By Jennifer Larson

Suburbanites all over get ready to shudder, because POLTERGEIST is headed back to a neighborhood near you!

The smash hit that terrified children and adults alike, is celebrating its 25th anniversary by being re-released for one day only. Latimes.com says “the digitally remastered film will be screened in theaters and then released on DVD Oct. 9.” Just when I thought it was safe to build that pool I was thinking about.

A real good ghost story is hard to find, and this offering by Steven Spielberg has always stood out as one of the best. Besides scaring the pants off of millions of people, the movie was surrounded by tragedy and mysterious illness and death for many of the cast and crew, which only heightened the chill factor. While there were some awesome special effects for the time, the magic of this movie was in the story itself. It was written by Spielberg, which further proves his dominance in film. As far as marketing goes, it’s a brilliant move to cash in on a movie classic 25 years after it was originally released.

The real point to the re-release is probably to promote the DVD, but who cares. Marketing or not, we all benefit from the ploy, especially when you consider it’s being done right before Halloween. I’m always looking for a good scary movie to see that time of year. I’m not talking about blood and gore, I’m talking about a movie that leaves you sleeping with the lights on for two months after you’ve seen it. The last movie that did that to me was THE SIXTH SENSE. I do have a word to the wise for anybody who hasn’t seen it before; if you like clowns don’t go see this movie. Everybody else who has seen it knows what I’m talking about.

The bigger question here is whether or not we will be seeing more of this type of marketing. The answer to that lies in what it always does … money. If this one day event, and the subsequent DVD sales do well, I would expect to be seeing much more of this type of thing. Anybody else up for ENCOUNTER OF THE THIRD KIND?