I watched this for the first time in years recently. It’s funny how well this movie aged. Steven Spielberg often strikes me as the film equivalent of music producer Trevor Horn: things he makes are often marked by a certain glossy artificiality and obvious studiocraft, dusted down with stardust and childlike wonder, engrossing but as inauthentic and unconvincing, in their way, as Mr. Rogers’s studio set. There’s always a sense of effort, usually at “spectacle” (in scare quotes, just like that) and in Spielberg’s case, usually some cloying emotional content, which there are traces of here although it’s manageable.
So it’s always been funny to me to call this a “horror” movie, which almost requires grit rather than gloss and authenticity to generate scares. But, Tobe Hooper directed, and if nothing else just about anything Tobe Hooper touches is going to have a few brilliantly scary scenes. I will say the visual effects that (mostly) seemed so dazzling at the time look much cheaper and faker today than I remember them being. It’s a movie about the supernatural, but it’s more a family drama/action movie of sorts (Spielberg, go figure) than a horror movie.
Actually, watching it again after so long, it struck me, it’s a pretty unique movie. It owes debts to movies that came before but really resynthesizes things in a manner that was novel for the time, and probably still is today. It was worth the rewatch, but probably not another one soon. Still, it hasn’t totally aged out, and deserves its rep.
