Another Claim Surfaces That Steven Spielberg Actually Directed POLTERGEIST

It's one of those pieces of Hollywood lore, the story that Steven Spielberg actually directed the 1982 horror classic Poltergeist. At the time Universal had Spielberg under contract which prevented him from making another movie because he was preparing to make E.T. : The Extra-Terrestrial, but he still found himself on the set of director Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist quite a bit. To this day Spielberg has not come out and said he was the actual director, but he has said that his involvement went even further than being the film's co-writer and producer.

"Tobe isn’t… a take-charge sort of guy. If a question was asked and an answer wasn’t immediately forthcoming, I’d jump in and say what we could do. Tobe would nod agreement, and that became the process of collaboration."

Spielberg would later give Hooper more credit for his creative involvement. In fact, over the past few years, he’s never said he merely visited set as an interested producer, but, a new claim has just surfaced claiming that Spielberg actually helmed the film.

Wish Upon director John Leonetti recently sat down for an interview with Blumhouse. He shared some first-hand experience with working behind the scenes of Poltergeist. You see, Leonettie's brother Matthew Leonetti was the director of photography on Poltergeist, and John worked as the assistant camera. So he clearly saw a lot of what happened on set and said  there’s no doubt about who was calling the shots on “Poltergeist.”

"The really cool thing about ‘Poltergeist’ — I’ll never forget the very first time I walked on the shooting set, there were 4 x 8 foam core boards with 8 ½ by 11 storyboards on them, and I’d never seen anything like that before. It was a very intense, very fun, very technical movie to work on. There’s a lot going on. And candidly… Steven Spielberg directed that movie. There’s no question."

"Hooper was so nice and just happy to be there. He creatively had input. Steven developed the movie, and it was his to direct, except there was anticipation of a director’s strike, so he was ‘the producer’ but really he directed it in case there was going to be a strike and Tobe was cool with that. It wasn’t anything against Tobe. Every once in a while, he would actually leave the set and let Tobe do a few things just because. But really, Steven directed it."

Does this prove the legendary mystery to be true? I'll let you decide that, but it is pretty convincing.