Dreaded horror remakes
The revamps often don’t live up to the original frights
“Jason does not take prisoners. He does not hold people hostage. That’s the worst thing you could do is screw with the elements.” Steve Barton, DreadCentral.com
Everything old is new again, which is why another little girl is getting way too close to another creepy television set in another Poltergeist movie.
Horror remakes, more often than not, leave fans of scare-fests, slasher films and supernatural fare throwing things at their screens — and leave filmmakers navigating more hazards than a bunch of frightened teenagers in the woods. Yet, Hollywood keeps coming back for more.
In Poltergeist (in theaters Friday), produced by horror icon Sam Raimi ( Evil Dead) and directed by Gil Kenan ( Monster House), the Bowen family has moved into a house that just happens to be on the site of an old cemetery. Spirits haunt walls, appliances and freaky clown dolls, and the parents (Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt) go to great lengths to rescue their daughter Madison (Kennedi Clements) when she disappears into the mysterious “other side.”
A premise to inspire nightmares, for sure, but it’s one that surely invites a little more scrutiny with that Poltergeist name attached. The 1982 original by director Tobe Hooper (known primarily for 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and writer/ producer Steven Spielberg is considered a classic of not only the genre but of ’80s cinema.
“It’s always this looming presence,” Kenan says of the original, 1982’s eighth-highest-grossing film ($76.6 million). It spawned two sequels in the next six years.
The awareness of that first movie — which London-born Kenan, 38, discovered during one fateful trip to a video store when he was a kid — means “ultimately we’re doing this because it’s a great story, a story that deserves to be told and a story that has important analogs to see how the American family and American dream have changed in the 30 years since the original film.”
RISKY BUSINESS
One thing is still the same over those decades: Horror remakes don’t do very well at the box office. Revisiting staples of the genre seems like a good idea in theory, since studios know that fans love the classic villains of the 1970s and ’80s — A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Halloween’s Michael Myers and Fri- day the 13th’s Jason Voorhees. But only two remakes in the past 25 years — 2002’s The Ring and 2004’s The Grudge, both American versions of Japanese hits — cracked the $100 million mark.
A variety of factors come into play, from brand recognition to nostalgia to the effectiveness of trailers, says Paul Dergarabedian, of the media research company Rentrak. But “they usually drop harder in their second weekend than a dead body thrown out of the back of a speeding hearse.”
The biggest pitfall facing a filmmaker who tackles a wellknown franchise is paying so much homage that the filmmaker mimics it, says Steve Barton of horror site DreadCentral.com.
Being wholly faithful failed with 1998’s Psycho, director Gus Van Sant’s nearly shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, and with Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween.
The first half was “decent and interesting ” as it was a different movie altogether from John Carpenter’s 1978 original, Barton says. But “when it became Halloween, he tried to squeeze 90 minutes of film into the second half and that didn’t work.”
A SCARE FOR A NEW ERA
Barton says something new has to be added to freshen a remake for the current generation, and that was one of Kenan’s primary goals with his new film. When watching the trilogy of earlier Poltergeist movies, he says he was always hungry to see what was on the other side of that fuzzy TV set. “There were peeks and hints and teases at it, but there is this incredible world that exists just beyond the fabric of our reality.”
So in the new Poltergeist, Kenan decided to take the camera into the unknown and show how “the souls of those who are trapped in the land between life and death actually make up the very structure of the place.”
At least the Poltergeist filmmakers stick with the concept of the first film; Barton has seen a lot of horror flicks that can’t even get that right.
One of the worst offenders is the 2009 Friday the 13th remake. The idea behind the first Friday in 1980 was a simple one — “Kids go into the woods, kids get killed, roll credits,” Barton says.
But the remake veered from the lore: Jason sets traps and kidnaps youngsters. “Jason does not take prisoners. He does not hold people hostage,” Barton says.
“That’s the worst thing you could do is screw with the elements.” (Anew Friday the 13th reboot hits theaters May 13, 2016.)
Still, that wasn’t as horrible a horror reinvention as A Nightmare on Elm Street in 2010, a “lazy” film that failed miserably in every way its 1984 predecessor didn’t, Barton says. “All of the original Elm Street movies put together, that was like the remake’s craft service budget.” But sometimes, it all works. Barton says Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead took George Romero’s 1978 zombie flick and added to it in a fresh way. Similarly with Evil Dead in 2013, director Fede Alvarez gave fans of Raimi’s 1981 movie new ideas “while not just winking at the camera over and over again going, ‘ Look, I’m making an Evil Dead movie!’ ” Barton says.
Raimi actually has had quite a bit of success with remakes — he was a producer of The Grudge and the recent Evil Dead, and he is revisiting that franchise with Starz TV’s series Ash vs. Evil Dead, now filming in New Zealand.
Sometimes people are cautious about boarding a horror remake “because they don’t want to betray their love for the original,” Raimi says.
A major way to remedy that: Find a director who has his own point of view, is coming from the right place and, most important, has a passion for the material.
“They’re not trying to exploit it,” he says. “It’s basically the next generation telling that same old story around the campfire.”
For Kenan, a Poltergeist film has always had an allure and accessibility as a gateway horror movie. Back in the 1980s, families would go see that movie with kids not yet ready for the likes of, say, Evil Dead, and it would spark exploration “into the darker depths” of cinema, Kenan says.
“We don’t get those movies in theaters anymore, movies that cross the spectrum of audience and still are committed to scaring the daylights out of people.”
Therein lies a big problem Kenan faced with his remake: putting his film up against people’s memories from childhood.
“It becomes an emotional attachment that goes beyond just the exchange of an audience to a film,” he says. “And in many ways, you have to acknowledge that that’s an insurmountable obstacle. You have to make the very best story you can tell.”
Some fans are always going to cry foul at a remake, Barton says, but even they know nothing is sacred and the ghosts of movies past are constantly around.
“The knee-jerk reaction is always, ‘ Why are you doing this? Please just leave it alone.’ ”
But, he says, “remakes serve a really great purpose: If people see a remake of Poltergeist or Texas Chainsaw and they dig it, there’s a good chance they’ll go back and look at the original film and discover it all over again.”