Warren S. Buckland (London)

Important note: This paper is cancelled. Unfortunately, Warren Buckland will not be able to attend our workshop.

Who Directed Poltergeist (1982)?

Using Statistical Style Analysis for Authorship Attribution in the Cinema

Director Steven Spielberg, fresh from the success of his and George Lucas’ “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” has finished the small, personal film he’s been wanting to make for years, and “The Extra Terrestrial” will be released in June.

Spielberg will also be pacing the list of horror films with “Poltergeist,” which he produced (and according to reports, largely directed). (Dale Pollock)

[I]t is pretty well agreed now that [Poltergeist] deserves to be read as a Spielberg work. (David Thomson)

The issue of who really directed Poltergeist has perplexed many critics and Spielberg fans over the last 25 years. Their language is equivocal (Pollock: ‘according to reports’; Thomson: ‘It is pretty well agreed’; plus arguments for and against found on the Spielbergfilms.com website), and their aesthetic evaluation of the film is vague and impressionistic.

In this paper I use computerised statistical style analysis to data mine a selection of films by Spielberg and Hooper. I aim to determine how Poltergeist’s style conforms to and deviates from the filmmaking styles of these two directors. From this analysis and comparison I am able to determine who really directed the film. This “real world” application of statistics for authorship attribution follows a long tradition within stylometry to use computers to resolve long-standing authorship attribution problems (Holmes 1994; Hoover, 2001; Foster 2001).

My paper represents one of the first attempts to apply statistical style analysis to the resolution of an authorship attribution problem in the cinema. In the paper I outline my data collection methods (delimited to shot parameters) and processing of data (using SPSS data mining software), before presenting the result of my study.

Foster, Don (2001), Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (Macmillan).

Holmes, David (1994), “Authorship Attribution,” Computers and the Humanities, 28 (2): 87-106.

Hoover, David L. (2001), “Statistical Stylistics and Authorship Attribution: An Empirical Investigation,” Literary and Linguistic Computing, 16, 4, pp. 421-44.