Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s Behind the Scenes Pic!
Poltergeist is top 10 material for me. I love every frame of that film, every creepy Jerry Goldsmith note, every disgusting Craig Rearden effect, every spooky bit of ILM magic and every bit of brilliant casting. Zelda Rubinstein alone makes this a win for life.
I love the mythology behind this movie. The later films expanded it in odd, and admittedly effective, ways, but what makes the first film so great is that there isn’t a big bad guy (that we see, anyway). As much as I dig the preacher guy in Poltergeist 2, the series never quite captured that balance of terror and awe of the afterlife the way the first film did.
I love what they came up with when representing the other side poking through into our world. Child-eating trees, crawling meat, face ripping mind-fucks and that goddamn creepy skull thing that yells at Craig T. Nelson and makes him drop the rope.
Today’s image is from this very scene in Poltergeist and shows us a nice wide shot of the set as the effects geniuses light that crazy skull thing and get ready for the shot.
Thanks to the folks at the Practical Effects Group for this amazing shot. Click to (slightly) enlargen!
If you have a behind the scenes shot you’d like to submit to this column, you can email me at quint@aintitcool.com.
Don’t call tomorrow’s pic chicken.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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Click here to visit the complete compilation of previous Behind the Scenes images, Page Two
