Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
I thought of those lines when I first viewed this brief, gripping portrayal of the supernatural in Poltergeist, so evocative of Eliot’s vision of the long line of marching dead, death having undone so many. For me, this was the most spooky, unsettling scene of the movie, offering nothing like the noisy, visually overwhelming horror of so many other set pieces that captured the public imagination – the evil tree, the possessed clown doll, the Hellmouth opening up in the kid’s bedroom, and all of the other crudely startling, special effects-driven, crowd-pleasing spectacle – but portraying something far more powerful and poignant. It’s quiet. Subtle. In the middle of the night, while the paranormal researchers fight to stay awake, if not exactly alert, a line of glowing human forms descends a staircase. To the naked eye, the phenomenon manifests as a bright light, looking perhaps like a sort of angel, but the sophisticated cameras reveal the true picture. These are the scores of restless, tortured souls no longer at peace, owing, it turns out, to the construction of a cookie cutter middle class suburb atop a graveyard that was supposed to have been relocated. The developers moved the headstones, but not the bodies, and the dead don’t appreciate the contempt.
They file by silently, not threatening, exactly, not even the stuff of nightmares, compared to everything else going on in the haunted house. They’re just souls trapped somehow between our world and the place they’re supposed to be, agitated by the indignity of stirring to find themselves buried beneath driveways and swimming pools, while the austere stone markers that preserved just a little bit of their earthly identities have been repositioned miles away, leaving their mortal remains to rot where they sit in complete anonymity.
These were all, plainly, ordinary people who once lived ordinary lives. Now they march slowly down the stairs, trapped in some awful, liminal space separating the physical from the eternal, lonely, disoriented, confused, and suffering. It’s more than merely frightening. The real horror lies in the terrible sadness of every lost soul descending those stairs, each so alone, people who were just like you and me, whose sorry fate we may all one day share.
