It was only a matter of time before someone remade Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg's 1982 Poltergeist. And I was ready for it. Frankly, I never much liked the original, because the effects are weird, the editing clunky, and the dialogue poor. The only things I enjoyed were the great lighting and the feminist (or at least female-centered) angle. But I think most of my difficulty with that film is its label as a horror film; it's hardly ever frightening or even disturbing, besides the moment when one man hallucinates peeling his own face off. Much like M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water (2006), the original Poltergeist is a dark fantasy, narrated much like a straightforward fairytale and filmed accordingly. It's less a haunted house movie (compare it to The Haunting, 1963) and more an edgier NeverEnding Story. Come on, I mean, a tree tries to eat a child and "The Beast" looks like Falkor mixed with Ridley Scott's Alien.
But now we have a scary Poltergeist. Or at least one that doesn't feel laughable. The foremost reason Gil Kenan's new vision is a real horror movie is that he doesn't film it as a fairytale with bright colors, still wideshots, or predictable effects. Rather, Kenan lingers on empty frames, daring the audience to follow him into the nightmare. That's not to say it's a novel technique (indeed, we'd be hard-pressed to find a non-found-footage horror film in the last decade that doesn't do the same). But it is no less effective here.
That said, this movie has plenty of its own faults. Though it's a distinctive horror film, as opposed to its inspiration, it labors under an intrusive score and little difference from the original film. If Kenan wanted to keep us totally on the edge of our seats, he would have played a bit more with the plot; that he didn't suggests to me that he had another agenda. Perhaps the credit also goes to the writer, David Lindsay-Abaire, who shifted the focus from the female "horror" of the first film to a less thematic and more iconic sense of contemporary paranormal activity. Let me explain. Hooper's original featured two female paranormal experts who came into the haunted home in an effort to bring back the (also female) victim, a child; ultimately, the child's mother is the sole means by which the child is returned home; the portal to the other world is arguably feminine, as a hole that opens periodically and (violently) sucks in its prey, and spits them out again in a sticky red fluid; an unveiled monstrous entity at the end (perhaps another portal to the spirit dimension? Who knows?) is distinctly vaginal, as a ribbed, red circle that similarly seeks to devour the child in a cruel inversion of a birthing process.
Still with me? Unlike many horror films that thematically or artistically position the audience with a (intrusive, gazing, violent) male horror-entity, Hooper's film was especially concerned with a female horror-entity (and hero). To hell with all that for this new film. For better or worse, Lindsay-Abaire and Kenan decided to have one female and one male paranormal expert, to have that male expert be a bizarre sacrificial lamb, to have the (still female) victim's brother (not mother) be the means of her salvation, and to do away with most of the feminine-horror imagery (no gaping vagina to devour the children here, and no Falkor either for that matter). In fact, we are actually allowed to see inside the portal this time, and the other dimension looks more like a scene from Dante's Inferno or "The Further" from Insidious (2010) than anything else: a murky, dark tunnel crowded with green-gray corpses that grab at the children like Harry Potter's Inferi.
So I don't know. Is it less likely to spark intelligent discussion of the gendered dynamics of horror films? Yes. Is it less likely to make you roll your eyes, chuckle, and then yawn? Yes. I fancied it because it was actually kind of creepy, unlike the original, and because Sam Rockwell is a sort of guilty pleasure of mine. I thought the dialogue was more engaging, the effects familiar but more grounded than in 1982, and the pacing a bit easier to manage than before. It's also just as overscored and just as melodramatic as before, and the lighting isn't nearly as inventive. Does it make me more anxious for Insidious: Chapter Three? You bet your ghost.
IMDb: Poltergeist
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