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supernatural
1982 · PG · 1h 54m
They're here.
It started as poltergeist mischief — chairs sliding, silverware bending, something whispering through the static. Then it took the five-year-old.
The Freelings are a comfortable suburban family in a California tract home when strange phenomena begin: objects moving on their own, a presence speaking through television static to their youngest daughter Carol Anne. What starts as playful and inexplicable turns catastrophic when Carol Anne is pulled through a portal in her closet and disappears into another dimension, leaving only her voice behind.
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The Freelings — real-estate agent Steve, his wife Diane, and their three children Dana, Robbie, and five-year-old Carol Anne — live in a new-build tract home in the planned community of Cuesta Verde, California. One night Carol Anne is drawn to a television showing post-broadcast static and begins speaking to it as though something inside is answering. The next night, a white hand reaches out from the screen and the house shakes with a burst of energy. Carol Anne turns to her family and says: they're here. In the days that follow the manifestations are playful — silverware bends, a cracked glass spills on its own, chairs slide across the kitchen floor without being touched. The family treats it almost like a parlor trick, pushing Carol Anne across the floor to watch her glide. They do not yet understand what they are dealing with.
During a violent thunderstorm, things turn. Robbie, who is already frightened of the gnarled tree outside his window and a clown doll in his room, watches the tree come alive. A branch crashes through the glass, seizes him, and drags him outside into the storm, the trunk splitting open to swallow him. Steve and Diane pull him free while the tornado that tore the tree from the ground carries it away. In their absence, the closet in the children's bedroom glows and warps, a vortex opens, and Carol Anne is taken. When the family races back inside she is gone, leaving only her voice calling through the television static.
Steve and Diane bring in a team of parapsychologists from the local university — Dr. Lesh and her assistants Ryan and Marty. In the Freeling home they witness objects spinning in midair behind closed doors and a luminous spirit form descending the staircase. Dr. Lesh determines this is a poltergeist intrusion involving multiple entities, not a single haunting, and that Carol Anne is trapped in a kind of limbo tethered to the house. Steve, meanwhile, learns from his employer that Cuesta Verde was built over a relocated cemetery. The bones, he is assured, were moved before construction began. He accepts this, for now.
Dr. Lesh brings in a renowned spiritual medium named Tangina Barrons — small, formidable, unshakeable. After moving through the house, Tangina explains that the land holds many spirits who have not crossed over, trapped in a dreamlike state and drawn to the warmth of Carol Anne's living presence. Among them is something she calls the Beast: not an ordinary ghost but a predatory, malevolent entity that has latched onto Carol Anne as an anchor to hold the other spirits and prevent them from leaving. It is intelligent and it will not give her up willingly. Tangina identifies the entrance to the other side as the children's closet and the exit as the living room ceiling. She threads a rope between them. Diane, whose bond with Carol Anne is strongest, will go through.
They open the portal. The house shakes. Diane, tied to the rope, steps into the closet and enters a roaring tunnel of light and debris. In the living room the others hold the rope running from the ceiling, waiting for the signal. Tangina cries out and they pull — dragging Diane and Carol Anne back through the opening and crashing them onto the living room floor, both unconscious and covered in ectoplasm. They are alive. Tangina surveys the house and declares: this house is clean.
She is wrong. On the family's last night before the move, while Steve is at the office and the older kids are away, the house reasserts itself. Robbie notices the clown doll is not in its chair. He looks under the bed. When he turns back the clown is behind him — its arm wraps around his throat and drags him beneath the bed, choking him with its long limbs. The closet detonates open again, a swirling vortex with the presence of the Beast filling the room, its essence trying to pull the children through. Diane races upstairs and the house attacks her — invisible forces fling her across the room, drag her up the walls, pin her to the ceiling. She fights free and runs out the back door, where she falls into the unfinished swimming pool excavation, now filled with muddy water from the storm.
In the pool, coffins erupt from the ground around her. Waterlogged bodies in various states of decay float up and jostle against her as she screams. The graves were never moved. Only the headstones were relocated. The entire development of Cuesta Verde was built directly over the bodies. She tears herself out of the pool, gets back into the house, rips Robbie free from the clown, grabs Carol Anne, and they run.
Steve arrives home with his boss Teague just as coffins begin erupting across the yard and street. He confronts Teague as the neighborhood watches in shock and the Freeling house shakes and glows. The family piles into the car. Behind them the house reaches its limit — the structure contorts, folds inward, and collapses into a single bright, swirling point of light. In one implosive moment the whole thing is sucked into a portal and disappears, leaving an empty lot and stunned neighbors staring at the ground where it stood.
The Freelings check into a Holiday Inn, exhausted and filthy, carrying their bags into the room like a family at the end of an ordinary trip. After the door closes, Steve rolls the television set out onto the balcony and leaves it there. The camera lingers on the blank space where it was.
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