before digital sampling, before computers were in the studio. All of that was at a very crude stage and Mark, Richard and Stephen were still able to do incredible work.” One of Howarth’s most iconic contribu-
tions to Poltergeist is Carol Anne’s ethe- real voice calling out from the netherworld. “We met with Spielberg and I asked him what he had in mind,” he re- calls. “He looked straight at me and said, ‘Earth to Venus.’ I said, ‘Fabulous,’ walked into the hallway and started to sweat! I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought, ‘If I don’t get this right, I’ll never work in this town again.’” Howarth returned to his studio and
began experimenting with various tech- niques in order to realize Spielberg’s di- rective. After several aborted attempts, inspiration arrived from an unlikely source. “I was travelling to [MGM] when Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ came on the radio. I heard the break in the middle of the song where the band stops and Robert Plant sings a cappella. The sound of his voice is a pre-echo and was actually a tech- nical mistake. It turns out that when he was in the recording studio, there was a better take that was bleeding over the headphones back into the track. At that moment, I understood what ‘Earth to Venus’ meant. Spielberg was talking about sounds travel- ling over a great distance. I then went back to my studio and devised what you now hear in the movie.” For the tree that abducts Robbie from his bed-
room, Mangini reused some of the animal sounds accompanied by foghorn blasts that were slowed down. (Howarth recalls that they were trying to cre- ate noises that represented “wood stretching with- out breaking.”) “Poltergeist required designed sounds, things
you’d never heard before,” Mangini insists. “We were nuts back then about acquiring new sounds and always wanted to be original in everything we did. So we eschewed using sound libraries as much as we could.” Mangini remembers the incredible lengths they
would go to in order to discover the right sound. For the sequences when characters would burst back through the dimensional portal into the real world, and were dripping with purplish ectoplasm, the men filled balloons full of Jell-O and threw them on the ground or stabbed them to get the right sound. “We tore the balloons apart and squeezed the stuff
out of them to get this extrusion sound,” recalls Mangini. “Not satisfied with that, Stephen actually put on a bathing suit and lathered some shaving cream on his back. He was trying to get that suction-sound you hear when your back is pressed against the wall of a shower stall and you pull away. We could suddenly hear these great fart-like sounds!” Things eventually became downright stomach-
churning in their search for the perfect effect. When creating the noises for the crawling, spewing steak, the men started playing with dead animals. “That was the first time we experimented with meat to make squishing noises,” Howarth admits,
Scaring Up Sounds: (from L to R) Noisemakers Mark Mangini, Stephen Hunter Flick and Richard L. Anderson, and (top) Diane meets The White Beast.
chuckling at the memory. “One of the greatest sources for that is raw chicken. For an entire ses- sion we started fooling around with the innards, rip- ping the flesh off and breaking the limbs. It was disgusting but we got these wonderfully gross sounds!” Really, the only way the sound effects crew
could’ve taken things further would be to record ac- tual ghosts. Oh, wait... they tried that too. Mangini explains that during the filming of Poltergeist, he met a hypnotist who happened to head up the Para- psychology Department at UCLA. “He was going around the country investigating
hauntings and I thought, ‘I have to meet this guy.’ I ended up going on five ghost hunts with him, and even developed a four-channel recording system that we could use to echo locate or triangulate the presence of a spirit, should one manifest itself. We’d then have high-fidelity audio proof of paranor- mal activity occurring.”
Yes, during the making of Poltergeist, Mangini
took his recording equipment out on real-life super- natural stakeouts, in hopes of capturing something he could use in the movie. “These ghost hunts would involve me sitting in
the dark rooms of supposedly haunted houses with all my equipment trying to document a haunting,” he continues. “The hope was that I could go back to my producer, Frank Marshall, and say, ‘I have the sounds of actual ghosts to put in our film! You have to put this in the advertisements – Poltergeist in- cludes the sounds of real ghosts!’ I thought that would have been one of the all-time great ad cam- paigns in the history of horror films, which was aw- fully sophomoric of me.” But the burning question remains: did Mangini suc-
cessfully document evidence of the supernatural? He laughs at the notion: “All I succeeded in doing
was recording a great deal of tape-hiss and scaring the crap out of myself!”
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