Poltergeist (2015) [M]

The lives of the Bowen family are already in a little bit of turmoil with Eric being out of work and Amy being a full-time at-home mum, but they get thrown into greater trouble when they move to a house in the suburbs. Young Griffin is the first to notice the spookiness of the house, but the rest of the family doesn’t believe in his fears. That is until one night when the floor opens up and a hand grabs Kendra the eldest, a tree rips through the roof and attacks Griffin, and little Madison disappears completely. With the help of some paranormal experts, the Bowens discover that their house is infested with angry poltergeist, hell-bent on keeping little Madison for their own. 

Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist is probably one of the hardest movies to screw up. You’d have to really set your mind to it if you wanted to achieve that feat. However, I actually was quite impressed with this version. As a horror moving standing on its own it’s pretty solid, building up suspense and tension really well and delivering many sudden shocks and frights. As a remake, it was quite close to the original, changed ever so slightly to make it that little bit different and not a horrible carbon copy of a classic (which has been done before, check out Gus Van Sant’s Psycho). I was actually quite impressed with this movie. 

The lives of the Bowen family are already in a little bit of turmoil with Eric being out of work and Amy being a full-time at-home mum, but they get thrown into greater trouble when they move to a house in the suburbs. Young Griffin is the first to notice the spookiness of the house, but the rest of the family doesn’t believe in his fears. That is until one night when the floor opens up and a hand grabs Kendra the eldest, a tree rips through the roof and attacks Griffin, and little Madison disappears completely. With the help of some paranormal experts, the Bowens discover that their house is infested with angry poltergeist, hell-bent on keeping little Madison for their own. 

As I said before, it’s pretty hard to ruin Poltergeist because it deals with themes that are always going to have an impact on an audience, the biggest and probably scariest being the abduction of children. What I liked about this version was how they gave more of a story to Griffin, the middle child and only boy, who is obviously suffering somewhat from those statuses. Where the mother was the limelight of the original, Griffin is the real hero and I like that they gave his character a story and an arc. 

As remakes or adaptations go, this is a pretty close one with some of the dialogue from the original movie making its way in there (not just the iconic line of “they’re here”). Taking place within modern day America, the spookiness of the poltergeists is actually amplified and the suspense further established because there is all this modern technology that they can mess with and it’s not just them speaking through the white noise on the TV. Phones, iPads, and huge smart TVs take on the creepy white noise gloss, establishing the horror faster and also making a point that no area of the house is safe.The sound, I noticed, was a very important part of this movie with everything being amplified: the white noise, the distorted music from headphones, bangings, gurglings, electric shocks, and of course the storms and drawstring sound of toys. At times I thought it was a little bit too much and I have to admit that, whilst it worked for the big sudden scare sequences, for the most part it took away a bit of the realism and we lost a bit of that voyeuristic pleasure in looking into a different world because the sound is so close and loud it’s almost internal. I wasn’t so jazzed with that. 

The performances were pretty so-so; the real star of the show, as I mentioned before, was Griffin, and whilst Jared Harris’ character comes into the mix and provides a good dose of information dumping and comic relief, the performances were nothing to rave about. Sam Rockwell, who I believe is a great actor, was a bit flat here and his character was hinted as having been given an arc but halfway through he sort of fell on his face, almost like the writers worked out that it wasn’t flying and so they just dropped it. 

As I said before, the story is changed up a little so it’s not identical to the original and I thought this was a good move. One major point of interest is that we actually get to see the world in which Madison gets trapped and I really liked this because it solidified Griffin’s story about bravery and such. 

Starring Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Saxon Sharbino, Kyle Catlett, Kennedi Clements, Jane Adams, Susan Heyward, Nicholas Braun, and Jared Harris, Poltergeist was a spooky and impressionable horror movie and worked quite well as a remake. Filled with the supernatural, action, romance, drama, suspense, violence, horror, and comedy, I was fairly impressed with it and quite enjoyed it.