A conversation about Poltergeist today reminded me of
something I’d been meaning to post about for a while. A couple of months ago I
went through a Steven Spielberg binge – partly for this essay on his
development as a political filmmaker, partly because, hey, Spielberg. But as I
went back over his earlier work, it struck me just how much Spielberg’s filmmaking
language owes to horror. Obviously, several of his earliest films – Duel,
Something Evil, Jaws – actually are horror films. But I’m intrigued by how many
of his other films rely on horror tropes.
