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Poltergate 3d 20153/17/2023 You can see it in the very visual DNA of Kenan’s film, a CG extravanganza that contrasts with the original’s last-gasp use of practical effects and (notoriously) real skeletons. Oh how times have since changed, with the digital age opening the doors and, heh, windows of our homes to all manner of newly malign outside influences. As the middle-class Freelies found their domestic life being torn apart by spectral entities, the real bogeyman – shown in extreme close-up in the film’s opening shot, used by ghosts as a medium, and pointedly discarded in the final shot – was television itself, which in the early Eighties had come to dominate American living spaces and challenge parental authority. There is, of course, no accounting for nostalgia – but Hooper’s film was very much of its time, and proves ripe for revisiting. At issue here is not the lack of originality as such, but rather the reappropriation of a title – and therefore of a brand – to cash in on the original’s cachet and dance, as it were, on its grave. Few even complained when Poltergeist was recently ‘reimagined’ as Insidious, the most profitable film of 2011. Few complained that the 1982 film itself drew much of its plotting from a 1962 Twilight Zone episode called ‘Little Girl Lost‘ (about a child who has slipped into the fourth dimension of a house, and her parents’ desperate attempts to get her back). Much like a house built on top of the unrestful dead, Gil Kenan’s Poltergeist is haunted by the ghost of Tobe Hooper’s original.
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