The presence has a wonderful Easter egg, only for horror fans to notice

Steven Soderbergh’s The Presence is steadily building a reputation for being an unconventional ghost story, and director Maverick chooses to essentially play a ghost and shoot the entire film from the ghost’s point of view. While My review from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival (Where the film premieres) explains that this technique allows “presence” to straddle the line between found footage film and POV character film in a subversively clever way: At the time, the Other Human could not watch, Soderbergh never lets us forget that the fact that there is an identity in that point of view, even if the subject themselves does not know who they are to begin with.

This perspective means that The Presence is less of a terrifying supernatural horror film and more of a thoughtful, character-driven thriller because, in the end, we know where the ghost is, even if the other characters don’t. It also undoubtedly makes “Presence” a landmark film in the annals of haunted house movies, upending what has been the norm in the subgenre for decades. Soderbergh seems well aware of this fact, as seen in the film’s delightful Easter egg, which horror fans, and Tobe Hooper fans in particular, will immediately notice. Paying homage to 1982’s Poltergeist with this Easter egg, Soderbergh’s “presence” is the next step in the evolution of the ghost film.

The haunted house film was born out of a tradition seen in Gothic literature, in which dark, macabre, and mysterious hauntings were generally relegated to distant and remote (not to mention grand and foreboding) houses. As such, many haunted house movies from classic Hollywood and beyond have featured characters traveling to these sinister locations, usually discovering at some point that some ancient curse or legend or incident took place there years ago, as in one of the seminars works on the subgenre, 1944 “Unfriendly”. Then, around the 1960s, haunted house movies began to expand beyond the “haunted house” tradition. In it, the characters actively sought to investigate the paranormal (as in “Ghosts” and “Legend of Hell”), and also try to survive or exorcise the evil spirits that already lived with them (as in “Amityville Horror”).

Poltergeist was the first mainstream horror film to bring the haunted house out of the remote corners of literal distance and the imaginary past. Instead, It brought paranormal activity right to the suburb’s front door. In the film, the family at the center of the story does not buy a creepy old mansion with a history of violence, but rather a brand that floats a new luxury home. Of course, it turns out that the house may be new, but the land it sits on is old, and unscrupulous developers are giving the homeowners a hard time how they couldn’t move the cemetery that once stood there (or rather, still, still, it does ). Poltergeist is when the haunted house movie literally came home.

For the opening and end credits, the “presence” font used is pretty much the same as in Poltergeist. It’s essentially Helvetica Medium (or maybe bold), each letter has a white outline, and its eerie simplicity still has a chilling power for those who remember the marketing materials for “poltergeist.” Ironically, these titles are the first images seen in both films, so the font seems to be a deliberate homage from “presence”.

David Koepp’s script for “Presence” is rooted in the A ghost story and a haunted house is a film tradition: The family in the film goes through many financial and interpersonal issues; When they stumble upon a supernatural presence in their new home, they are skeptical but still decide to investigate (and naturally include the environment); And there are several mysteries to be solved – not only who the ghost might be and what it wants, but also what might be responsible for the deaths of several teenage girls around town. So it’s a bit more classic than even “poltergeist”. However, Soderbergh’s choice to tell the story in this way, not only emphasizing the spirit’s POV, but also leaning towards sadness more than scares, gives this subversive twist a “presence” that puts it on par with Hooper’s film.

“Poltergeist” Easter Egg is not the only “presence” with other films (there is a connection between the film and Interstellar by Christopher Nolan, Christopher Nolan Although there will be a spoiler to explain why), but it’s in a hurry. If “Poltergeist” was Hooper’s way of announcing to Americans that we need to acknowledge our country’s sad history before we can truly move on, “Presence” is Soderbergh and Kopp acknowledging how powerless many of us feel to stop the terrible events that we see before us. If we are not careful, we can end up like a ghost in a movie, unable to move on until we are wrong, which we could not recognize when we were alive. Maybe “presence” is pretty scary after all.