Oscar Horrors: Poltergeist's Polter-ghastliness

Oscar Horrors continues...

HERE LIES... Poltergeist's ghosts and ghouls.  The Oscar loss for Cuesta Verde’s original residents of evil still haunts me to this day. Spielberg’s other 1982 production featuring otherworldly visitation beat Carol-Anne and Company to the FX gold. The restless undead may have lost out on hauling an Oscar back to the Beyond that day, but you never know if they might sooner or later... maybe... come back...

“Poltergeist,” stresses the creepy voiceover that ends the trailer, “It knows what scares you.” Thus so, too, do Richard Edlund, Michael Wood and Bruce Nicholson, the scare-mongering trio responsible for its Oscar nominated (and Bafta winning) visual effects. These were the guys (along with 106 other crew members) who threw JoBeth Williams around her bedroom before dropping her into a cadaver-filled watery grave. They scared seven shades of senselessness out of all of us by making us think every clown doll we saw thereafter might very well drag us under our beds. 

They made us believe that our televisions might be conduits for the ‘TV people’ to enter our plane of earthly existence to cause all manner of paranormal activity. Whatever you do, guys, don’t tell us thattelevision is evil!

And that’s in between merely making doors slam shut of their own accord, building near-impossible furniture displays out of possessed kitchen chairs and making unearthly light gush forth from some otherworldly portal-slash-closetspace. In short, and to paraphrase Poltergeist’s most famous line: these guys brought ‘“them” here’. I mean, who didn’t think that evil entities were hiding within the unsettling fuzz of the TV static after seeing Tobe Hooper’s family get repeatedly spooked out?

everyday objects suddenly possessed

This is why Poltergeist’s scare tactics work their spell so well. The visual effects team, transposing the imagination of Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper,  took commonplace objects and familiar environments and made them feel odd and uncanny, possessed with unwanted life where none is meant to be. The most effective scares were conjured via the careful, sly and playful subversion of the things we know to be safe and free of fear. That’s the inspired labour of Edlund, Wood and Nicholson’s work - the fruits came via the spectacular spectral show.

However justly celebrated E.T. was, Poltergeist’s ghouls were a marvel of weird and wonderful technical wizardry. They should be remembered for the impact they had on the early 1980s horror map, Oscar win or no. But maybe Poltergeist’s very best visual effect was a living, breathing flesh and blood embodiment of special extrasensory perception? The vocal and attitudinal magic weaved by Zelda Rubinstein as Tangina Barrons was key to all the polter-joy and ghastly-geist. I don’t believe there’s an existing Oscar category for Inherent Spectral Awesomeness. If there were, Tangina would banish all competition to the televisual beyond with one wave of her hand.

16 More Oscar Horrors

Oscars Horrors: Hellboys and Albinos

In this series, Team Experience is looking at Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions from or related to the horror genre. Horror has many hooks (and other deadly pointy things) but it's historically lacking in Oscar bait.

HERE LIES... Hellboy's makeup, sent to the grave from Benjamin Button's cradle in the 2008 competition for Best Achievement in Makeup for 2008; aging in reverse buried ageless supernatural creatures. 

Have you ever found yourself wholly confused by what Oscar's makeup branch looks for in a movie? Aside from aging prosthetics, where latex is lathered on to  take movie stars from cradle to grave in bloated biopics, there seems to be no consistency in how they vote. Benjamin Button's aging, which was surely heavily computer abetted, won the Oscar whilst Nicole Kidman's nose in The Hours was ruled ineligible due to computer touchups years earlier.  If you stop to recall that that the subgenre of movies that is most obviously makeup dependent (the zombie movie) has never received one makeup effects nomination it sets the head spinning right off one's shoulders. What are they looking for? It's my dream to corner one of them one days and ask just that question.

The case of Hellboy II: The Golden Army is an interesting one because, though the movie is rife with beautiful prosthetics work, many of the characters appeared in the earlier film Hellboy (2004) for which Mike Elizalde and Thomas Floutz did not receive nominations. Technically makeup work within a sequel must be sufficiently "new" to qualify. Was it the adorable site of Little Orphan 'Code Name: Hellboy' in the prologue flashback? 

The makeup work was so perfect that child actor Monste Ribé could even brush his fake teeth!

Why was the amazing sight of Ron Perlman as the adult Hellboy in 2004 not enough for a makeup nomination? Perhaps we're so accustomed to seeing genre favorite Ron Perlman buried in latex and prosthetics that it's only the site of him without (like in Drive this year) that warrants any double takes and "how did they do that?" wonder!

Or maybe the nomination came from those twin Royal elves Prince Nuada (Luke Goss, pictured) and Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) and their albino skin and weirdly creepy scarring?

Either way I hope the makeup artists or Guillermo del Toro got around to thanking Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta for the Fire & Ice inspiration... "NEKRON!!!!!"

Have you ever seen the Hellboy movies?
Hellboy would sure be a tough costume to pull off for Halloween.

Oscar Horrors: Jonathan Demme, Silence'd

Editor's Note: in this new series we're exploring Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions to the horror genre to get you in the right mood for Halloween. For this edition I've invited first time contributor Mayukh Sen, to offer up his provocative thoughts on an Oscar winner -Nathaniel.

Here lies... Jonathan Demme's early career. There was a time when he was the most promising young American director of his time.  But we lost all his potential the minute he won his Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Demme was a humanist in an era that desperately needed one.  He loved people, and he possessed grace, sensitivity, and a lack of condescension toward his working-class characters.  Kind of like McCarey or Renoir, he had a way of illuminating human flaws and virtues without passing judgment and was capable of expressing patience -- talents many directors lack.  Demme's universe seemed unhinged by the good-evil binary that pervades how many artists render America's lower- middle class. He refused to make human idiosyncrasies seem foolish or naive.

Around the time of Lambs, though, Demme lost one of his salient characteristics – lightness of touch.  Demme seems conscious of the fact that he is directing a “thriller”, and thus that he must downplay his sometimes offbeat, pop art-influenced aesthetic impulses for us to digest the narrative’s direness.  And, though he does still demonstrate considerable compassion for his characters, Demme seems more interested in asserting Clarice Starling's singular heroism than probing the moral ambiguities of the other characters.

This may seem like a petty complaint, but watch some of his earlier works – Caged Heat, Last Embrace – and you’ll understand what exactly we're missing from the old Demme.  Pauline Kael, one of Demme's earliest champions, said it best when she criticized Lambs for treating pulp as art.  She was right -- there’s nothing urgent or passionate about it.

This has happened with many directors. Post-Last Tango, Bertolucci never achieved the sensuality that characterized Before the Revolution or The Conformist.  Success brought upon more ambition, and the intimacy of his earlier work was lost.  

A part of me will always remember Lambs as the point at which Demme jumped the shark. Though Lambs is effective and, at times, fascinating, it doesn't have the charge of early Demme.  At best, his subsequent films function on the level of interesting failures.  I’m afraid that Demme's school of satiric humanism is unlike anything we'll ever see from him again, and I attribute this to his acceptance at the hands of the Hollywood elite.

16 More Oscar Horrors
From The Exorcist through the Fly and on to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane...

Oscar Horrors: "The Tell Tale Heart"

BOO! In this 17 episode miniseries, suggested by Robert Gannon, Team Film Experience will be exploring Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions from or related to the Horror Film genre. Happy Halloween Season! 

HERE LIES... The Tell Tale Heart. Its insistent beating was drowned to death by the cacophony of musical noise coming from the instruments of Walt Disney's Toot Whistle Plunk and Bloom which won the Best Animated Short Film Oscar for 1953.

What is more horrifying than a madman who thinks himself sane, like the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's legendary horror story The Tell Tale Heart? I can actually name four.

1. That an Oscar nomination by no means makes your film easy to find for future generations. This is especially true of any nominations outside of Picture, and Acting. Have you ever tried to find all the nominated short films to watch from any given calender year? SHUDDER. (YouTube has reanimated some of their corpses but otherwise, they're tough to dig up!)

2. That animation is still synonomous with children's entertainment despite all the disparate moods the medium is capable of. This short proves that animation is just as suitable for the macabre as it is the goofy slapstick. Note how the animator's makes creepy visual associations between a harmless old man's blind eye and mundane objects... and that director Ted Parmalee and his animators know as much about shadows as good noir filmmakers.

3. That the great James Mason never won an Oscar. CHILLING!, right? Not even for The Verdict or A Star is Born! He can do more with a few line readings than some actors can do in whole films. 

See how calmy and precisely I can tell this story to you? Listen.

The eye was always closed. For seven days I waited -- You think me mad? What madman could wait so patiently, so long -- in the old house, with the Old Man, and the eye that... 

4. That this short was rated X (X!) by the British censors in 1953... ...and now you can see things 100,000 times as grotesque and violent every night on television without parental guidance and with 100,000 times less humanizing guilt. 

Had you ever seen this short before?
What do you make of the new fictional Edgar Allen Poe themed thriller "The Raven" starring John Cusack?