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"They're here."
-- Madison (Kennedi Clements).
1982 was kind of a watershed year. Star Wars had already broken the dilithium ceiling and proven that fantasy films could be major boxoffice contenders, and was followed in short order by films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, and The Empire Strikes Back. Nevertheless, it seemed as though the boxoffice could only withstand one huge action/effects blockbuster a year, until the spring and summer of 1982, which offered, in rapid succession, Blade Runner, E.T. The Extraterrestrial, The Road Warrior, Cat People, Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, The Dark Crystal, John Carpenter's The Thing, as well as an inordinate number of non-genre films now considered classics or mini-classics, such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, First Blood, Sophie's Choice, Gandhi, Tootsie, An Officer and a Gentleman, Diner, The Year of Living Dangerously, Victor/Victoria, 48 Hours, The Verdict, The World According to Garp, The King of Comedy, and many, many others. Look at that list again and consider it carefully.
Yet one film might actually be the movie best remembered, most parodied, its iconography more easily identified even by people who have never watched it: Poltergeist. Few are those who have grown up surrounded by American pop culture who have never seen the image of little Carol Anne Freeling (Heather O'Rourke), her hands pressed to the static-filled giant TV screen, or who have never heard her solemn declaration, "They're here," or psychic Tangina's (Zelda Rubenstein) imperious pronouncement, "This house...is CLEAN."
I didn't like Poltergeist when I first saw it, and it's taken me years to warm up to it. I saw it as the generic Spielbergian suburban treatment of the horror genre, pretty much the equivalent of E.T. The Extraterrestrial. Maybe I had to become a husband and a father before I could appreciate the depth of Craig T. Nelson's and JoBeth Williams' performances, so completely convincing in their intimacy, their humor, and finally their desperation to save Carol Anne.
Plus, I was still in a phase in which I rejected what I interpreted as Spielberg's domestication of genre after genre, his struggle to make everything palatable to a family audience composed of Freelings all over America. I understand now that was never his intention in the vast amount of work he has directed, produced, and written. His purpose, rather than candy-coating that secure suburban existence, was and is to impart his fears about how fragile it all is. The shark in Jaws doesn't care how idyllic life is on Amity Island, and he'll remind swimmers in half a second that nature isn't cute, talking, Disneyesque wildlife. When husband and dad Roy Neary witnesses the marvelous in Close Encounters, his reward is to lose that thin veneer of suburban security. The American dream IS a beautiful one, but it can collapse in a second, and in no Spielberg film is this a more terrifying reality than in Poltergeist.
I'm sorry. Did I say "Spielberg film"? The credits say that Tobe Hooper directed Poltergeist, and he may have been the one on the set, calling the shots, but the sensibilities of Poltergeist scream out loud that it's a Spielberg film, and, in some ways, that makes it more cinematically sacrosanct than J.J. Abrams deciding to remake The Wrath of Khan or Marcus Nispel remaking Conan the Barbarian.
So how does 2015's remake, directed by Gil Kenan (City of Ember), compare to the original? Sam Rockwell (Better Living Through Chemistry) and Rosemary DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married) have always been reliable, but the simple truth is that, for reasons I suspect lay not with them, they can't muster one tenth of the chemistry of Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams in the original, nor is little Kennedi Clements capable of exercising the cuteness factor to the degree the ill-fated Heather Rourke could, and, by the way, I don't see the purpose in gratuitously renaming the family "Bowen" instead of "Freeling," or changing the child's name from "Carol Anne" to "Madison," but I guess that's why they don't ask me to write these things.
Even more disastrous is the substitution of Jared Harris (The Quiet Ones) for the late Zelda Rubinstein as the medium summoned to save the haunted family. Now, I happen to like Harris, thought he's always done an outstanding job, and I might very well be better disposed to like him here had I never seen Rubinstein, but I did and she made such an impression that she can't be unseen. Ditto with Jane Adams (All the Light in the Sky) taking over from the late Beatrice Straight as the collegiate paranormal investigator who links the Freelings/Bowens up with the help they desperately need. The look on Straight's face when her character realizes the haunting is no hoax, and the humor and conviction and motherly concern she brought to her role are absent from Adams' performance, but it's not that I don't believe she could have done it. I believe she wasn't asked to.
The original Poltergeist, in that now remote summer of 1982, seized America's imagination with its spooky atmosphere and special effects, but I don't believe that's why it's endured. I believe it's the quiet interlude where Straight whisperingly explains her spiritual beliefs about why ghosts and poltergeists haunt the living. You can stack all your household objects, have all the black holes in closets that you want, but THAT'S the crucial sequence that made the film, and director Kenan doesn't even attempt to replicate it. I believe it's the reason the film has endured for over 30 years, and I'd bet that, 30 years from now, when the word "poltergeist" is mentioned, it will still be Spielberg's heartfelt original that will be invoked and remembered, not this flaccid remake.
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