Abstract
Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist opens with the National Anthem of the United States. This opening is significant: Poltergeist is a movie about one family and the ghosts it encounters, and it’s also about the United States of America, and its ghosts. Poltergeist’s Freeling family are proxies, not only for the film’s audience, but for an entire political community, as it comes face to face with its anxieties about its origins, and its fear that its bloody past may not stay buried. It’s a commonplace to say that horror often involves the “return of the repressed”: a past misdeed that resurfaces, a long-forgotten trauma that comes back, someone who knows what you did last summer. Poltergeist shows us one particular version of this phenomenon: horror that reflects an anxiety about the terrible things buried in the origins of our communities, and the costs we incur when we obscure such origins.
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- 1.
I’m indebted to Roger Ebert’s review of Poltergeist for confirming my sense of this image. Roger Ebert, “Poltergeist,” June 1, 1982 (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/poltergeist-1982). The University of South Carolina Sumter generously provided funding and other support toward the competition of this piece. I’m grateful to my fellow panel participants at the 2018 meeting of the Popular Culture Association in the South/American Culture Association in the South. Thanks to the Institute for Humane Studies for assistance with conference travel and expenses. My colleagues at USC Sumter have been generous with their time and insight, in particular Andy Kunka and Kristina Grob; I’m also grateful for the time and insight of the students in my Film, Politics, and Social Change class. Finally: Jil and Lenny Picariello, Alex Picariello (with whom I first watched Poltergeist, and whose DVD I borrowed to write this piece), and—as always—Erin.
- 2.
Steven Spielberg, “Poltergeist,” 1. I’m relying on an undated version of the Poltergeist screenplay credited to “Steven Spielberg” and marked “1st Draft,” found on dailyscript.com (http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Poltergeist.pdf)
- 3.
“One might say,” says Robin Wood, “that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its reemergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror” (“An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Barry Keith Grant, Ed., Robin Wood on the American Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews [Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018], 79). For example: Valdine Clemens, The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto to Alien (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999).
- 4.
Dan Nosowitz, “Why Every Horror Film of the 1980s Was Built on ‘Indian Burial Ground,’
” Atlas Obscura, October 22, 2016 (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-every-horror-film-of-1980s-was-built-on-indian-burial-grounds). See also Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 37–48.
- 5.
John Lutz talks about this in the context of The Shining in “From Domestic Nightmares to the Nightmare of History,” in Thomas Fahey, ed., The Philosophy of Horror (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 161–178. We might also consider the horrors of slavery, which consideration brings to mind New York City’s African Burial Ground (https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/index.htm)
- 6.
Stephen King points to this broader point in Danse Macabre when he says that “the truest definition of the haunted house would be ‘a house with an unsavory history’” (New York: Berkley Books, 1981, 267). Similarly, Robin Wood says that “what the ‘terrible house’ … signifies is the dead weight of the past crushing the life of the younger generation, the future” (“An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” 98).
- 7.
This framing emerges from a conversation I had about the Republic with Kristina Grob, in which she noted the importance of this first attempt at creating a “healthy” city in speech. I’m very grateful for her insight.
- 8.
The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), Book II, 368e–369c.
- 9.
Ibid., II, 369b–369c.
- 10.
Ibid., II, 372d.
- 11.
Ibid., II, 372c–372e; Allan Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, 346–348.
- 12.
Ibid., II, 372e.
- 13.
Ibid., II, 373d–374e.
- 14.
“It would appear from this presentation that war is requisite to the emergence of humanity … The city may exist for the sake of life, but it needs men who are willing to die for it” (Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 348).
- 15.
Ibid., III, 414b–414e.
- 16.
Ibid., III, 415d. “This tale” works to conceal “the unjust origin of this regime (which we have seen) by a just account of its origin. On the basis of the lie, the citizens can in all good faith and conscience take pride in the justice of their regime.” As readers of the dialogue, our position is somewhat different: “The lie, because it is a lie, points up the problems it is designed to solve. Perhaps no rational investigation of them could yield a basis for political legitimacy” (Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 366–7).”
- 17.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 130.
- 18.
Spielberg, 3. We’re pointed back to WWII soon after, when we come upon Steven Freeling watching A Guy Named Joe, a 1943 film set during the war. For more on the decline of WWII-era “victory culture,” see Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
- 19.
In Spielberg’s screenplay, “The twisted branches that seem to suggest arms and the split trunk that appears to suggest horns is all too real even at first glance” (23).
- 20.
Ibid., 1.
- 21.
Ibid., 68.
- 22.
Ibid., 90.
- 23.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 721–722.
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Picariello, D.K. (2020). Fear of Founding from Plato to Poltergeist. In: Picariello, D.K. (eds) The Politics of Horror. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42015-4_17
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