consensus score of 88%.

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This photo from 2 years ago shows how tall my wild sunflowers get when I don't cut them back during the summer: