Sometimes, the people who make movies don’t always get the credit they deserve. Carrie Fisher served as an uncredited script doctor on the 1998 Adam Sandler movie The Wedding Singer, and Quentin Tarantino did an uncredited rewrite of the Saturday Night Live sketch-turned-movie It’s Pat. This is more common with writers than directors, but it can happen to directors, too.
For example, Richard Donner, who helmed the 1979 masterpiece Superman, shot a good deal of the sequel Superman II, but was fired partway through the movie. Richard Lester, who replaced him, received full credit. And while all the details about it still aren’t really known, there’s a certain 1982 horror film that many speculate was directed by someone other than the guy in the credits.
Poltergeist, which is currently available to stream on HBO Max, follows an ordinary suburban family who begin to experience strange things in their home. Furniture and toys move on their own, a glass of milk shatters out of nowhere, and the youngest child in the family, five-year-old Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), begins to communicate with beings through the television. At first these events are dismissed, but during a thunderstorm one night, a tree outside the windows of the kids’ room crashes in and snatches the boy.
Then, a portal opens in their closet, sucking Carol Anne into another dimension. With help from some paranormal investigators, the family tries everything to bring her back. The credited director on Poltergeist is Tobe Hooper, who is best known for directing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other gruesome scary movies, as well as a couple sci-fi horror films like Lifeforce.
The movie was also produced by Steven Spielberg, and to this day, there’s an ongoing debate about which of the two men was the real director. The contradictions between the two parties begin as far back as the very beginning of production. Originally, after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg wanted to do a sci-fi horror film called Night Skies, which was basically about a handful of aliens landing on Earth and terrorizing a family.
Eventually Spielberg reworked that idea into the heartwarming E.T., which was much more suitable to his sensibilities. Still, he wasn’t entirely cool with letting go of Night Skies, so he brought in director Tobe Hooper to maybe direct it. Some say Hooper changed Night Skies into Poltergeist, substituting ghosts for aliens, while Hooper himself has said he shot down Night Skies and came in with the entirely original idea of Poltergeist, which he’d been working on for years.
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