I was shocked when I realized that Poltergeist had actually garnered a youngster friendly PG rating. I had always assumed Poltergeist was rated R. This tale of malevolent spirits tormenting the angelic youngest member of a family is anything but kid friendly. The White Light scene is enough to terrify more impressionable viewers. Seeing Carol Anne sucked in to her closet by malevolent spirits is absolutely pushing the boundaries of a PG-rating. Poltergeist is highly atmospheric and brings scares that go beyond the run-of-the-mill variety. The second and third Poltergeist films dont quite live up to the bar set by the original, but this 1982 Tobe Hooper classic scared an entire generation of viewers upon its release and still holds up fairly well to this day.
A telekinetic wax museum/roadside attraction proprietor torments a group of young travelers. You can see some influences from Tourist Trap in the House of Wax remake. House of Wax almost seemed to take more of its cues from this 1979 film than it did from its source material. Director David Schmoeller went on to direct more genre fair, including 1989s story of malevolent playthings, Puppet Master. This flick somehow managed to land a PG rating. There is certainly more blood than you could sneak in to a film with a PG rating today. Tourist Trap is a bizarre film. The cackling mannequin and the windows that open and close themselves (with the help of telekinesis) in the scene leading up to the first death in the film is still spooky, even when re-visiting the film years after first seeing it.
The film is full of creepy segments; the whole sequence where Mike realizes the person across the way from his is his mirror image and then gets attacked by a crazy masked man-who then disappears-was highly unsettling. The ledge sequence was also particularly unnerving. John Cusack plays a true crime author that holes himself up in an allegedly haunted hotel room and the results are anything but predictable. This Stephen King adaptation manages to be quite frightening in spite of its PG-13 classification. 1408 is another great example of a PG-13 rated horror film that wouldnt necessarily have benefited from being pushed to an R-rating. There wasnt anything missing from 1408 that would have been made more effective with the addition of R-rated antics.
