Whenever I'm talking to people about horror movies that genuinley scared them, the movie I hear the most frequently cited is Poltergeist.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

- Partially based of an the true story of Cheeseman Park in Denver, Colorado, where the city council built the park over a cemetery without moving all the bodies. The park is now supposedly cursed.

- Was almost written by Stephen King.

- Though Tobe Hooper is credited as the director, and though his involvement was certainly important to the movie's success (the guy who made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre probably has at least a few things to add to a scary movie), this is undoubtedly a Steven Spielberg movie. He wrote it, he apparently created most of the storyboards, was there everyday on set, fine-tuning the production and interacting with the actors, and once shooting wrapped, he took complete control over every aspect of post production. He only stopped working on the film so he could begin work on E.T., which came out a week after this movie. It's a common theory that Spielberg acquired Tobe Hooper's help so he wouldn't technically be the director of Poltergeist, which would have been against his contract , which dictated he could not make any movies for anyone else at the time.

- The hands that rip the flesh off the investigator's face in the bathroom scene are Spielberg's.

- The roar of the Beast, the big, bad, demon thing that attacks the family at the end, is currently being used for the MGM lion roar, which is flipping awesome.

- All the corpses in the pool near the end of the movie are all real. Because they were cheaper than making fake bodies.

Actress JoBeth Williams was not told this before she jumped in.

- As a nod to George Lucas from his best buddy, Robbie is a Star Wars fan.

- Zelda Rubinstein, like her character in the movie, was supposedly a psychic.

- Over the course of the whole production, Heather O'Rourke (Carol-Anne) was only genuinely scared during the scene where she's holding on to her bed as the closet tries to suck her into the other dimension. When the first take was done, Spielberg promised her she would never have to do that again.

- The scary tree outside the kids' window is based on Spielberg's childhood fear of a tree outside his window. He was also afraid of clowns.

- Speaking of which, SCREW THAT THING.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=TWDDoydceVg

Also, the air. Freaking pervert air.

Anyway, during the filming of that scene, the clown puppet actually was strangling actor Oliver Robins, and he probably would have died had Spielberg not realized he wasn't acting. Weirdly enough, the same thing happened on another Spielberg produced movie, Back to the Future III. Michael J. Fox was also accidentally strangled during the scene with the noose, and we were almost in a world without that man. That, my friends, is truly horrifying.

- No fancy editing was used for the scene where the mother turns around to see all the chairs stacked up on the table; it was all done in one take. While the camera looked the other way, crew members quickly removed the chairs on the ground and put a bunch stuck together on top of the table.

- Was filmed on the same street as Elliot's house in E.T.

- Was originally given an R rating before the filmmakers convinced the ratings board to lower it to PG without them having to cut anything, which actually explains a lot.

You know, for kids!

Anyway, yeah, this movie rocks.

This post... is clear.