Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

Poltergeist II: The Other Side arrives four years after its predecessor, minus Tobe Hooper, minus Steven Spielberg, and minus any lingering reason for the Freeling family to remain interesting. The house is gone. The neighborhood has become an archaeological dig. Left behind are a family crammed into a Phoenix bungalow with Grandma Jess, a television-free living room, and a nineteenth-century preacher named Henry Kane who wants the youngest child for reasons the screenplay explains at length and with visible strain. This is a sequel in the purest commercial sense: the same people, the same problems, a larger budget, a worse script. Critics at the time were unkind. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus has since been unkinder.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the film offers a modest and largely incidental inventory. Will Sampson appears as Taylor, a Native American shaman who supplies the family with smoke spirits, charmed spears, and a Hopi obelisk out in the Arizona desert. Zelda Rubinstein returns as Tangina, the psychic who has apparently been traversing the spirit world in her spare time. Both performances are sincere and both characters are functional. The film has no interest in interrogating what it means to borrow Hopi ritual for a monster movie, and no interest in anything else either. No romantic subtext, no gender politics, no economic grievance, no climate anxiety, no body-image discourse, no neurodivergent coding. The 1980s had other concerns, most of them involving practical effects.

Where the film does exert itself is in the design of its villain. Julian Beck plays Kane with a hollowed-out fervor that is genuinely unsettling, and H. R. Giger contributed creature designs the production largely squandered, a fact Giger himself noted with characteristic bluntness. Kane's backstory, a doomsday cult led into a cavern and left to die when the prophecy failed, is the closest the film comes to a thesis, and that thesis concerns religious delusion, not social reform. Nothing here lectures. Nothing here instructs. The film wants to frighten teenagers and sell tickets, and it managed the latter. On the ledger of contemporary cultural signifiers this is a lean entry: a shaman, a psychic, and a worm that possesses a man through a bottle of mezcal. The mezcal worm, at least, has aged well.