One of the great things about buying a brand new house rather than an older home is that there is less chance for ghosts to be in your home. Nobody has had a chance to die or be murdered and haunt the place.
Steven and Diane Freeling (Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams) live in lovely new neighbourhood in Orange County, California with their children Dana, Robbie, and Carol Anne (Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robins and Heather O’Rourke).
Steven is a real estate agent who works for the company that has built the homes in this community. Everything is fine. One night during a storm something seems to have come through the static on the TV. Then strange things begin to happen.
It begins with chairs moving around the house and then things get worse. One dark and stormy night something sucks Carol Anne into the closet and into another realm. Steven and Diane get help from a group of parapsychologists from the university. They inform them that they are dealing with a poltergeist haunting and Carol Anne is trapped on the other side.
Steve then finds out that the whole neighbourhood was built on cemetery but his boss assures him that the graves were all moved down the road. The parapsychologists bring in a spiritual medium named Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein) to help get Carol Anne back.
Poltergeist is a classic. It’s scary, intense and frightening. It also breaks the mold that hauntings could only happen in spooky old houses with a dark history.