Creepy willows, unnerving storage space, misbehaving tech, zombie soil eruptions and, reliably, clowns (“Why would someone keep a box of clowns, daddy?”) … this restless remake of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 spooker chucks in everything but the ectoplasm-smeared sink in its search for new audiences. Or perhaps given the hollowed-out, late-noughties socio-economic context opted for by director Gil Kenan (Monster House) and writer David Lindsay-Abaire – joblesswhite-collar dad Sam Rockwell moves his disgruntled family into a foreclosure-hit neighbourhood – this trope overkill is a case of horror vacui. It’s a shame Kenan can’t muster his own bit of gothic shorthand for post-credit crunch America, but the film still has a fluid, 3D-orientated immediacy that produces one beautiful sequence: a hallucinatory child abduction via the bedroom closet in the finest supernatural-suburban tradition of Spielberg, the original’s writer-producer. But aside from CGI-boosted shocks, it’s clear the new Poltergeist won’t be laid to rest before any serious tension is long gone.
