Perfectly adorable

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This movie has some of the creepiest and most disturbing scenes you can imagine, yet it retains the warm feeling of a family movie somehow! The story makes you feel and care about the characters, and the great practical effects keep you on the edge of your seat. When it comes to buildup and "using your scares wisely" this movie could be used as a textbook. Basically when something happens in this movie, you will remember it! See it, you will not regret it.. and you will definitely not forget it!

I still liked watching this film after 35 or so years. There are many things about it in the reviews written that I think are true, that make it not sound so good, but I still think it blows most modern day horror out of the water. Yes, it might not have the same scariness as 30 odd years ago, and some pretty silly stuff going on, but it's still quite fun and imaginative and creepy, and in my opinion original.I love the fact that despite being a slightly apple pie American family, we actually see a family and how they interact. There's a beautiful scene in the parent's bedroom where the mum is smoking some pot and the husband is reading a book and they are just talking. In today's horror, this would be cut out, seen as superfluous and not related to the driving forward of the plot - which is exactly the problem with most films today - it's all about getting to the next set piece, so we don't see real families, and real people, just actors representing types of people.The main problem for me is poorly written plot. Nothing is really that clear. There's a lot of talk, especially from Tangina the medium, but it's all jumbled and waffley and doesn't really make that much sense. There are many questions that were not thought through. For example, if the whole Cuesta verde housing development was built on a graveyard, then why are the graves just popping up in their house and no one elses. It's also not clear when it's the devil? or when it's the supposed harmless lost souls who are reaching out and causing things to happen.....with most films it would make me angry and turn off, but Poltergeist is so good in other departments you can kind of lose yourself from the unanswered stuff and just enjoy the spectacle - until after it's over and you are left scratching your head.I really do not understand why when millions of dollars and so much time is spent on a movie, they still fail to tell a coherent story. Of course the cliched answer is that we all want to be spoon fed and not to think. This doesn't make sense, because how can you take any meaning from a film, and go away and think about it on a deeper level, when even the basic plot isn't clear - and the by the end of a movie we should at least have a totality of the basic plot, with basic things making sense and answered

Whatever I try to remember about this movie brings memories of the mother's acting. It was poor. She seemed to have no issues losing her daughter to ..., as happens early on in the movie. She didn't seem to know when to cry, when to drink, when to bathe, when to laugh and when to feel worried. Her demeanor actually made many scenes predictable.Overall, this movie is not bad. It's the same old plot of a family moving into a new house, which shows signs of a haunting pretty quickly. A tree is bothering the son while the daughter sees strange things through a TV. The second half is more of a "cleansing of the house" to bring back the daughter from the clutches of the... (you'll find out).The best part of the movie is the background score and the cinematography.

This is a fairly fun, entertaining movie. It has lots of memorable moments that many will have seen referenced throughout pop culture. I did not see this film as a kid. If I had, I probably would have been pretty freaked out by it. However, watching for the first time as an adult, I can't really say that any part of this movie was particularly scary or creepy to me. It came across more like a fun spookfest than a horror movie. I would say this is closer in tone to something like Beetlejuice than it is to The Exorcist. I guess it's somewhere in the middle, which probably makes me give it a lukewarm review. Not creepy enough to be that scary. Not goofy enough to be that funny. I felt the beginning had that sense of wonder that you get from a Spielberg film. I know he didn't direct it, but you can definitely notice his influence on the direction of this movie. However, that feeling seemed to disappear along with the daughter. Overall, this is a pretty good movie that you can have fun with. Just don't go in expecting something scary.6/10************SPOILERS************Recommended for those that enjoy creepy children, creepy clowns, creepy trees, creepy tvs, creepy meats, creepy self stacking furniture, spontaneous face melting, spontaneous grave popping, spontaneous house folding, inter-dimensional closet portals, giant closet heads, ectoplasmic mud baths, remote control feuds......but that's just like, my opinion, man# Of Times Watched: Once