PALTRY GUISE

POLTERGEIST (1982)
dir: Tobe Hooper

MAD #237, March 1983
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Jack Davis

Steven Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) is the patriach of a household in a Southern California suburb, where he lives with his wife Diane (JoBeth Williams) and their three children Robbie (Oliver Robins), Dana (Dominique Dunne), and Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke). Carol Anne speaks to the static on the TV at night.

You see, at one time before cable was the standard, and infomercials had not yet been invented, television sets used to sign off at night and then have nothing but static until the morning, and... oh, never mind.

The family gets into an argument with the neighbors when his remote control is interfering with their football game. Its significance in the movie is that animosity turns to empathy at the end, which is irrelevant when they leave that part out of the parody. The first omen of the house being haunted is that Carol Anne's pet canary dies. Robbie can't sleep because he's afraid of the tree he sees out a window during a thunderstorm but is assured there's nothing to be afraid of. The parody makes too much out of the fact that the parents smoke pot to relax at night.

Carol Anne, being so small, has no fear of the ghosts inside the TV static, who she refers to as “the TV people”. The ghosts escape and start to do weird things in the house, first harmless things in the kitchen.

The next night, the tree Robbie was scared of comes to life and tries to kidnap him. They save him and Carol Anne has been kidnapped by the ghosts. They call a paranormal team to investigate consisting of lead scientist Martha Lesh (Beatrice Straight) and her assistants (Richard Lawson and Martin Casella).

The children's room that was cordonned off has everything floating around, one of the investigators imagines himself peeling his face off in the bathroom, and Carol Anne communicated with the family through the television.

The family and the paranormal experts decide to hire a psychic, Tangina (Zelda Rubenstein) who in my opinion was creepier than anything in the movie. Tangina can see the other plane and can figure how to rescue Carol Anne by getting her to looking into the light, testing where things are with marked tennis balls.

The dollhouse says Ibsen because of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, and the doll you see is of The Crypt Keeper, which Davis had drawn years earlier.

They omit the “just when you think it's over” moment where they arrange to get out after the father's last day of work, and all hell breaks loose the minute he leaves.

Diane is thrown around in her bedroom, the two youngest kids are attacked by a doll in their room, and it's revealed all along that the house has been built on top of ancient graves.

POLTERGOOSED
Crazy #94, April 1983
w: David Allikas
a: Bob Camp

Another essential scene MAD omits is when Steven, who works for the agency that builds these developments, is being lied to by his boss Mr. Teague (James Karen, who people from NY and NJ would recognize from Pathmark commercials) about how they move the graves as well as the tombstones when they build new real estate on old graveyards.

The movie ends with the family evacuating prematurely and going to a hotel. The punchline in this is that it's the Bates Motel. In Cracked they decided to go a step further and do a mashup of the two.


POLTER-PSYCHO-GEIST
Cracked #221, August 1986
w: Mortimer Post and Mort Todd
a: John Reiner

Dee Snider, Stephen King, and Mikhail Gorbachev aren't in the article. Cracked would just include everything from the issue on their cover around this time.

Since Poltergeist ended with the Freeling family checking into a motel, they decided to pick up where the movie left off. Here it's the Bates Motel from Psycho run by Norman Bates (Tony Perkins).

The bellboy here is Marty Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein.

The twist ending for Psycho was (spoiler) that the corpse of Norman's mother was kept in the basement motel and he would pretend to be her.

There were several unnecessary sequels to both Poltergeist and Psycho.