Do you remember watching the original Poltergeist movie?
I remember being terrified by it when I was a kid. I don’t remember where I saw it... I just remember the effect of it, and how it sat in my psyche. Then when we were going to remake this movie, I started watching it again and I couldn’t watch it, but more from the actor’s perspective, because JoBeth Williams and Craig T Nelson (who starred in the original films) were just so awesome. I thought I would be too scared to take the role on, but I feel like everyone you talk to my age has a very vivid memory of seeing the film.
So, in watching it again, you were more scared of the actors than the poltergeist?!
Well, I don’t know! I shut it off during the mosquito-biting scene (where the Freeling family is the only one in the neighbourhood that’s affected)... I had so much respect for those actors. But I acknowledge that this is its own thing, an incredible story that we’ve modernised and done a contemporary take on.
The original really does hold up well. What is it about this film that still seems relevant?
I think part of it was that it was so cutting-edge for the time, and was very ‘of the moment’ when it was made. The immediacy was right there with what was going on in the world, with pop culture — it’s all over the kids’ rooms and the dolls, and the way the parents are and the neighbours... it was very specific.
Plus, of course, the people that worked on it: Steven Spielberg is a genius, so I’m sure that had a lot to do with it, and Tobe Hooper (the director of the original)… I feel like the whole group was just on their ‘A’ game.
Why does it still seem scary?
There’s something so scary about what you don’t know, and I think at its heart it’s an abduction story, and for parents it’s terrifying because that’s a nightmare. And for children, we all remember getting lost in the mall, and this girl gets lost in her house, sucked into the TV! We’re all helpless and hopeless and have to band together to save her. For me, I remember as a kid, it just tapped into all that stuff. Plus technology is such a big part of the first one, in terms of the TV, and now we’re living in a whole new realm with this family being very disconnected. They have too many gadgets going at the dinner table every night, and you wonder how connected we even are to each other, and would you notice if one of the kids was slipping away from you... on a metaphorical level, I think it works too.
An inevitable question then — why bother with a remake?
I ask myself that a lot as an actor and as an audience member, and I think sometimes when a story is so great, there’s always going to be an audience that’s hungry for it. I’m not so familiar with the genre, but I imagine a lot of horror movies ripped Poltergeist off because it’s a classic, haunting abduction story, so I think that was probably the reason. Plus, this is also 3D, and that adds a whole different element to it and a different experience — it’s great for a new generation to have access to this amazing story.
You say you’re not over-familiar with the genre… do you like horror movies at all?
My husband Ron Livingston did The Conjuring (he played Roger Perron) a couple of years ago and I hadn’t gone to a movie like that in the theatre with a full crowd for a long time, and for me so much of what was fun about it was that communal experience with the audience, where you scream so much that everyone starts laughing, a bit like a ride at an amusement park. So although I may not see a horror movie at home, there is a whole different experience when you go and see a horror movie in the theatre. There’s something about being scared together that’s actually fun.
Was it at all scary on set making the movie?
No, it wasn’t scary in that way. This movie isn’t graphic, it’s not violent... it’s subversive in its scariness. What was scarier for me was when the kids would get scared. Kennedi (Clements), who plays Madison, was six when we started filming and we were shooting a scene towards the end of the movie and there are corpses in it, and she pulled Gil (Kenan, the director) aside and said: ‘You know, I’m really scared of corpses, do you think we could CGI these in later?’ So basically we reconfigured the whole scene so that she didn’t have to come into contact with them at all. I loved her standing up for herself at that age and saying: ‘I’m scared and don’t want to have bad dreams about this later’. I guess the goal is to give other people bad dreams, not the cast!
Which were the most important elements to keep from the original?
The only thing you want to keep intact is the story itself and hopefully the heart of the family, because we have to care about them. You can go break it all down and say what’s important, but it’s not a shot-for-shot remake. The speed of life has changed so much since the original, which means the pacing is different. What was scary to me when I was a kid were these low, slow, quiet shots where you’re waiting for something to happen, but I don’t think young people right now have that same attention span. This movie has a lot of faster edits.
Now that you’ve done your first horror film, are you interested in doing any more?
I wasn’t ready to do more right after it, but of course once you do one of anything they think of you for something else. I did enjoy the experience way more than I ever imagined. A really good story is a really good story, and I don’t think it matters what genre. So I would do this again, sure.
P FOR POLTERGEIST
Co-written by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, Poltergeist (1982) chronicled the trauma and torment of the Freeling family that is terrorised by a group of ghosts in their own home, with the youngest daughter Carol Anne being the prime target. The film’s success gave rise to two sequels — Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Poltergeist III (1988). Poltergeist 2015 is the remake of the 1982 film and stars Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jared Harris and Kennedi Clements. Early reviews of the film have called it “a solid remake” and “entertaining”.
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