By I need to preface this with the fact that I am not the person who hates remakes/reboots/sequels out of pocket. In fact, I kind of love them. I love the experience of seeing a new creative team’s fresh take on old material. I love reimaginings of classic stories (think Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You). Heck, I love fanfiction. I am not a person predisposed to rejecting any reworking of existing material.
Now that that’s out of the way, the 2015 Poltergeist remake had me yelling at my TV. Spoiler warning: I’m about to spoil the big twist of a movie first made in 1982 then remade six years ago. I apologize.
The biggest single problem with 2015’s Poltergeist (aside from the absence of Tobe Hooper’s flawless horror direction, Spielberg’s grasp of 80’s families in suburbia, and the incomparable Zelda Rubinstein) was that they didn’t trust their audience to put the story together. No, halfway through the remake, Jared Harris’ psychic stand-in had to verbally state one of the great cinematic reveals of the 20th century.
Both versions feature a scene in which a bizarre assortment of dusty, dirty items appear through the veil; baseball cards, jewelry, pocket watches, that sort of thing. The 1982 version never explains what these items are on screen. Instead, it’s up to the audience to understand what they are as the rest of the clues are slowly revealed until the father screams at his corrupt property developer boss, “You moved the headstones, but you didn’t move the bodies!”
This is a great moment in storytelling and an excellent example of Chekhov’s Gun (if you put a gun above the mantle on the set, then at some point the gun must be fired). Those sundry items aren’t even mentioned again. It’s up to the audience to think back on all the clues leading up to this moment and come to the realization that those are the sort of things people are buried with. They trusted their audience to both remember that scene and also put the clues together.
The 2015 version simply uses Harris to literally state what the items are and his astounding theory that the property developer merely moved the headstones, not the caskets. Not only does this dialogue not make any sense within the context of the movie (that was the only clue with which Harris had to come to that conclusion), but it shows how little they trusted their audience. It’s almost insulting.
When cleaning and loading a Chekhov’s Gun, it’s important to make sure your audience knows it’s there. In film, this is fairly simple: you just have to dedicate a few extra seconds of screen time to it, throw in some quick dialogue to acknowledge it, then move on. In print, it’s not all that different. Instead of film, you’re working with scene description. How mysterious your story is will determine how many extra details and tidbits you include (otherwise known as red herrings).
Think of old cartoons: we always knew which object a character would interact with because the color was a little off. That detail you want your reader to unconsciously store for later should be just slightly off color, barely out of step with the rest of the information you include.
The audience is savvier than you might think. It’s certainly savvier than what the writers of the 2015 Poltergeist thought. They will remember the seeds you planted. There’s a reason why our culture is so anti-spoiler: we like both the surprise and the satisfaction of mentally replaying all the clues that lead up to the big reveal. We like rewatching and rereading those stories with our new knowledge and picking out all the details that lead up to that moment.
Don’t deprive the audience.