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News at SoundtrackCollector
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DVD Poltergeist - the 25th anniversary!
16-Nov-2007 -
Marvelously spooky. Like a thoroughly enjoyable nightmare...
Warner Home Video has released Poltergeist - The 25th Anniversary. Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, teamed up with family-oriented producer Steven Spielberg to make Poltergeist. The film is about a haunted suburban tract home in a development very much like the Arizona one in which Spielberg was raised. (Because it came out the same summer as Spielberg's E.T., it was tempting to see both movies as representing Spielberg's ambivalent feelings about childhood in suburbia. One was a fantasy, the other a nightmare.) Spielberg also cowrote the screenplay, which taps into primal, childlike fears of monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, sinister clown faces, and all manner of things that go bump in the night. At first, some of the odd happenings in the house are kind of funny and amusing, but they grow gradually creepier until the film climaxes in a terrifying special-effects extravaganza when 5-year-old Carole Anne (Heather O'Rourke) is kidnapped by the spooks and held hostage in another dimension. Though not nearly as frightening as Hooper's magnum opus, or the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, which came along two years later, Poltergeist is one of the smartest and most entertaining horror pictures of its time.
Special features.
They are here: The Real World Of Poltergeists Revealed.
Documentary in 2 parts: Science Of The Spirits and Communing With The Dead.
The music of Jerry Goldsmith.
The score is almost as spooky as Steven Spielberg's classic tale of the supernatural. Composer Jerry Goldsmith keeps listeners on edge by constructing sweeping soundscapes with drastically contrasting moods, rapidly slipping from childlike delicacy to overpowering grandeur in just a few bars of music. Consider the tones of the main title or the rapid shifts from understated menace to overwhelming terror in "Rebirth." From shivering strings (used to especially good effect on "Twisted Abduction") to gentle piano (the closing lullabylike "Rebirth"), Goldsmith is a master of effect, his compositional style perfectly suited to the film. The soundtrack for this 25th anniversary edition is remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0.
The original score CD is still available from Amazon.com.
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