Are there monsters buried under your house? No? Yes? How do you know? Do you like swimming in a swimming pool? No sharks in a swimming pool, right? Just your disinterred neighbors.
The evil is in the TV! There’s one in every room to take you straight to hell! You’re not safe inside your own home, especially at night (which is always strobe-lit by lightning). It’s not limited to the clown, the tree (Spielberg is said to have taken inspiration from one that creeped him out as a child), and the bedroom closet.
#Pieces 1982 swimming pool movie
To which I say, fuck you, mister! This movie is jam-packed with stuff to specifically and intentionally terrify children. According to Bruck’s profile, he insisted that the film was PG because it was “all threat and fantasy, no reality.” Twenty-four MPAA ratings reviewers saw all this and said, “Yep, that’s an R!” Who could argue? Spielberg, that’s who. This movie is an evil tree plunging through the bedroom window, dragging your ass outside. Like being scared? Like this was a ride at Carowinds? My ass! This film is not a “boo!” followed by giggles and squeals. “I was thinking, what the fuck, kids like being scared,” Dad said. “You actually recommended that? After seeing it? What were you thinking?!”ĭad dug in and went Red Forman on me. I thought you and your brother would like it.” “So, you told me and Brendan to watch it when I was nine, I guess because it was PG,” I said. “Dad, did you know Poltergeist was originally rated R?” I said, after reading The New Yorker profile. The only thing my parents ever forbade me and my brother from watching was The Dukes of Hazzard, probably because my dad’s name is Roscoe.Īnd as for Poltergeist, I found out the rating didn’t matter.
#Pieces 1982 swimming pool license
Here’s the part where you guess I saw the movie by myself or at a friend’s house, given the broad license to watch anything PG. That was where “The Beast” lived, right? I can’t really remember for sure because, you know, I only watched the thing once. The glowing bedroom closet was a big part of Poltergeist. It doesn’t help that, at this time, I also used my closet light as a nightlight. When I tried, I reverted to a fetal posture less surface area for the evil tree to grab. I saw Poltergeist on HBO in 1983, toward the end of my fourth-grade year. MGM and Spielberg needed that kid-tested-mother-approved PG rating if it was going to make any money, and Valenti was gonna do them a solid. “The fix was in,” Heffner said later, meaning Valenti got to the jurors.
And, lo and behold, a panel that had been 24-0 in favor of R was now 20-4 for PG. To me, that’s evidence enough that Spielberg knew Poltergeist was no PG movie - which in 1982 was basically taken as a G without animation or the Disney logo.īut Spielberg, Valenti and Poltergeist distributor MGM still browbeat Heffner into re-screening the movie for the ratings board. In Connie Bruck’s 2001 profile of Valenti in The New Yorker, Spielberg, after haranguing the MPAA over Poltergeist’s rating, is said to have promised Richard Heffner, chairman of the ratings board to “get that for you.” He meant the creation of PG-13, or some rating between PG and R. Films like Red Dawn (the first PG-13), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Gremlins are more considered the rating’s spiritual ancestors.
Except very little of it mentions Poltergeist. This was before PG-13 ratings, a period well documented in pop culture. And both are responsible for turning Poltergeist, a haunted-house horror masterpiece (I’ll grant it that) from a unanimously-rated R to a PG on appeal. Spielberg was responsible for 1982’s Poltergeist Valenti was responsible for the Motion Picture Association of America. That’s when Steven Spielberg and Jack Valenti scarred me for life.
I haven’t seen a horror film since I was nine years old.
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