Movie Trailer: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Cult-Movie Review: Poltergeist (2015)

Well, another beloved horror film has been strip-mined in pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. 

The new edition of Poltergeist (2015) is a sad, uninspired shadow of its cherished source material, a work of art lacking totally the visual lyricism of the Tobe Hooper film. 

Even more importantly, this remake lacks the original’s sense of spirituality and very humanity. 

Instead, the 2015 film is a 90 minute cash grab and little else.

I should preface my remarks, however, with a note.  We live in an age of remakes, and so -- lest I go insane -- I do not rail mindlessly against them. 

On the contrary, I take remakes on a case-by-case basis, so that the good ones -- and there are some -- doesn’t get tossed away with the bad. So I was open to a new Poltergeist, as I have been open to other remakes.

My criteria for the new Poltergeist are as follows:

One: Does the remake speak to issues of today in the way that the 1982 film expressed the Zeitgeist of its age? 

In other words, is the spirit and sub-text of the original carried forward into the remake?

Importantly, I don’t expect this new Poltergeist to be about the Reagan Age like the original was. No, I expect it instead, to reflect the Obama Age. Its mission,  therefore, is to show and tell us something about the world we live in now.

Two: does the remake derive creative inspiration from the original and find something new to say about the central ideas and characters, (a haunted house, and a suburban family)?  

I was seeking here, perhaps, to see a half-enunciated idea from the 1982 film developed and expanded upon, revealing to us another or fresh angle of the narrative and its individuals.

Finally -- and perhaps most fundamentally -- is the remake at least as scary a film as the original? 

In a way, this last bench-mark -- fear -- is related to the other two.  If this Poltergeist doesn’t speak trenchantly to 2015, it can’t really be scary.  If it doesn’t give us new shades of the familiar story, it won’t be scary either.

Sadly, the new Poltergeist fails all three tests rather egregiously. 

The down-on-its luck Bowen family, teetering on the edge of financial disaster, purchases a foreclosure in a near-abandoned neighborhood. 

Eric (Sam Rockwell) is out of a job, and Amy (Rosemary De Witt) is a stay-at-home writer who spends more time looking after the children than actually writing.

They are parents to Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), a sassy teen, perpetually-scared Griffin (Kyle Catlett) and gifted, open Maddy (Kennedi Clemons)

Before long, Maddy has detected the presence of spirits in the house. These spirits -- who communicate through the television -- quickly develop a profound interest in her. 

One night, when Eric and Amy are away at a dinner party, the spirits punch their way into our world, attacking Griffin and Kendra, and stealing Maddy away to the spectral plane.

With the help of a parapsychologist, Dr. Powell (Jane Adams), and later a reality-TV show medium, Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), the Bowens seek to retrieve their daughter from The Other Side.

As I "read" and understand the original Poltergeist, it establishes two key thematic ideas and develops and explores them thoroughly.  

The first is that television is a negative influence on children, and a portal of evil.  It is located in the house (often at the hearth), and therefore brings evil right into the heart of the family.

The second conceit involves the larger national economy. A family called “the Freelings” learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  If things seem to be too good to be true, they probably are.

Because of the corruption and lack of oversight in the economy of the 1980s, Mr. Freeling’s avaricious boss is free to commit a horribly immoral (but profitable!) act: moving the headstones at a local cemetery, without moving the bodies underneath them.  

This idea of irresponsible laissez-faire economics creating blow-back is punctuated in the film by a composition in which Steve Freeling is seen reading a copy of a Ronald Reagan Biography: Reagan: The Man, The President.

This remake actually begins quite promisingly, with tips of the hat towards both themes, only with a 2015 twist.

For example, the film opens with a close-up of the pixels on an I-Pad.  

As the camera pulls-back, the pixels form into the imagery of a horror video game and a zombie.  In short order, we also see that the new American family -- the Bowens --  has moved into a house near electrical towers.  

The family also learns that the former owner was a “techno-phile” and that he wired the entire house for universal wi-fi access.  I-Pads, I-Phones and flat screen TVs now take the place of the original’s portal of evil. 

The idea here could be that with the development of wi-fi and personal devices, the evil of the TV is now spread to every corner of the house, not just the living room, or the upstairs TV. 

Now evil can access you and your children anywhere and at anytime.  

On the second front, the new Poltergeist positions the Bowen family as struggling in an economic sense.  

The family moves into a foreclosure in the years after the 2008 Recession. Mom and Dad both are unemployed, and money is tight.  When we are doing poorly in terms of money, we sometimes cut corners, we sometimes make bad choices...and then have to live with those choices. We put off health care expenses. We accumulate credit card debt.  We delay a visit from the plumber, or an electrician.

Again there's ample material here to build a sub-textual case about the economy, and attempt to tie it in with the spectral outbreak.

Indeed, the first twenty minutes or so of Poltergeist are impressive -- the film's best -- because one can detect the filmmakers laying the thematic ground-work for some case about our world today, and how our technology and a weak economy are creating “evil spirits” to menace us. 

There’s a scene here, for instance, in which Mr. Bowen goes to the mall and comes back with an arm-ful of new (expensive) gadgets for the family, living the lie that the family can afford it, and “deserves” a treat.  

But after this scene (which follows one in which Eric learns, embarrassingly, that two family credit cards are over the limit…), absolutely nothing comes of the economy sub-text, or -- crushingly -- the technological one either.

The ideas are dropped without a look back, so that the movie can slavishly recycle the details of the original film instead of charting new territory. 

A malevolent tree grabs the boy on a stormy night. The little girl gets sucked into the closet.  Paranormal investigators come in and quantify the spirits as poltergeists; ones angry about the head-stone incident. Then an eccentric medium is called in to clean the house. The girl is rescued after an instance of bi-location, and then the spirits strike one more time.

It sounds familiar, but there is no sub-text here, no Zeitgeist moments that make us relate to or understand the characters better. There is no philosophical meaning to any of this action. Automatically, then, this remake is a lesser film than the original.  It doesn't operate successfully on multiple layers of meaning.

Let’s move on to the second criteria I enumerated above.  Does anything new happen to develop the ideas of the original?  

Well, we get the recycled family, the recycled house, the recycled medium (now a man), and the recycled paranormal investigators.  Nothing to new to see there.

So what does this movie add the mythos or franchise?

A toy drone that is flown into the other world, so that you can see “the Other Side” in 3-D with your own eyes.  

The original movie didn’t follow Mrs. Freeling’s journey to the spectral realm, but the remake does. The Other Side here doesn’t resemble an astral plane at all, oddly, but rather an organic one, where rotting corpses are piled upon each other, stretching out and trying to grab any one they can get.

The film’s one legitimate inspiration is that the Robbie/Griffin character has been given increased importance and depth. In many ways, this film is really his story.  We learn early on that his mother lost him in a mall three years ago, and so now he is afraid of literally, everything. The film is his journey towards courage, towards being “the super boy” his Mom wants him to be. 

Kyle Catlett gives the best performance in the film, too. Whatever good qualities this Poltergeist possesses owe mostly to his efforts.

Lastly -- and it must be said -- this version of Poltergeist just ain’t scary.

I suspect this sad result has much do with the slap-dash direction and pacing. By contrast, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist builds and builds, accelerating constantly. The last act is something akin to kinetic madness, but importantly, the original film starts out  small, with only omens of disorder, with things being…off.  The storm clouds must gather before it can rain.

In the original, the ghost attacks don’t start immediately There’s a period of time during which the Freelings learn of the spirits, and exhibit curiosity about them.  The mayhem only begins later. 

But here, there is absolutely no build-up, no character-development at all. Instead, the movie just picks from “They’re Here” to the tree attack.  And then the clown attack is moved from the finale to the middle of the film, a grave miscalculation that short-circuits suspense and tension.

Another comparison: the original Poltergeist is 114 minutes long. The new one is 93 minutes in duration. That’s an important distinction and one that bears mentioning. Twenty long minutes of plot/theme/character development are just...lopped off.  

So make no mistake: this is the slap-jack, cliff-notes version of the story, one with no time or patience for mood, nuance, under-score or character-building. All the stuff that makes the original Poltergeist something special -- like the funeral for Carol Ann’s bird, or Dr. Lesh’s explanation of death -- is omitted here. Presumably so the theater can pack in an extra showing a day.

As a consequence of this choice to simplify the story, the Bowen family feels a lot more generic and less real than did the Freelings.  And since we don’t care or sympathize with this family to the same high degree, the new film actually takes half-a-dozen toy clowns to achieve not even fifty-percent of the scares accomplished by one toy clown in the original.

Seriously, it takes a whole clown collection to make a jump scare here work, as opposed to the original film’s build-up to that under-the-bed terror.  

In fact, the presence of the clowns make no sense here.  A whole car's worth of clowns is discovered in a crawl-space outside Griffin's room.  Eric quips that people "collect" weird things, and that's the only explanation we get.

That's true, Eric.  

But if you go to the trouble to collect weird things -- like all these old fashioned clowns (some made of very expensive porcelain, apparently) -- you likely aren't going to leave them behind when you move.  

Especially if you have money problems. You'll either take them with you, or sell them on E-Bay in a bid for quick cash. The Great Recession Economy is also the E-Bay Economy.  Sometimes E-Bay or Craigslist money are all that gets people through the gaps between pay checks these days.

But this remake HAS to have clowns in it, right?  At the very least so you can plaster one on the poster...

Listen, I can understand remaking Poltergeist.  I can.  

The two ideas of the original film, as I’ve laid out here, involve the integration of technology into our home, and the way that families respond to shifts in economic policies. Those are ideas with huge relevance and importance today, in 2015.

But this Poltergeist is lobotomized, and doesn't know how to turn those ideas into meaningful themes.  And it it doesn't even know what it's about, how can the director make form reflect content?

Oddly, the remake doesn’t even seem to have the resources behind it that the original did.  Here, for example, the house doesn’t fold up on itself in the finale.  

And here, only one corpse bursts up out of the yard, instead of the virtual mob we get in the original, in the pool, in the house and in the yard.  

Here, we don’t get the visual manifestations of the ghosts/demons, either, or the wall-climbing scene.   
Spectacle-wise -- the one area you expect a horror film made in 2015 to improve on the 1982 original -- this film is a total downgrade. It's cut rate not just in terms of ideas, but in terms of special effects too.

The denouement of this Poltergeist is also a debacle.  Remember how the Freelings went to a motel and kicked their TV to the curb, pushing out the portal of evil?  

Here, the Bowens do the same thing…but with a new house.

And it makes no sense.  You can live without a TV in your house.  But if you won’t buy a new house, where the hell are you going to live? 

Out of your car? Gimme a break.

On top of all these deficits, the new Poltergeist looks just like Insidious, The Conjuring or a dozen other modern horror movies. There’s no appeal or value to the film's visual canvass, and no sense of the camera as an active player in the drama. There’s just no classicism, no lyricism, and no poetry in this film’s color schemes or compositions. It could have been made for TV, for all its use of film grammar.

One example: remember how the original Poltergeist connected visually the static blue of the TV screen with the blue “strobe” of the Other World, thereby drawing a visual connection to theme of “portals of evil?”  

Again, I don’t hate remakes as a rule. 

I don't.

But boy do I hate this one. This new Poltergeist doesn't know what scares you, and worse, doesn't know how to scare you.

Movie Trailer: Poltergeist (2015)

This House You Have To Watch Every Minute: The Seen and Unseen In The Haunting films (1963/1999)

When first we glimpse Hill House in Robert Wise's chilling The Haunting (1963), the imposing old structure is a featureless black obelisk: a jagged silhouette carved out from brooding night sky.

Secrets dwell inside Hill House -- in the dark; in the night -- and yet the director's selection of visualization (a shadowed, blackened house with no distinguishable architectural features) purposefully confounds our desire to peer inside this monument to the unknown; to learn about the "unquiet dead" who may walk the lonely, vast hallways of this spectral monolith.

Hill House is a place "born to be bad," according to the film's opening narration, but it is something more than that too: "an undiscovered country waiting to be explored." And The Undiscovered Country, as we remember from our Shakespeare, is Death Itself.

Robert Wise structures his horror film (based on the sterling novel by Shirley Jackson) as a probe into that ultimate unknown; but more than that too, as an ambiguous probe into that unknown. Never in the film, for instance, is the audience 100% certain that it has actually witnessed the supernatural and the ghostly. On the contrary, our senses are heightened and tweaked by disturbing noises, by the sinister-seeming twist of a doorknob, and more. Yet certainty still eludes us; just as certainty about the paranormal eludes people in real life.

You Should Be Receptive...and Innocent: Exploring The Self in The Haunting.

It is no mistake or coincidence that the four explorers countenancing the chaotic, uncertain terrain of Hill House are -- in the spirit of Hugh Crain's strange edifice itself -- a determinedly unconventional group. This is important structurally to the narrative. The sojourners reflect the sojourn.

Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson) gave up a "conventional" life and a proper upbringing (courtesy of his upper-crust English family) to prove the existence of the supernatural. This is his life's work, which makes him either commendably dedicated or utterly foolish. He says he wants his people "innocent and receptive" so that they will discover the secrets of Hill House. If someone is innocent and receptive, however, he or she is not looking for the angles that might be played; and every little noise becomes significant and meaningful. So Markway may (intentionally or unintentiaonally...) be encouraging hallucinations or delusions (though he says, explicitly, that this must not be the case if their research is considered to be legitimate).

Theodora (Claire Bloom) also fits the bill of "unconventional." She not only boasts extra-sensory perception, but is "out" as a lesbian. To some people in traditional society in the 1960s the latter quality would make her untrustworthy at best, abnormal at worst. And when strange handwriting appears on the wall of Hill House, Theodora is the first suspect. She's jealous of the attention Markway showers on Nell, and this spooky handwriting (which names Nell...) may be her petty revenge; her game playing. She has a cruel, jealous streak that could effect the exploration of Hill House.

Then there's Luke (Russ Tamblyn), a playboy and would-be millionaire who has a frat-boy sense of humor; but also a burgeoning curiosity and conscience. Is he just a money-grubber, a dabbler, or something more? What's his angle?

And finally, we arrive at the most unconventional of the explorers: Eleanor or Nell (Julie Harris), a spinster who had a poltergeist experience as a child but who, in essence, has never truly left the confines of her home. The sheltered, inexperienced woman has spent years caring for her invalid mother (now deceased...) and the chance to explore Hill House is most definitely an escape from the drudgery of her day-to-day existence. She is motivated to stay at Hill House; to "belong" to the group. We wonder: is Nell's subconscious somehow causing the noises that bedevil Hill House at night (as it caused the rock storm that fell upon her house in childhood?) Or is Nell hallucinating? Or, worst of all: is she so desperate for attention that she is "pretending" all the experiences with the supernatural. When Nell almost falls off a veranda at Hill House, who can adequately judge what caused her to grow dizzy? It is convenient that Markway, the object of her affection, would rush in to her to care for her...

These idiosyncratic individuals -- who don't conform to the boundaries of society-at-large and who don't entirely fit the bill of "normal" or "trustworthy" -- investigate the home of a 19th century robber baron of sorts, Hugh Crain. He too is a kindred spirit: an unconventional person and one who didn't believe in the rules of society. He built his oddball house to reflect those beliefs. For instance, all the doors in Hill House are hung crookedly...so that -- after a time -- they slam shut, apparently of their own volition. And all the angles inside the house are off-center a bit....just like the characters in the drama. The house --as Markway reminds us -- "does have its oddities." Just like every team member...

In such a strange environment -- with four such anarchistic individuals in close-quarters -- the probe into the unknown is tainted by the frailties of the individual personalities. We can't rule out that one or all of the explorers is perpetrating some kind of hoax; or simply that some one's imagination has gotten out of control. Consider the moment in which Nell becomes convinced that someone is holding her hand in the dark. She believes it to be Theodora, but when the lights come up, Theodora is across the room, in her own bed. Wise's camera never leaves Nell's face during the "event." It stays on Nell, in extreme close-up throughout the purported "visitation", and thus we are left to wonder if she is hallucinating, or really countenancing something supernatural. If something were holding and crushing her hand...why don't we ever see it?

Similarly, on the night of the loud noises at their door; Theodora and Nell never actually see anything abnormal. And importantly, Luke and Markway are elsewhere in the house at the time...they could easily be responsible for the noises. Similarly, anyone could have written Nell's name on the wall. When the film's biggest scare arrives -- Mrs. Markway's (Lois Maxwell) sudden appearance from the attic -- even it is not ghostly in nature. She became lost in the attic and tried to escape...stunning Nell.

And finally, Nell's death could be suicide brought on by the fact that the attention seeker was being ostracized from the group, and on and on...

My argument vis-a-vis the original The Haunting is this: I believe Hill House is haunted and that the explorers experience paranormal or supernatural events there. However, the film retains an authentic sense of terror because Wise walks the line of ambiguity brilliantly. Nothing supernatural is ever truly seen, and we become perched on the edge of our seats by the things we don't see; but which we believe to exist. I'm not making the argument that showing ghosts in horror movies is always less effective than hiding them, only noting that The Haunting still scares -- 45 years after it was made -- because it exhibits this spine-tingling sense of uncertainty and ambiguity. We don't know what is making the horrible noise outside the bedroom; we don't know if that is a human face in the sculpture on the wall, or merely a trick of the light. We can't be certain if the door is bending because of a supernatural force...or someone leaning on the other side of it. But taken all together, these events are chilling and add up to something meancing. More so, they are chilling because we never get satisfactory answers about them.

Wise's exquisite camerawork in The Haunting generates genuine terror, but notice that the camera truly grows perturbed only when the dramatis personae have also grown perturbed or hysterical. Theodora and Nell are worked up to raging terror by the time Wise deploys that prowling, angling camera which circumscribes the perimeter of the bedroom door. We interpret this odd, angled movement as the search by something inimical -- on the other side of the door -- seeking an entry point. But we see nothing; and the camera's twisted perspective could simply be the perspective of two very frightened women Similarly, Nell's fainting spell on the veranda coincides with the camera lunge from the high tower; again as though something invisible is approaching...or attacking. Yet the sudden, alarming camera movement could be interpreted as a reflection of Nell's sudden, dangerous vertigo. Especially if we are to believe she is suicidal (a belief which also plays into the climax and the staircase set piece).

And by the time we see a Hill House door swell and retract (as if breathing by itself...), every character -- especially Markway -- is desperate and fearful. These apparent manifestations of the supernatural could be the manifestations of the characters' out of control hysteria and fear.

One of The Haunting's central set-pieces involves Nell and Markway's ascent up a rickety, vast spiral staircase. The staircase is loose from the wall (again, not a danger that is supernatural in origin). But the quest to reach the top metaphorically reflects the team's overall quest. Markway and his people are climbing the tallest mountain and seeking answers on the summit. But even they cannot reach Heaven for answers about life beyond death. And again, notice that when Nell and Markway do finally achieve the top of the spiral staircase, Nell is frightened out of her mind not by a ghost...but by another desperate human, Markway's wife. In other words, Nell has reached the pinnacle of Hill House -- climbed as far as she can possibly climb -- and the terrors/answers she gets are still of the human, not supernatural variety.

The Haunting succeeds as a great horror movie because there exists enough ambiguity in the camera-work, the characters, and in the script to support multiple interpretations. Either the house is haunted, or Nell is a very disturbed individual responsible for the so-called haunting, or all the characters are just "innocent and receptive" to their admittedly creepy environment. These interpretations compete for primacy in The Haunting, and that competition results in an incredibly active viewing experience; a high-level of engagement with the material. And that engagement leads to unbearable suspense...


Just Because You Can Do A Thing: Remaking and Unmaking The Haunting (1999)

Ambiguity was not in fashion in 1999 when Jan De Bont re-made The Haunting. Therefore, what remained unseen but detected in Wise's classy original film became seen....and predictable. Not just seen actually, but dramatized in full-color, in ample lighting, utilizing the latest in state-of-the-art computer generated special effects. Because of this see-it-all approach, the remake leaves itself only one possible interpretation: Hill House is haunted by a malevolent spirit who can re-shape reality to his liking.

You can almost detect how the makers of The Haunting (1999) were onto the kernel of something clever in reconceiving the film. They seized on the good idea that Hill House was an outward manifestation or reflection of Hugh Crain's twisted psyche. But they went too far. The filmmakers thus transformed Hill House into a bloated monstrosity with oversized rooms that might resemble a human rib-cage, or a bizarre drawing by H.R. Giger more than a real house. Again, you can understand this approach at the same time that you realize it just doesn't work. Houses -- even haunted houses -- aren't hatched or born out of twisted psyches. They are built and constructed plank-by-plank and it is simply impossible to believe that the out-of-proportion, bizarre Hill House of The Haunting (1999) was ever built by 19th century hands, using 19th century techniques and plans. Because of the house's egregious (though inventive) design, the film sacrifices some vital piece of believability. A house with a Godzilla-sized fireplace? With a hall of mirrors? With a virtual river inside one hallway?

Bottom line: If we can't believe in the house as a real, tangible place from human history; we don't believe in the story being told there, and the movie automatically fails to suspend our disbelief.

Another bad move in The Haunting grants the Crain-spirit seemingly invincible powers over flesh and blood, stone and mortar. The house repetitively grows appendage-like vines out of the walls and entraps human characters in them on a regular basis. Stone gargoyles come to life and attack people in broad daylight. Curtains dance with ghostly apparitions whose shapes we can see, process, and comprehend. The digital special effects are repeated so often and in such ample light that the "horror" imagery becomes commonplace instead of frightening. A flying gargoyle and ambulatory statue are things you can run and hide from, things you can strike with your fist or with a weapon. Contrast that kind of nemesis with the amorphous, unseen thing perhaps prowling in Wise's original. How could you escape an angry spirit that seemed to exist by its own set of "laws?"

The Haunting remake eschews ambiguity in other ways. We also see and detect here the all-too-human motives of Hill House's ghost, Hugh Crain. He's apparently enslaving all the children he used to exploit in life (just like Kathie Lee Gifford...) and this version of Eleanor (Lily Taylor) -- a surprise(!) descendant of Crain's second wife -- must free the children from his hellish grip. All is made right when Nell and the children ascend to Heaven and Crain passes through the "door of judgment" to Hell itself.

Again, there's nothing like taking uncertainty entirely out of the equation. In the original Haunting it wasn't even plain whether one ghost or multiple ghosts (or no ghosts...) were at work. The new Haunting provides us an "earthly" agenda for a specific ghost (enslavement of the children), a proper fate (punishment for bad deeds) and a reward for the righteous victor in the fight against him. De Bont's The Haunting takes the shivery indeterminism of Wise's classic and shelves it in favor of mind-numbing, imagination-crushing certitude.

No expense was spared to remake The Haunting in 1999, but the spine-tingling ambiguity and uncertainty of Wise's original were abandoned in favor of an onslaught of digital effects. This is a case where seeing is not believing; and where certainty crushes the mind's capacity to imagine the unseen. That's why the original The Haunting still "walks alone" as a classic.

The remake, in every sense of the word, is un-"Wise."