Why remake Poltergeist? Well, it's a good title and you can make money with it, of course. But remaking Poltergeist seems, to me, to be an incredibly bad idea for a number of reasons. One is that there's no good reason to remake the damn thing, which I recently saw on the big screen and can report is incredibly effective. But more than that, Poltergeist is kind of ground zero for a problematic trend in horror films - scary movies with action movie finales. Technically this stretches back to the Universal monster movies (poor Frankenstein's castle, always exploding and collapsing) but Poltergeist moved it up into the SFX era. And a remake is going to have to take that action movie finale and up the ante - maybe this time the whole neighborhood gets sucked into the portal! And I would be surprised if the camera stays on this side of the portal in the new movie - how can CGI-happy filmmakers resist getting a peek at the Other SIde? In Poltergeist the huge monster ghost that pops out of the portal is a shock; I fear that in the 2015 version he's the foot soldier of some sort of invasion force.
The good news is that Gil Kenan is directing; his Monster House shows that he's not exactly a dummy. The other good news is this quote from Sam Raimi, producer, who indicates there could be an actual thematic reason for this movie to exist:
"The original film commented on how we've let television get out of control, babysitting our kids," says Raimi. "It's only gotten worse with the handheld portable devices. Screens are everywhere."
If this is really explored - ie, it isn't just used in one cheap scare sequence with the older sister, who spends all her time on Yik Yak - this could make the 2015 Poltergeist truly worthy of existence. If.
In the meantime, the image above at least tells us they've upped the ante on how many ghosts are in the big flatscreen TV. Is that a 4K?