‘Where did you get maggots? Where do you order maggots from? Is that something that’s on your truck all the time?’” The Parents’ Secret Stashĭiane and Steve Freeling were a modern couple despite living what now looks like a retro-traditional life. “I remember asking the prop guys a lot of things. He remembers asking a lot of strange questions on the Poltergeist set, like during a scene in which a fresh steak appears suddenly to be rotten. I told Steven that I was scared to do it and he said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll get in with you.’ He put on waders and he said, “First of all, it’s all grounded, so it couldn’t electrocute you.’” And I just had this image of one of those fans or the lights falling into it and being electrocuted. “When I first had to get into the pool, I was very scared because I’m nervous about electricity and water. “It was of course surrounded by lights and surrounded by giant fans called Ritters, which are about 16 feet in diameter,” Williams says. They were more unsettled by tangible dangers, like the array of electricity that rimmed the pool full of corpses. Neither Williams nor Nelson spoke about eerie feelings or supernatural happenings on the set. Don’t Go Into the Light (Or the Giant Fans) “I’d have to scream, and I’d think, Oh, God, I don’t want to get this water in my mouth because I’m sure I’ll get terrible diseases,” Williams says. “There were the cadavers floating in there and strange things, amoebas. ![]() “I ended up in that pool, oh, yeah,” Nelson adds. And so it was really icky to be in it,” she says. And peat begins to really stink after about a day, it begins to smell like dog poop. First of all, they made the mud with peat. The children included moody high schooler Dana (Dominique Dunne), scrappy little boy Robbie ( Oliver Robins) and sweet-as-pie preschooler Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke.) Williams played Diane Freeling, a stay-at-home mom who holds everything together, even in the best of times. Tobe would give direction, sometimes Steven would add to that or give other direction, but I think it’s fair to say that it was sort of a combo of the two of them, because certainly Steven was actively involved.” The Dead Pool And I’m sure there were times when it drove Tobe crazy to have Steven so actively involved, but he never let on. He very much listened to Steven’s ideas about things, because it was Steven’s movie, really. And Tobe was not as experienced as Steven was. “I think, in his heart of hearts, he would’ve loved to have directed it,” Williams says of Spielberg. And I’m sure there were times when it drove Tobe crazy to have Steven so actively involved, but he never let on.” “A few years later, I ran into one of the special effects guys, and I said, ‘You guys making all those skeletons, that must have been really amazing.’ He said, ‘Oh, we didn’t make them, those were real.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they were real skeletons.’” “I always assumed that the skeletons were made by the prop department,” Williams tells Vanity Fair. Long after filming this sequence, the actor learned an unsettling truth. This is where the source of ghostly rage is finally revealed during the stormy climax, as the bodies of those who were buried beneath the property when it was a graveyard rise up around the mother, played by JoBeth Williams, who has slipped and fallen into the murky runoff. ![]() Then there is the swimming pool-an open pit the family is just beginning to excavate in their backyard. And the angelic little girl, pressing her hands against a whispering, static-filled TV screen and calling out to her slumbering household: “Theyyyy’re heeeere…” The monstrous tree that rips through a bedroom window. The closet that’s actually a portal to another world. The movie about a family menaced by malevolent spirits in their cookie-cutter suburban home plays like a list of collective nightmares: The cackling clown doll that comes to life. Poltergeist is still haunting, even after 40 years.
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