Poltergeist

Continuity mistake: A few seconds before Robbie looks at his clown toy, you can see a Rubik's cube near his head. When the camera angle changes, the cube is gone.

Continuity mistake: When the dog jumps in the back of the cab, he gets in the right side and Robbie is nowhere to be seen. It cuts away very briefly, and when it cuts back suddenly Robbie is very much on the right side of the seat and the dog is on the left- not enough time for them to have moved and settled in.

Krista

Continuity mistake: When Robbie wakes up to cover the clown, his grip on the jacket and the position of his head (crouched neck against breast vs raised neck) changes between one frame and the other.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: After Carol goes through her mom's body, a huge wind sweeps away the living room. The lamp next to the TV falls down, but a second later it's facing upwards again.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: The reddish brown goo on Robbie's face after he's almost eaten by the tree varies between camera shots.

jerimiah

Continuity mistake: After Carol Ann's been abducted, her family walks upstairs and places one mattress on top of another. A few seconds later they are arranged in a different way.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: When Diane and Carol Anne are lying in the bathtub towards the end, Carol Anne's hair and hand position change drastically between the wide shot and the closeup.

Krista

Continuity mistake: Right after JoBeth Williams and Craig T Nelson joke with Dr. Lesh about not showing the tapes of their haunting on "60 Minutes" or "That's Incredible", JoBeth walks to the table with Dr. Lesh's flask in her hand. As she walks from the sink, there's a silver cap on it. When she gets to the table, the cap is gone. She couldn't have removed it out of sight, she had a coffee cup in her other hand.

Ingabritzen

Continuity mistake: When Diane and Carol are in the tub, the amount of red slime on Diane's forehead, and foam on Steven's hand increases or decreases between shots.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: The first night the ghosts come out of the TV, before Carol Ann wakes up, there's a pillow on the background laying on the floor by a basket. When she walks towards the TV the pillow is standing upright by the basket.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: Returning from the pool, Diane enters the kids' bedroom and starts to fly, covering the door with mud. A second later the door is clean, only to dirty itself in the following shots.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: When Robbie leaves in a taxi, in the close-up Steve is massaging Diane, in the wide angle he is just standing behind. This keeps swapping back and forth.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: When Carol Ann is about to be abducted, sometimes she is suspended horizontally over the bed, others diagonally.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: After the credits, the position and amount of beer cans around the fallen bicycle changes between shots.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: When Carol Anne goes to the TV in the parents' bedroom the first time, the clock on the TV changes from 2:38, 2:58, 2:38 and then back to 2:53 with each camera angle change.

jerimiah

Continuity mistake: As the Freeling family is escaping through the side of their house, you will notice that Diane is holding a doll that looks like Carol Anne.

Continuity mistake: Toward the end, when Diane and the kids are trying to escape, they start into the kitchen only to see 2 coffins come up through the floor. The initial shot shows the coffins quickly shooting up to almost the same height and then stopping, but in the next shot, in which the coffin on the right opens, the one on the left is a couple of feet lower and is still slowly rising.

Jeff Swanson

Revealing mistake: When the chair moves across the kitchen floor, Craig T. Nelson goes to investigate it (after it has stopped moving). He goes up to the chair and flips it over. If you look closely, Craig almost hits the camera with the chair's legs. You can tell this has happened because the camera moves up very quickly and Craig looks straight at the camera crew with very big guilty eyes. This is more easily visible on the widescreen version of the film. (00:33:30)

More mistakes in Poltergeist

Carol Anne Freeling: They're here.

More quotes from Poltergeist

Trivia: While filming the toy clown attacking Robbie, the clown's arms were wrapped tightly around Oliver's neck. He immediately said he couldn't breathe but Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper both thought that he was ad-libbing. When Spielberg saw Oliver's face turning purple, he realised that he really was being asphyxiated and ran over to remove the arms from his neck.

More trivia for Poltergeist

Question: What exactly is the red slime on the body of Carol Anne and her mother after they are rescued from the another dimension?

Answer: Ectoplasm.

Phixius

More questions & answers from Poltergeist

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.