In the original 1982 Tobe Hooper cult classic Poltergeist, we see a happy family moving into the suburbs with a mother and father raising their three children with ease on the income of a single salary, while the country is at an economic high, and the future seems bright and hopeful. Unfortunately, most of today’s families are not defined by such a carefree lifestyle. “I mean, all of the movies I grew up on sort of took the idea that the suburbs are where you go when you reach the American dream” explains Poltergeist 2015 director Gil Kenan, “but that wasn’t interesting anymore, like, we’ve moved past that, that’s not the world we live in. The idea of coming back to revisit those same suburbs from the films that we’ve grown up on and see how it’s withered and decayed in the past thirty years was an exciting kind of post-modern concept of a film that is revisiting an old franchise, but also to use it as a way to explore characters”. Indeed, the Bowen family is one that definitely feels more realistic to modern-day America, as the film starts out on a heavier note, with the family moving out of the city and into the suburbs following the loss of Eric’s job. Like several companies, John Deere had to make cutbacks in order to save money, and when it came to Eric’s career, he got the chopping block. Now, he must move his reluctant family away from their friends and from familiarity to the rows of identical houses and nosy neighbors, and hopefully, a new beginning. Sadly, the spirits that lie in wait for the family’s arrival have other plans.
With the loss of his job, and his wife just beginning to pursue her career as a writer, Eric is feeling the pressure to once again become the breadwinner, and earn the love and respect of his teenage, rebellious daughter Kendra, his fear-stricken son Griffin, and his youngest daughter, sweet little Madison. As many in the working class environment do, Eric finds temporary relief in material items: “the idea of Eric buying things for his family and for himself, we all know that quick high, right?” sympathizes director Kenan, “It’s like a chemical rush where if you buy something, even if you don’t have the money to pay for it, sometimes its that good feeling that can get you through a dark patch”. In his efforts to bring his detached family back together again, Eric relies on the quick fix of materialism, leaving the deeper, underlying issues intact, and the family, vulnerable. “They see the insecurity in the family and they exploit that” states star Sam Rockwell on the topic on his character Eric and his willingness to give into consumption and the spirits that await the opportunity to take advantage of the Bowen family’s weakened state. Like the home that they move into is supposed to be “temporary”, as mother Amy puts it, the family constructs superficial, transparent solutions to solve their larger problems. “There are a lot of cracks in the family in just the way that they’re not really being authentic with each other or connected” interprets Rosemarie DeWitt, the actress playing Amy, concluding that the family must endure a crisis for the sake of coming together. “They think that they’re a good family because they love each other but they’re really disconnected, and they start to really come into focus for each other once they’re all called to become a unit, and you really get the sense that their value system is going to be aligned after this experience”.
In noting the similarity between this reboot taking on a much darker tone than its predecessor and another cult classic remake approaching its updates in the same manner, Sam Rockwell compared the 2015 Poltergeist to the 1991 Cape Fear: “It’s very similar to what the Cape Fear remake did. In the original Cape Fear, they were just a Leave It To Beaver kind of family. In the remake, it was a very dysfunctional family unit. Nick Nolte had an affair, and Juliette Lewis was very much a rebellious teenager. I think we talked about that actually, as a prototype at one point”.
In comparing the original film to the remake, actress DeWitt touches on an important perspective of luxury items that keeps o many families like the Bowens in debt: “We all have this big money in our pockets! We’re all gonna spend, and we’re gonna have that new mixer in the kitchen, and the TV screens, and now you see that people still have that whether they can afford it or not, because it’s become the American way. This family cannot afford to give a ten year-old an iPad, but they do it because that’s what you do”. In commenting on the need to keep up with the demand of consumption, DeWitt ties in another update that plays a large part thematically in the film, which is the overabundance of technology. With large, flat screen TVs in almost every room, Griffin playing games on his iPad, Kendra always on his phone, and even the parents harboring a slight addiction to the latest and greatest, the youngest daughter, Maddy, is really the only one who has yet to be tainted by the computer screens’ angelic glow. “I mean, we meet Griffin when he’s staring at his iPad. The opening of the film is inside the world of the device and so it’s very connected, not just to the story of our family, but the story of us, us people in 2015,” Kenan relates, “We have redefined what our lives are with the people around us by the devices that we use”. In a modern family that often finds themselves sucked into their social media accounts, Maddy remains the purest of the bunch: “Madison is sheltered from a lot of the numbing effects of those devices and is sort of young enough and pure enough to be open to the possibility of there being an energy that co-habitates in this house with the rest of the humans” says Kenan.
The film may be very relatable in a financially-decrepid and technologically advanced sense, in today’s ever-improving but constantly economically struggling society, but is there any legitimacy to the frights in Poltergeist? According to the movie’s on-hand paranormal expert Christopher Chacon, there most certainly is: “if you were to take each individual paranormal event that happens in the film and take each one out, each of those events have been actually experienced or documented by someone in the world. Those events, either I’ve encountered, or people in different parts of the world have experienced them individually. Collectively? No. There’s never been a case that has been this volatile and extreme with this type of phenomena, which comes with the dramatic license. You want to pack it up and make it as exciting as possible”. Although the film may condense many real life events in order to create a fast-paced, whirlwind reboot, the events that occur in the movie still technically classify as classic cases of poltergeists; categorized as subjective poltergeists and objective poltergeists: “Subjective means that it’s not in the environment. In order words, you ca see the ghost, put on the camera, and it won’t document it, because everything you’re experiencing is almost at a telepathic level. You can have twelve people sitting around a table and only one or two people would actually see it, or hear it, or smell it, because for whatever reason, be it genetics, or biology, or some kind of physics, they’re only in tune to the phenomena”. Chacon goes on to relate real life poltergeists to the film: “Poltergeist, it’s very objective. You see, anyone who walks in the house is going to see these things flying. But that one scene where the guy is having this whole experience of the drill, and it’s almost like a hallucination in his mind, this is a perfect example of a subjective phenomena, because the entity is affecting the mind and what you’re experiencing. It’s very real to you, but at any time, they can shut it off”.
Even the cast and crew experienced strange events during filming, proving that the ‘Poltergeist curse’ lives on, even to this day. “Little things happen, like electrical disturbances, lights blowing…I use a lot of drone photography on the film and the drone could not get its bearing on the mysterious empty plot of land behind the house where I was shooting” says director Kenan with a shudder, “the neighbors said they saw a woman dressed in black going up and down the stairs in our house at night, it was like really, really serious stuff. Marc Streitenfeld, our composer of the film, sat down to work at his computer and his computer just went completely haywire. It was just like a normal Macbook, so it should have done nothing of the sort, but the screen started flashing and it started to make this really weird electronic groaning noise, and he immediately grabbed his phone and started recording the sounds and then used them as the basis for the score, so I guess the hauntings are now part of the film”.
Despite some of its more dreary, harsh, realistic themes, overall, the re-imagining of Poltergeist is film that focuses on the power of courage, and the jubilation of redemption after a long and tiring trial. “It’s okay to be scared, but I think the story is about courage, and coming up with that courage” muses star Sam Rockwell. “I love a redemption story, and I feel like my little journey in this film is about that, and he’s trying to overcome some stuff. He’s a little emasculated, he’s got a little drinking problem, he’s out of work. So, I love having a hurdle to overcome for your character, because then you have somewhere to go”. Rockwell isn’t alone in thinking that his character finds strength at the moment that the family hits rock bottom: “It takes something literally larger than life to pull them together” co-star DeWitt comments on the tragedy at the center of the film. One can only hope that the Bowens survive through this difficult paranormal period in their lives, and come out clean on the other side.
