... FOR "A TALE OF TWO 'POLTERGEIST'(S)"

UPDATE: Via this report from Variety.com, MGM and 20th Century Fox have moved up the release date for Poltergeist to May 22, 2015. The article that follows remains unaltered from its original post.

Excuse me for sounding a little churlish, but the newly-released trailer for 20th Century Fox's Poltergeist remake has my stomach in knots, and I don't mean in a good way. The film, which opens July 24th, has been touted as "a revisionist take" on Tobe Hooper's 1982 horror classic, with "modern" updates including cell phones and flat-screen TVs. Which is fine, I guess - I mean, this is Hollywood, after all, where people aren't truly happy unless they're busy ripping off someone else's work or exploiting the latest adventures of the world's greatest superheroes. And this is hardly the first time Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures label has tried rejiggering a modern classic, with remakes of The Grudge and The Evil Dead burning up theater screens in 2004 and 2013, respectively. My question, though: what's the point in remaking something if you don't have anything new to bring to the table? Why reproduce the same thrills and chills if you can't be bothered to give a fresh spin on old material?

Despite the change in cast (Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt make fine replacements for Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams from the original movie), the new Poltergeist looks to be a rehash of the same exact plot - close-knit family moves into suburban home and is immediately beset by supernatural forces. Again, this is nothing new. Remakes have been a part of our cinematic diet since the days of the earliest films, when Cecil B. DeMille remade his 1914 silent The Squaw Man in 1918 and again in 1931. (Trivia bit: DeMille also directed a silent version of The Ten Commandments in 1923, then later reused some of the same props and sets for his 1956 remake.) True, the marketing gurus behind Poltergeist 2015 could be deliberately trying to goad us into seeing the new movie by plumbing our nostalgia for the previous one. And yes, the final film as released could be entirely different from what the trailer lets on. But the fact that so many elements come directly from Hooper's version suggests a paucity of imagination on the filmmakers' part.

... IN DEFENSE OF "HORROR MOVIES"

Why do we love Horror movies? What is it about them we find so consistently fascinating? Is it the childlike thrill of the dark? A secret love for things that jump out and go "Boo!"? Or is it something deeper - a catharsis, say, a way of facing our fears head on, only to emerge, two hours later with a silly grin on our faces, into the light? The fact is, most of us like to be scared on one level or another. It's the adrenaline you feel, that thumping in your chest when you're forced to step outside your comfort zone. This is true whether you're jumping from a plane, climbing a rock face, or riding a roller coaster - you get addicted to it, like a drug. Horror films affect us in much the same way.

Even so, Horror movies tend to illicit different reactions from the people watching them. It's hard to feel threatened by Dracula, for instance, if you don't find vampires particularly frightful or menacing. The shark scenes in Jaws may turn your basic aquaphobe to a quivering mess on the floor, but the effect will be decidedly different for anyone who's spent a great deal of time out on the ocean. From the silent Expressionist films of the 20s (The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu) to Universal's classic monsters of the 30s and 40s (Frankenstein, The Wolf Man) to the slasher flicks of the 70s and 80s (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween and their countless clones) and finally to the J-Horror and "torture porn" films of the Noughties (Ju-On: The Grudge, Hostel), the genre has been fractured and splintered into so many subcategories that there's practically something for everyone. The question becomes: What kind of Horror fiend are you?

... FOR "MOVIE COINCIDENCE OF THE DAY #2"

In which we take a look at a series of odd movie coincidences - scenes, jokes, dialogue, even specific camera shots shared between two seemingly unrelated films. Anyone who's sat through a particular scene in a movie and thought, "Gee, haven't I seen someone do this somewhere before?" will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Continuing with our horror movie theme (a week after Halloween - so sue me), I offer this comparison between two "classics" of the genre, Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982) and Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984). One is a haunted house movie in which a middle-class American family find themselves under attack from a malevolent spirit. The other is an atypical slasher flick in which a group of all-American teenagers fall victim to a razor-fingered psychopath who kills them in their sleep. Couldn't be more different, right? Yet they share a single scene on common - in which a character is dragged across the walls and ceiling of her bedroom by an unseen demonic force:

... FOR "HALLOWEEN HORROR PROJECT - 2013"

I'm currently at work on a Horror retrospective for the blog, but it looks like I'm not going to finish on time (that's the thing about self-imposed deadlines - you know how forgiving the boss can be), so I thought I'd run a quick opinion poll for the time being instead...

Yesterday on Facebook, I asked everyone within eye shot what they'd recommend to a friend if they were asked the question: "What movie should I rent for Halloween night?" This could run the gamut from grossest gore film to funniest scare comedy to zaniest zombie flick - anything they found particularly frightening or family-friendly (or both) for the holiday, and why that particular film should be cherished and appreciated by others. The response was about as enthusiastic as I expected, but the thing I always find so interesting is how different types of Horror movies affect different types of people. From The Blair Witch Project to The Exorcist to Psycho to Shaun Of The Dead... what's scary to one person will often have a different effect on someone else, and it was fun to get at the heart of what really scares the pants off of you this time of the season.

... FOR "80'S REMAKE-A-PALOOZA!"

I'm late to the party again, I know, but they announced this last Tuesday (August 9th) and it's been festering ever since: "Lionsgate announces Dirty Dancing remake directed by original choreographer Kenny Ortega." That's right. Dirty Dancing. Patrick Swayze. Jennifer Gray. "(I've Had) The Time of My Life." "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." All that.

To which I say: Whaddup, Hollywood? Why this sudden interest in retrofitting 80's pop culture mainstays for our current attention-deficit millennium? First, there were reboots of Friday The 13th, The Karate Kid, and A Nightmare On Elm Street, and a sequel to Tron. Now we've got trailers for a Footloose remake and a prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing (itself a remake) circling the web. We've got upcoming big-screen recyclings of Conan The Barbarian, Fright Night, and Red Dawn, plus in-the- works retoolings of WarGames, Child's Play, and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (produced, not coincidentally, by Raimi himself). And that's just as of this writing. Who knows what titles will be announced tomorrow, or next week? It's 80's remake fever!