Paltry geist
HORROR movies suffer from the law of diminishing returns. After you’ve sat through a few dozen, you become aware that they all use the same repertoire of scare tactics — a few false frights near the beginning, a creepy child who is probably going to be possessed, a re-animated clown doll that will terrorise the household, a few quick flicks of the camera to a dark corner where some monstrosity lurks.
Great horror films, such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining or many examples from Asian cinema, work by slowly accumulating an atmospheric sense of dread, like a machine that produces atavistic feelings of ambient unease within its viewers. The assembly-line American-style horror just serves up a series of quick scares, without ever building a thrilling nervousness.
In Poltergeist , the moments of horror are wedged between large slices of suburban drama. Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) is a likeable father down on his luck who moves into a new neighbourhood with his wife Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt) and their three children.
Their house, we will later discover, is built on an old graveyard, and before long, malevolent forces begin to turn the house against them. Their youngest daughter, Madison (Kennedi Clements), is slurped into an extra-dimensional portal behind her wardrobe. To rescue their daughter, they call upon a range of would-be heroes, including the staff of the “Department of Paranormal Research”, a sort of academic ghost-busters outfit, and later, Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), the grizzliest of ghost-hunters, with a legion of battle-scars that announce his victories against the other side.
Poltergeist is a remake of the 1982 Spielberg-produced horror of the same name, and it updates the old fable to include modern technology — the spirit communicates via iPhone, flat-screen TV and headphones, and the arsenal used against it includes GPS, thick wads of cables and temperature sensors.
In this way, this film enters all the techno-based horror territory recently explored at length and to the point of exhaustion in the Paranormal Activity series and films such as Insidious and Oculus. The best moment is a supernatural jaunt through the netherworld in which the walls are made of writhing masses of undead flesh. But for the rest of it, the film dishes up a carnival of predictable scares.