'Tis the season of spook, and therefore the season of spooky movies, so for this week’s episode I decided to dig not into a creepy topic so much as a classically creepy movie – Poltergeist, from 1982. This movie might be a ridiculous-sounding forty years old this Halloween, but frankly, that makes it no less Creeptastic to this very day, and I rewatched it just to be sure. In honor of the spooky season and this truly iconic addition to the wide world of horror that we all know and love, today I am going to depart from our typical episode format and walk you through the background and production of Poltergeist (including some talk of controversies and curses), give you a quick little spoiling of it from start to finish (just in case it’s actually been forty years since you watched it), and tell you about the real-life supposed haunting of the Herrmann family which occurred back in the fifties in Seaford, Long Island - a haunting which planted the seed that grew into the film we know today. I’ll be honest, the real-life poltergeist doesn’t hold a candle to the movie in terms of solid bumps and scares, but I find it endlessly fascinating to see how film producers can take a grain of truth and turn it into a wildly fictitious and entertaining version of what it once was, and that is exactly what happened with Poltergeist. The "why" this week is pretty obvious – because 'tis the season to celebrate the ghostly and ghastly, and in addition to epitomizing both of those things, obviously Poltergeist (1982) is quite simply Creeptastic!

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