“Poltergeist” Review: A Less-Quirky Take on Some Old Familiar Fears

Is there a more family-friendly horror movie than Poltergeist? The 1982 original, written and produced by Steven Spielberg but ostensibly not directed by him (watch the camerawork and tell me with a straight face that Spielberg wasn’t calling the shots), could almost have been an after-school special. Gil Kenan’s 2015 remake starring Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt is also a breezy, cheerful affair, as movies about angry hauntings go. (Kenan also directed the animated Monster House.) It offers plenty of fleeting scares – jumps that come in the usual ways, their effects dampened by their predictability – but nothing that is likely to keep even nervous children awake at night.

The original movie wasn’t trying to scare audiences so much as teach them; to teach them that their fixation on TV screens, and on affluence in the sense of American-style detached housing, were tugging at the fabric of family and community. Those talking points haven’t changed much over the course of three decades, and if anything last decade’s housing collapse and the proliferation of tiny screens in our lives have made them more acute. It’s no accident that Kenan’s Poltergeist finds fear in phones and tablets as often as flat-screen TVs, and that the movie’s exposition keeps coming back to layoffs and foreclosures.

Rockwell, DeWitt, and Kyle Catlett

Having retained the original film’s affable, conversational tone and its barely-veiled cultural commentary, Kenan also hews closely to particulars of plot. The haunted family’s teenage daughter has more presence in the remake, as she is a convenient conduit for discussions about phones, and the son has a greatly augmented role that culminates in a substantial change to the movie’s climax. The sequence of events is also compressed to achieve a shorter runtime, robbing us of the original’s gasp-inducing pull-back shot of a cemetery. But the rest is mostly imported intact: the young daughter who opens the portal between worlds, the tree, the clown, the trio of paranormal investigators, the big-shot ringer, and the journey into darkness with a good old-fashioned rope.

What doesn’t survive in Kenan’s adaptation are the quirks and well-observed character moments that made the original so much fun. Consider the scene when the father learns that his family’s new subdivision is built on the site of a former cemetery. The developers moved the headstones but left the bodies. That twist would be a spoiler for the original movie, because it comes late and Craig T. Nelson plays it for all it’s worth. “You left the bodies!” he bellows repeatedly as he shakes his corner-cutting boss by the shoulders. When Rockwell receives this information in the 2015 version, it barely registers. It’s just an afterthought, and Rockwell’s response to it amounts to “Huh! How about that,” even though DeWitt’s character has, by that point, actually handled one of the bones. The canary subplot, the dog, the Reagan biography, the pot-smoking, the wife’s initial glee over the haunting – none of these colorful accents from Spielberg’s (or, ahem, Tobe Hooper‘s) Poltergeist make it into Kenan’s stripped-down version.

Jared Harris fills Zelda Rubinstein’s role as a famed paranormal expert

In place of Zelda Rubinstein, the well-coiffed four-foot-three actress with the southern drawl who played a seasoned exorcist in the original, Jared Harris creates a sort of Irish version of Robert Shaw in Jaws. There is no perfect substitute for Rubinstein, but Harris’s reality TV star persona falls markedly short.

If not as inventive as the first, 2015’s Poltergeist is sufficiently pleasing. The special effects are better, and they let us see more of the otherworld than we did before, in part through a use of drones and GPS that’s a little more corny than creative. But corny isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a Poltergeist movie.

Poltergeist (2015) v. Poltergeist (1982)

Rubinstein in POLTERGEIST (1982)

Only in the visual department does Kenan exceed his source material. Most other points of comparison are either a wash or in the original’s favor, though the acting from young Kyle Catlett, who plays the son in the remake, is perhaps better than Oliver Robins’s in the 1982 film.

Winner: Poltergeist (1982)

Poltergeist v. The Omen (2006)

Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick as Damien Thorn in THE OMEN (2006)

The remake of The Omen failed to touch the cinematographic masterfulness of the 1976 original, but its more pronounced and unsettling use of jackal imagery helped to compensate. The drop in quality from old to new is roughly the same in the case of Poltergeist. There are two ways to look at it: either The Omen (2006) wins because it’s based on a better and creepier story, or Poltergeist (2015) wins because remaking Poltergeist isn’t as ill-advised as remaking The Omen (not that the remake is a disaster by any means.) This is horror we’re talking about, and I like to be scared, so I’ll break the impasse with a gut-level fear-check: The Omen scares me more, even in remake form.

Winner: The Omen (2006)

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