It’s heeeeeeere. This remake of Spielberg’s haunted house scare fest has a few jolts but it seems rather quaint in a new era of horror movies which deliver long lasting shock value
With such recent chillers as It Follows, The Conjuring and The Babadook, the hackneyed horror genre has taken on a new lease of life. It's also taken a dive into some seriously dark depths.
Like the heyday of the seventies, things just got scary down the cinema all over again. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s 1982 Poltergeist was source material for a lot of those modern genre classics and this unnecessary but fun remake seems oddly quaint in a world of new and novel twists in terror.
Director Kenan, who previously proved his PG chops with Monster House and City of Ember, remains true to the original but he occasionally gets playful too. The rather dated and cartoonish FX of Spielberg’s vision is well exorcised; this Poltergeist is grislier, darker and far more believable. Producer Sam Raimi even summons up the spirit of The Evil Dead in places.
The setting is the same anonymous suburban sprawl, an innocent milieu where truly diabolical things are about to unfold. The human dimension is never overlooked. The struggling Bowen family move into their new neighbourhood and when things immediately start going bump in the day and night, it’s a prelude to a battle of wills and souls in the netherworld.
There are convincing performances all round from the great Sam Rockwell as the head of the middle class American family reeling from the recession, Rosemarie DeWitt as his careworn but still free-spirited wife, and Saxon Sharbino as eye-rolling teenage daughter, Kendra.
But the film belongs to the kids. Kennedi Clements is captivating as Madison, the little girl who is snatched away by the un-dead who lurk in her bedroom closet to become a pawn in the battle between worlds. There's also a marvellous watchful performance from Kyle Catlett as anxious son Griffin and he has a touch of Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense.
The Bowens draft in paranormal investigator Carrigan Burke who is played brilliantly by Jared Harris with a thick Dublin accent, a tramp's coat, and a battered face. Like Robert Shaw’s Quint in Jaws, he shows off the scars and burns from his years of battling aggressive spirits and ghosts and he is both grim and very funny as his goes about his task.
The TV, in this case a big-screen monster dominating the living room, is still the main mean of comms between worlds. Madison is still lost in the white noise on screen, calling out in glitchy cries as she is dragged deeper into the underworld. It's an oddly disorientating feeling in our modern world of 24-hour babble.
Spookily true to the original, the new Poltergeist should bring fun and frights for all the family. It has a few jolts but serious horror aficionados may be left wanting.
Alan Corr
