If you, like me, are writing a haunted-house movie, it's a worthwhile exercise to compare the structures of Stanley Kubrick's hypnotic masterpiece The Shining with Steven Spielberg's thrilling, personable Poltergeist. Both are movies about families trapped in haunted houses, but The Shining is grand, quiet, still and stately, while Poltergeist is small, noisy, casual and antic. The Shining is, unquestionably, the greater of the two, but I would argue that Poltergeist comes up with more ingenious solutions to the haunted-house-movie problem than The Shining does. Where Poltergeist can't wait to throw all kinds of wild ghost stuff at you, The Shining hoards its secrets extremely carefully, keeping us waiting over an hour before the first ghost shows up, and two hours before we're absolutely sure the ghosts are real.

(Much later, Spielberg tried, again, to make a definitive haunted-house movie, The Haunting, a movie that turned out so poorly he took his name off it.)

The plot of The Shining, for those recently born, goes like this: Jack, Wendy and little Danny move into a hotel that's closing down for the winter. The hotel, we're told, does not have a sterling history. Jack, a frustrated writer, starts to act testy with his family while Danny starts seeing ghosts. Then Jack starts seeing ghosts, only to him they're not so scary. Wendy remains clueless pretty much throughout. The ghosts pressure Jack to murder his family and Jack finally gives in and tries to do so.

What does it do with a running time of 140 minutes?

It's hard to imagine, 25 years later, how fresh and peculiar Poltergeist felt in 1982. Before Poltergeist, haunted house movies usually went basically like this:

ACT I: Some people move into a haunted house. Maybe on a dare, maybe out of necessity, maybe in a spirit of inquiry. We are told the house is haunted and so we wait for something scary to happen. And the filmmakers drag out every trick they can think of to

ACT II: Scary things happen, but they are explained away by one thing or another. Factions are drawn among the members of the people in the house. One person sees ghosts, the others don't. Maybe it's all a trick being played by unscrupulous real-estate developers. Maybe it's all in the mind of one of the people in the house.

ACT III: The people are now trapped in the house and cannot escape, and it is revealed that there are, indeed, ghosts. And many scary things happen as the people desperately try to figure out how to get out of the house. And someone, usually the last person you'd suspect, has the key to get out of the house, or the solution that will appease the ghosts. And maybe it turns out it's actually unscrupulous real-estate developers after all.

Poltergeist does none of this. Spielberg has so much he wants to tell you about ghosts, you can feel the giddy excitement in the narrative as he unpacks every box of ghost research he's got. In this way, Poltergeist is almost a sequel to Close Encounters -- it's not enough that Spielberg entertain you -- he wants to make you a believer.