my inner 9 year old just screamed
Like a lot of latchkey Gen-Xers in the 80s, I spent a lot of time with the TV babysitter. The early 80s was also the advent of cable TV, complete with the old style plastic woodgrain channel-changey boxes and all that. In what must have been ’83 or ’84, we had HBO for a while. During that time, I saw the movie Poltergeist many times, because some sadistic HBO programmer thought putting freaky scary movies like that on TV at 10am when little kids are watching would be funny.
I guess it was. Most of the movie wasn’t all that bad, but then there was the clown, the leading cause of coulrophobia for an entire decade. that damned thing still creeps me out.
I wasn’t consciously aware of it until today (but given the current entertainment landcape, I probably should have just assumed), but there’s a remake of that classic Tobey Hooper (or was it Speilberg?) horror flick coming out next month. This is the big lobby poster:
I guess I wasn’t the only one that movie scarred, although the new clown is a little too on-the-nose sinister; the old one was creepy precisely because it wasn’t meant to be.
Oh well.
