8 hours ago
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JoBeth Williams, played Diane Freeling
When my agent said, “We have a script called Poltergeist”, my response was: “Is it horror? I’m not interested.” Then he said: “Well, Steven Spielberg is producing.” So I read the script, which Spielberg had also written, and loved the family in it, and the fact that there were so many strong female characters: Diane, Dr Lesh, Tangina the psychic. Zelda Rubinstein, who played Tangina, was a dynamo. Spielberg was busy prepping ET, so even though he was often on set, Tobe Hooper, who made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed. I’d never seen that because when it comes to horror, I’m a nervous Nellie.
We’d all do improv to give the sense of a real family life – sometimes they’d just roll a camera while we were chatting and telling jokes. Craig T Nelson, who played my husband, had been a standup. Where we’re smoking pot in the bedroom, he improvised the “before/after/before” routine with his stomach. Little Heather O’Rourke, who played my youngest daughter, Carol Anne, was just five at the time, but very intuitive. If I cried in a scene, she’d cry too. When we were covered in cold goop, she was shivering and shaking but never complained. She was such a trooper.
Early in the film, the camera follows Diane across the kitchen after she’s just straightened some chairs. When she turns back, they’ve been silently stacked on the table, impossibly fast. It was all done in one uninterrupted take, with crew members rushing on while out of shot to remove one set of chairs and put the pre-stacked tower in place. They were like a herd of elephants – the sound was re-dubbed afterwards. My biggest problem was trying to keep a straight face.
Later, I get dragged across the bed, up the wall and across the ceiling by an invisible force. That was filmed on a rotating set called a gimbal, like the one that allowed Fred Astaire to dance on the ceiling in Royal Wedding. The cameraman, Dennis, was strapped to the set and had to go round and round like he was on a ferris wheel. After a few takes, bless his heart, he had to get off, because he was nauseous.
The skeletons that surround Diane after she falls into the pool were all real – though I didn’t learn that until I ran into one of the special effects guys later. I’d have been even more disgusted had I realised they weren’t just props, but at the time I was more concerned about the lights and the huge fans creating the wind effect. I was terrified one would fall into the water and electrocute me. Spielberg actually waded in up to his waist and said: “If you get electrocuted, it’ll kill me, too.” That was reassuring.
Martin Casella, played Dr Marty Casey
Poltergeist was my first movie and I got to act with Beatrice Straight, who I worshipped. She’s exquisite in the role of Dr Lesh, the parapsychologist who investigates the house. Richard Lawson and I played her assistants and I guess it’s because my character is the sceptical one that, as Tobe put it, the house hates me.
The steak Marty sees crawling along a kitchen countertop like an inchworm was operated by a guy underneath poking a couple of chopsticks up through a track disguised as the grouting between the tiles. When Marty throws the chicken leg he’s eating on the floor in disgust and we see it covered in maggots, there were handlers on set to scoop them up and ensure none of them came to harm.
They made a complete upper-body dummy of me for the moment Marty hallucinates clawing off his own face in the bathroom mirror. I asked how much it cost and they said: “Oh, the wig alone was $10,000.” Remember, this was 1981. This would be a one-take, unrepeatable shot, with me reaching up from under the dummy and tearing away its cheeks to release the semi-set jello and pockets of blood underneath. I thought: “There’s no way I can do this.” Steven lit up when I told him – those are his hands you see in the film! He’s just wearing my ring. I could never have ripped that face off with the same joie de vivre.
Later, I had to go back to shoot some extra footage of me picking at my real face. By then I was acting in a play I’d written and my hair had been cut short – luckily they’d saved the wig from the dummy. It took three hours to rig my face up with prosthetics full of stage blood. It was only when I got to the sound stage that someone realised the makeup guy had been working from the image in the mirror and put everything on the wrong side.
There was no PG-13 rating back then. That wasn’t introduced until the second Indiana Jones film a couple of years later. Poltergeist ended up rated PG but, until Steven talked the ratings board round, that scene meant they wanted to make it an R. Another scene of mine was cut, where Marty is lifted into the air and bitten by some gigantic ghost. They rigged me with explosive squibs full of liquid detergent, representing saliva, but the first time they tried it the effects guys were joking that it looked like ghost semen.
That wasn’t the reason it had to go, though. Steven told me it interrupted the scene where Diane senses her daughter trapped on the other side and says: “She went through my soul.” It’s a testament to JoBeth’s wonderful performance that he just couldn’t cut away from that.
