Poltergeist

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

Poltergeist mistake picture

Visible crew/equipment: When Diane and Steve go to their neighbor's house after the scene of the chair sliding across the floor, there's a flash of lightning that reveals a shadow of a fan that's blowing on the actors on the left side of the house.

jerimiah

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: The piece of licorice that Carol Anne puts into the cigar box with the dead parakeet "for when he's hungry" appears to be close to 6 inches long when she's placing it in the box but no more than a couple of inches long when it's shown in the box a few moments later. (00:10:10)

Jeff Swanson

Continuity mistake: Just before the house starts to implode, Teague is backing away from it and as he does so, he passes a couple of white garbage bags on the sidewalk and backs into the street. In the next shot, taken from across the street showing bystanders being blown backwards, Teague is visible in the background; he's back on the sidewalk tripping backwards over the same bags he safely passed moments before. (01:48:10)

Jeff Swanson

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

Other mistake: The night after burying the bird, a lightning strike projects an image of the tree outside onto the bedroom wall. However, the silhouette has nothing to do with the tree's shape.

Sacha

Factual error: During the climax of the film, coffins from the cemetery below rise out of the ground. Only problem: they're rising vertically. Coffins are laid horizontally.

JC Fernandez

Continuity mistake: When Robbie throws his jacket to cover the clown, he throws it effortlessly and misses by far; one can even notice he throws it quite low. Shot changes and the jacket is flying high at a bigger speed.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: Before the clown attacks him, Robbie stretches his right arm and turns the light off. A shot later his right arm is resting by his side, and he is lowering his left arm.

Sacha

Continuity mistake: When Carol Ann is in the kitchen while her mom is doing the chair demonstration she is holding up a toy with her left hand and helmet in the right hand. When chair slides across the kitchen floor a close up shows Carol Ann yawning then immediately back to her holding the items. Clearly they inserted the yawn scene in as an after thought.

robsuttonjr

Continuity mistake: The window in Robbie and Carol Ann's room never has a mini blind. After the tree breaks through the window and the family races up to their room the window is intact with a blind in it. (00:39:00)

Revealing mistake: When Diane is on the ceiling, a piece of something white falls right in front of her, landing on the ceiling. This shows the set was upside down and she was actually on the floor. The scene was shot on a rotating stage but the little piece that falls gives away the effect.

manthabeat

Carol Anne Freeling: They're here.

More quotes from Poltergeist

Trivia: The scene where the ghosts stacked the chairs on the kitchen table was filmed in one take with no cuts. As the camera followed Diane Freeling to the kitchen sink, the crew members rushed to the table, put an already built pyramid of chairs on the table and then took away the individual chairs.

More trivia for Poltergeist

Question: What exactly did the ghosts want with Carol Anne?

Answer: They were attracted to her life force. She was such a young child, that it was particularly pure and strong within her.

raywest

Answer: They were partly attracted to Carol Anne because she she was born in her house.

She was not literally born inside the house. She was born while the family was living there.

raywest

The movie literally says she was born IN the house. When Teague asks, "One of your children was born in your house, huh?" and Steve replies, "Carol Anne."

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.