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Poltergeist

Name: Poltergeist
Genre: Horror
Released: 2015-05-20
Duration: 93 min

They know what scares you.

20151h 33mcritics 5.2/10

Horror

A family's suburban home is invaded by angry spirits. When the terrifying apparitions escalate their attacks and take the youngest daughter, the family must come together to rescue her.

starring Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Saxon Sharbino, Kyle Catlett

FLICKFEEL

from 39 comments

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what the internet says

FUN

how good a time it was

MEANINGFUL

how much it moved you

Two separate readings, not parts of the score — the score says how much of it held you, these say what kind of watch it was.

Nobody has rated this on FlickFeel yet. This is public discussion of this title, read into a curve. It is not a rating and it never becomes one.

Read from 39 comments (34 from Metacritic, 5 from TMDB reviews) — 8 of them described how it moves.

Thin evidence — the shape below rests on 8 comments. The shaded band is how wide the uncertainty actually is, and it is drawn to scale.

Not enough people said when to name this shape. The line is what the evidence draws, not a finding.

Hover the curveDrag across the curve to see what people said at any point.

height: how intense it got, 0–100
gold above: how tender it felt. violet below — what it cost. Thick on both at once means it was doing both.
tension rail: how much was still unresolved
grey haze: how sure we are — wider means fewer people described it

what critics said

Published reviews, not felt experience — a different question from the one above, and never mixed into the FlickFeel score.

Metascore

Tomatometer

89%

FlickFeel

“Make no mistake: Poltergeist is a Spielberg film, no matter what the credits say. His stylistic fingerprints are all over the movie, never more so than in the opening third, which turns a suburban haunting into an occasion for Spielbergian movie magic before the ghosts get down to business.”
Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club · 91
“Although the sub-religious gobbledegook (including a tiresome midget medium) is hard to take, it is consistently redeemed by its creator's dazzling sense of craft.”
Staff (Not Credited), Time Out · 90
“At first and final glance, Poltergeist is simply a riveting demonstration of the movies' power to scare the sophistication out of any viewer. It creates honest thrills within the confines of a P.G. rating and reaches for standard shock effects and the forced suspension of disbelief only at the climax, when we realize that the characters are behaving with such obtuseness precisely because they are trapped inside a horror movie.”
Richard Corliss, Time · 90
“Poltergiest is no nonstop scream express; at times it pulls its punches (Spielberg wants that PG rating), and at times its effects are bigger than life and less than terrifying. But like Spielberg's Jaws, which was a perfect genre movie, Poltergeist does what it's supposed to do about as well as it can be done.”
Bill Cosford, Miami Herald · 88
“Poltergeist's most canny conceit is how it takes the concept of a haunted house—up to that point a gothic, remote icon (you practically had to accept a dare and then drive halfway across the state to ever find yourself in one)—and plops it in the middle of the most mundane of all possible locations: American suburbia.”
Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine · 88

Scores from Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, read 28 Aug 2026. Quotes belong to their publications and link to the full reviews.

what people actually wrote

Grouped by where it was written, because a considered review and a reaction typed an hour after the credits are different things. Every quote links to its source.

Metacritic35 read

“the scene with the poltergeist expert is really good”
rive040about 33–66% inread it ↗
“the iconic tv scene”
rive040about 33–66% inread it ↗
“The scene where the guy pulls off his skin is very disturbng”
rive040about 50–70% inread it ↗
“Apart from one face ripping scene”
HellHoleHorrorabout 50–70% inread it ↗

TMDB5 read

“It’s not the worst remake of all time, but it’s just ordinary. It’s bland, lifeless, vanilla, and feels like what the Lifetime Channel in America would do to a remake of the Tobe Spielberg classic haunting film. I think the only reason Gil Kenan was hired for this movie was because the movie is based around a monster house and he depicted a monster so well in his last film that the job only seemed like a no brainer. The problem is Kenan forgets to produce likable characters and interesting scare”
Zevi Wolmarkread it ↗
“> Would have been a better film if it was an original. Unnecessary to compare this with the original and I tried, but impossible to avoid it since it's an official remake. Everything, from the house to frame by frame, all the scenes looked the same, except the cast and it's set in the present world with the daily life's modern gadgets. If you had not seen the 80s film, then there's a little chance you might like it. Though it was not a serious horror movie, or a scary movie to consider, still”
Renoread it ↗
“I had huge reservations about watching this remake, which I felt was completely unnecessary. It wasn't as bad as I had anticipated, and that the bad reviews at the time gave me the impression I should fear or avoid watching it. The special effects were pretty good, and Sam Rockwell, Jared Harris and Jane Adams (how wonderful it was to see her again, after her exceptional work in 'Happiness'!) sold the film for me. I knew what to expect after liking, but not loving, director Gil Kenan's earlier a”
talisencrwread it ↗

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