How exactly can you remake a film as classic as Poltergeist? We’ll find out this July when the new Gil Kenan directed film hits theaters, but today we got our first look at the movie with some pretty familiar looking images.
USA Today released the first images from Poltergeist. This includes an updated version of the classic poster shot featuring little Carol Anne with her hands pressed up against the TV, except now it’s bigger. And “except now it’s bigger” seems to be the motto of this remake.
Poltergeist takes place in modern times 30 years after the original film, though it seems to be following pretty much the exact same plot as the original: a family moves into a house which is haunted by ghosts and their youngest daughter is abducted into the spirit world.
Director Gil Kenan talked about his approach to remaking the classic film with the USA Today, saying that just like in the original movie the TV screens are a way the ghosts communicate with the family, only in modern times they have even more to work with in a house equipped with much larger TVs and other screens like smartphones and computers.
Kenan said that the original film was a comment on television getting out of control and babysitting children, and the remake will make that same sort of commentary about smartphones and other screens always surrounding kids.
When remaking a horror film, there are some which essentially just copy all of the iconic scenes from the original movie and do basically nothing new or interesting, like the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Then there are horror remakes that take the spirit of the original but still do something different and work in their own right, like the 2013 remake of Evil Dead. So what kind of remake will Poltergeist be?
The idea of updating the theme of the original to reflect modern technology sounds interesting, but is there any need to copy all the iconic scenes from the original movie rather than doing something new? These new images make the film seem like it might come dangerously close to just copying the original movie exactly, and what’s the point of that?
Not to mention that star Sam Rockwell recently described the remake as “more of a kids movie” than the original, according to The Guardian, and for horror fans hoping for an intense movie that lives up to the horror of the original, that’s some pretty worisome news.
Poltergeist is directed by Gil Kenan (Monster House) and written by David Lindsay-Abaire (Oz the Great and Powerful). It stars Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt and Jared Harris, and is scheduled to be released on July 24th.
A full trailer for the film is expected to drop online tomorrow, so stay tuned for a more in depth look at the film.
photo via Dara Kushner/INFphoto.com