Post of self-interest
If you and your family are interested in seeing Enchanted over the Thanksgiving weekend, I will not try to discourage you. I’m interested in seeing it myself, since I worked on it for a year, and a lot of my material, as far as I can tell, is still in the movie (I receive no credit on the finished product). So if you see it, you will, in a way, be supporting my work, although probably not in any way that will actually benefit me.
I won’t kid you, it’s a very strange thing to work on a movie for so long, and have the completed movie contain a fair amount of my work, and not have my name on it, but that’s how it goes. Not so long ago, people tried to remove my name from a movie because they felt it didn’t belong there, and the rules of the WGA protected me. This time, they didn’t, but here we are. In any case, the movie is being well-reviewed and I wish the Disney people the best of luck with it.
Poltergeist
It’s hard to imagine, 25 years later, how fresh and peculiar Poltergeist felt in 1982. Before Poltergeist, haunted house movies usually went basically like this:
ACT I: Some people move into a haunted house. Maybe on a dare, maybe out of necessity, maybe in a spirit of inquiry. We are told the house is haunted and so we wait for something scary to happen. And the filmmakers drag out every trick they can think of to produce "fake scares," things that have nothing to do with actual paranormal activity.
ACT II: Scary things happen, but they are explained away by one thing or another. Factions are drawn among the members of the people in the house. One person sees ghosts, the others don’t. Maybe it’s all a trick being played by unscrupulous real-estate developers. Maybe it’s all in the mind of one of the people in the house.
ACT III: The people are now trapped in the house and cannot escape, and it is revealed that there are, indeed, ghosts. And many scary things happen as the people desperately try to figure out how to get out of the house. And someone, usually the last person you’d suspect, has the key to get out of the house, or the solution that will appease the ghosts. And maybe it turns out it’s actually unscrupulous real-estate developers after all.
Poltergeist does none of this. Spielberg has so much he wants to tell you about ghosts, you can feel the giddy excitement in the narrative as he unpacks every box of ghost research he’s got. In this way, Poltergeist is almost a sequel to Close Encounters — it’s not enough that Spielberg entertain you — he wants to make you a believer.