Easily Tobe Hooper's style here

Please share some examples of what visual elements, tonal variations, or thematic similarities Poltergeist has in common with other Tobe Hooper films. I admire Hooper's movies, especially Texas Chainsaw 1 & 2 and The Funhouse, but I strain at finding anything resembling his style in Poltergeist. Specifically, which part of Poltergeist feels like Hooper's previous or subsequent films?

This is 100% Spielberg. It's honestly not even debatable. Hooper signed the contract knowing he wasn't even a hired gun, he was there for ONE reason, because Spielberg couldn't legally direct both ET and this at the same time. Hooper is hardly noticeable, if at all. I think MAYBE his use of Darkness was harnessed, that's about it. I can't blame him, I'm sure it was a life changing(At the time) amount of money and it should've put his name in the Mainstream more but it backfired. People looked at Spielberg as a Genius(He is) and Hooper as a Lackey(He isn't) It's unfortunate.

LOL, you're smokin' some good stuff..





I'm not a control freak, I just like things my way

The clown reminds me of something out of The Funhouse and the face peeling reminds me of an effect you'd see in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

A lot of the camera work didn't feel very Spielberg, it seems like he would have cut a lot more. But the whole look/production design of the film is so him. The quiet sequences at the beginning are like the suburban sequences in his other movies. It's not surprising to hear he did the storyboards.

I think that people should take a look at Poltergeist and then Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear and then put all their "IT'S NOT A TOBE HOOPER MOVIE/IT'S 100% SPIELBERG" crap into some proper perspective.

On a fundamental level, Spielberg NEVER, at that time anyway, had unbroken families in a movie and showed them trying to stay together.

Sugarland Express is very cynical about the manipulative, selfish mother of a broken family.

Jaws is an exception but you would hardly call it a movie about family. CE3K tacitly advocates the abandonment of a family unit in pursuit of a once in a lifetime adventure.

Poltergeist and Cape Fear are about dysfunctional families whose woes are partly the effect of outside forces, but also, arguably, symptomatic of the family dysfunction. The family remains unified in the end in spite of and/or because of the obstacle that they are faced with.

Scorsese, and particularly Hooper , did have experience with the endurance of a unified if dysfunctional families. Little wonder that Spielberg did not choose to direct those two movies by himself..

If you are going to get yourself into a lather about Hooper's directing credit then you need to get crazy about Cape Fear too.

What Jonatwork said in the below link sums it up best...

Maybe the POLTERGEIST story is about how some directors have more control and others have less, and it's not about power in every case but a director's view of his role. As I mentioned before, Jerry Goldsmith said he worked completely with Spielberg, while in other cases he worked with the director of a film.

The question then isn't whether Hooper directed POLTERGEIST, but how many movies have active producer input, while others are more director-influenced. I think it's yet another reason why I think the auteur theory is just lazy, a way for a critic to not have to bother figuring out who did what on a movie, which would be different for every movie if one thought about it for more than two seconds.

It's not that Hooper didn't direct POLTERGEIST, then, but that the level of producer input was simply known. In thousands of other cases, we just assume the director had complete control, but we don't know, and haven't investigated the circumstances of each production, and never will, because it would be a project for each film.

Maybe if more people accepted that a movie is indeed a group effort and that the director's role is often not firmly set, especially when the producer is a strong one on a multi-million-dollar project (investors don't just let anyone spend their money), and that writers, cinematographers, editors and others often have much larger roles than the casual viewer might think, we wouldn't be thinking a movie's authorship is due to one all-powerful director every time.

Source: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/monsterkidclassichorrorforum/who-directed-poltergeist-t16541-s140.html

Naturally the film has some Spielbergian tropes, the man did after all produce the film along with coming up with the story and co-writing the screenplay. So yeah it has that Spielberg suburban all-American family charm to it.

I've seen some people state the film is too 'slick' and 'classy' to be the work of Hooper which I think is pure ignorance, this seems to come from people who've only watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), it's sequel (1986) and Death Trap (1976).

One only needs to watch films like The Funhouse (1981), Invaders from Mars (1986) and Lifeforce (1985) to see other anamorphic lensed, colorful, family friendly (Invaders from Mars), practical effects heavy work. Watch those three films with Poltergeist in mind and you can see the similarities, those three films LOOK like Poltergeist to a great degree. Throw in a bit of Spielberg influence on the story and screenplay and you get Poltergeist.

People who consider this film to be an oddity amongst Hoopers filmography, thus being Spielbergs film, genuinely must not have watched Hoopers other films from the early-to-mid 80s.