{"id":352915,"date":"2025-11-03T15:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T15:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/352915\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T15:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T15:47:10","slug":"if-id-known-the-skeletons-were-real-id-have-been-even-more-disgusted-how-we-made-poltergeist-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/352915\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018If I\u2019d known the skeletons were real I\u2019d have been even more disgusted\u2019: how we made Poltergeist | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

JoBeth Williams, played Diane Freeling<\/strong><\/p>\n

When my agent said, \u201cWe have a script called Poltergeist\u201d, my response was: \u201cIs it horror? I\u2019m not interested.\u201d Then he said: \u201cWell, Steven Spielberg<\/a> is producing.\u201d 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\u2019d never seen that because when it comes to horror, I\u2019m a nervous Nellie.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d all do improv to give the sense of a real family life \u2013 sometimes they\u2019d just roll a camera while we were chatting and telling jokes. Craig T Nelson, who played my husband, had been a standup. Where we\u2019re smoking pot in the bedroom, he improvised the \u201cbefore\/after\/before\u201d routine with his stomach. Little Heather O\u2019Rourke, who played my youngest daughter, Carol Anne, was just five at the time, but very intuitive. If I cried in a scene, she\u2019d cry too. When we were covered in cold goop, she was shivering and shaking but never complained. She was such a trooper.<\/p>\n

Early in the film, the camera follows Diane across the kitchen after she\u2019s just straightened some chairs<\/a>. When she turns back, they\u2019ve 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 \u2013 the sound was re-dubbed afterwards. My biggest problem was trying to keep a straight face.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The skeletons<\/a> that surround Diane after she falls into the pool were all real \u2013 though I didn\u2019t learn that until I ran into one of the special effects guys later. I\u2019d have been even more disgusted had I realised they weren\u2019t 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: \u201cIf you get electrocuted, it\u2019ll kill me, too.\u201d That was reassuring.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Martin Casella, played Dr Marty Casey<\/strong><\/p>\n

Poltergeist was my first movie and I got to act with <\/strong>Beatrice Straight, who I worshipped. She\u2019s exquisite in the role of Dr Lesh, the parapsychologist who investigates the house. Richard Lawson and I played her assistants and I guess it\u2019s because my character is the sceptical one that, as Tobe put it, the house hates me.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cOh, the wig alone was $10,000.\u201d 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: \u201cThere\u2019s no way I can do this.\u201d Steven lit up when I told him \u2013 those are his hands you see in the film! He\u2019s just wearing my ring. I could never have ripped that face off with the same joie de vivre.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d written and my hair had been cut short \u2013 luckily they\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

There was no PG-13 rating back then. That wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

That wasn\u2019t 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: \u201cShe went through my soul.\u201d It\u2019s a testament to JoBeth\u2019s wonderful performance that he just couldn\u2019t cut away from that.<\/p>\n

JoBeth Williams\u2019s new film Not Without Hope opens in cinemas on 12 December<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JoBeth Williams, played Diane Freeling When my agent said, \u201cWe have a script called Poltergeist\u201d, my response was:…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":352916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-352915","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115486552810398769","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}