May 2017

GUY TALK
by Mark Bohm
In the car, I was talking to my barely teenaged
daughter. Something about our conversation
made me think of the movie Poltergeist. Not
the recent one, but the original from 1982.
Good film, I told her, and how if I didn’t think it might scare
her I would recommend she watch it. She started asking me
questions about the movie and I gave her a few highlights,
described a couple of my favorite scenes as best I could recall
them.
During our talk, I happened to mention when the movie
was made. “Oh, that’s not going to scare me,” she
scoffed. Apparently, because the movie was made all
those years back when her dad was growing up, back in the
days when there were no smartphones or streaming or even
the internet, when technology was so basic and crude, how
could it possibly scare her? She bolstered her impression by
recalling how only last year she read the book Christine by
Stephen King and then watched the movie. She reminded me
of how I had warned her before that movie how she might
find it too frightening, but she watched the movie and didn’t find
it so. In her mind, therefore, a horror movie from that primitive
time we call the ‘80s, when the effects couldn’t touch the
wizardry they’re capable of today, just wouldn’t be scary.
Oh really, sweetie.
I checked the rating and it was PG. I recalled
seeing the movie in the theater when it was
released and I was about her age, maybe
younger. So, I figured let’s have a nice family
movie night in the living room and revisit a
classic.
It didn’t take long before my kid realized that it doesn’t take the
most cutting edge, modern filmmaking effects to make quality.
Or scary. All it really took was a shot of a little girl talking to the
static snow of a television screen. (What I hadn’t expected was
how the film’s depiction of a television station signing off for the
night after playing the national anthem caused me to silently
acknowledge how those days could seem primitive to today’s
teenager.) Add a creepy old tree and some thunderstorms to
the mix, and before you know it, my kid realized the 35-year-old
film wasn’t so tame after all.
After about 40 minutes, we
decided that if our family
wanted any chance of a normal
night of everyone in the house
falling asleep peacefully, the
movie had to go off. Afterward, I
regretted that I’d recommended
it to my daughter at all. I felt
slightly better the next day
when she announced she
wanted to finish watching the
movie. I told her we’ll let a little
more time pass before we give
that a go.
I was my daughter’s age in the
‘80s and of course I remember
and have fond memories of
a lot of the good movies that
came out of the era. I hope to introduce my kids to more of
them. Maybe in doing so, it will further dispel any lingering
notion they might have that if it wasn’t made in their day, it
doesn’t hold up. For the time being, though, I think I’ll stick with
the comedies. P
54
MAY 2017