The Ghost of Tobe Hooper

Hollywood Reporter claims "House of Sand and Fog" director Vadim Perelmen is lined up to helm the remake of Tobe Hooper's 1982 "Poltergeist."

This type of news typically brings the why-monsters out of the closet, and that's fine. I suppose it's a mark of a film's effect upon an audience that certain members resist the inevitable regurgitation of Hollywood.

However, I cannot understand the surprise that always accompanies such indignation.

The mark of the insane is that they perform the same action repeatedly but are persistent in their astonishment at identical results. The mark of the modern pop-culture consumer is that they return to the same cheap trough repeatedly but are persistent in their astonishment at the poor-quality of the offerings.

I've read recent blogs in the publishing world that back this idea: The market produces what the consumer purchases. Yes, that's a vicious cycle. Market and consumer dictate each other's experience, to some degree. But there is a healthy amount of don't-buy-it-and-the-market-won't-sell-it going on here. We know this is true. If the consumer world thinks the new soda is too sweet, or not sweet enough, and does not spend its money on said new soda, the drink will soon be replaced.

The bottom line is, people go see remakes. Audiences apparently identify strongly with the source material, and they will experience the new iterations either to revel in the familiarity or revel in the variation. In either case, box offices log interest, and studios pay attention to what the hard-earned dollar buys. If genre fans thought remakes were bad ideas, studios would not make them.

All this being said, and perhaps overstated, my dismay is at how "Poltergeist" — no matter how often evidence to the contrary is published — is so commonly attributed to Steven Spielberg. In any given news cycle on the film, there seems to be at least one outright reassignment of the move to Spielberg, wholesale.

Yes, Spielberg wrote the script, intruded far too much into Hooper's domain on the set, and probably put his hands on the camera here and there. But the fact remains: It's a Hooper film. And if the world of critics and consumers had given Hooper his due in 1982, we might not have watched the laudable director spiral into a decade of obscure ineffectiveness (barring 1986's excellent and supremely underrated "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2").

But Hooper was forked onto the pile in the blaze of Spielberg's "E.T." summer. It was simply too attractive a proposition: One the one hand Spielberg's direct creation of a lovable potato from outer space, on the other hand a howling ghost story pulled from the pages of National Enquirer. On some marketing level, it had to be all Spielberg. Just read the poster to the left. If I were Hooper, I'd have had a career crisis, too.

So Mania today is the guilty party, eschewing any mention of Hooper at all, calling the film "a Spielberg classic."

Bloody-Disgusting gets it right back on Aug. 19, referring to it as a Hooper-Spielberg construction, but doesn't mention who actually made the movie in today's post. Fangoria and Hollywood Reporter get it right in all cases. Ah well, two out of four ain't bad.