Another Day, Another Hollow ‘Reimagining’

The original 1992 iteration of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” hinged on the thematic bread and butter of many horror and thriller films throughout the 1980s and ’90s: an outside threat to the quintessential nuclear family successfully infiltrates the home through a normally safe avenue and tears domestic bliss apart from within. In “Poltergeist,” the spirits connect with the family’s children through the living room television; in “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” the invasion comes in the form of a much-needed, very pretty, very put-together nanny. Like “Fatal Attraction,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” is, at its core, about a malevolent being in the form of a beautiful yuppy woman fracturing the family home. 

In “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” Mrs. Mott (who falsely names herself “Peyton” as an alibi) is out for revenge. Claire Bartel, loving and content wife and young mother, was the first woman to accuse Peyton’s husband of sexually assaulting her at his gynecological practice. Dr. Mott’s subsequent suicide causes Peyton to have a miscarriage. Peyton sees Claire as having everything that she has lost — a home, a husband, two healthy children and the general trappings of an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Peyton is determined to steal everything she lost back from Claire, and begins by infiltrating the Bartel family home under the guise of being a model babysitter. 

The film, like many thrillers and horrors, is a reactionary one, basing its fear factor on the fragmenting of the nuclear, heterosexual family and tropes of “stranger danger.” It’s a story of sexual assault, women as enablers and yuppie-on-yuppie crime. It’s also, notably, not a very good movie. 

Regardless of the original film’s quality, last week Hulu released its reboot of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” a remake that is being touted as a “reimagining” of the 1992 original. The current horror/thriller reboot trend is near-constant and regularly produces subpar films, in no small part because of the genre’s reactionary nature. A culturally topical theme from decades ago will likely fail to resonate now, and so instead has to be clumsily “updated” or “elevated.” 

In the newer iteration of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” the Peyton equivalent, now named Polly, meets the beautiful part-time lawyer, part-time passable mom Caitlyn at a meeting regarding Polly’s tenant rights. Polly’s beef with Caitlyn runs deeper than the original “Cradle’s” storyline. Polly’s hatred for Caityln was sparked by a mutually traumatic childhood event that Caitlyn is not aware of, and that Polly has made Caitlyn the antagonist of for decades. 

In the original “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” the unraveling of Peyton’s lies has to do entirely with Claire’s discovery of Peyton’s ties to the sexually abusive Dr. Mott — a revelation that is obviously and immediately disturbing. In the new “Hand,” Caitlyn’s “discoveries” regarding Polly’s character are that she is impoverished, she is a lesbian and she is a recovering alcoholic. Ideally this goes without saying, but it feels important to note that none of these traits on their own determine someone as having poor moral character. One of Polly’s fellow Alcoholics Anonymous members confesses to Caitlyn that she pretended to be a reference for Polly in order to help her get the nannying job. This is a gesture I personally perceive as a commonplace and minor deceit that is sometimes necessary for survival in modern America, but Caitlyn sees this as definitive evidence of genuine nefariousness. These “failings” on Polly’s part — a fudged phone call, a Fourth of July firework brought into the house, a past with addiction — are the evidence Caitlyn builds her case upon, long before she finds out anything conclusively disturbing about Polly. 

The fact that Caitlyn ends up being correct — Polly is secretly messing with the dose on Caitlyn’s psychiatric medication and angling to steal her husband, children and home — doesn’t make the new film’s case any better. On the one hand, Caitlyn makes assumptions based on intense classism. And on the other hand (which is actually the same hand), she is proven correct narratively, with the movie ultimately validating Caitlyn’s suspicions. 

When talking about representation in “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”–verse, it’s near impossible not to touch on Ernie Hudson’s character, Solomon, in the original film. Solomon is a Black man with intellectual disabilities who is hired to help with odd jobs on the Bartels’ property around the same time that Peyton arrives. Claire is suspicious of Solomon where she is not of Peyton, but is proven wrong when Solomon saves her baby at the end of the film. Showing Solomon huddled up in the corner of the attic, clutching the baby, is clearly imagery attempting to invoke “To Kill a Mockingbird’s” Boo Radley. The message we are meant to receive about presumptions based on identity aspects is given with all the subtlety of a club to the head. 

In the original iteration of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” the big moral lesson is a ham-fisted, patronizing, liberal one: We are wrong to be inherently suspicious of Black men and/or of people with intellectual disabilities — technically true (hopefully obviously so), but executed with little grace in the film. In the new iteration, the suggestion is one that is inherently reactionary and ideologically conservative: We are right to be suspicious of a poor person and/or of someone who suffers from addiction. 

This “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” remake gets rid of the Solomon character entirely, gives the mother figure a job and a more ambivalent relationship to her role in the home, creates some vaguely queer but poorly articulated tension between nanny and mother, and calls it a day. These updates are slapdash and haphazard, vague signifiers of modern womanhood without any intention. This lack of intention is the issue with horror reboots in general: There is no meaningful political, cultural or artistic purpose to what is changed and what is kept, no consideration to what reheating a decades-old film may telegraph politically and culturally in the present day. 

The issue with many of these reboots is that these films just aren’t reboot-able, at least not in a way that’s worthwhile. And yet, the remake mill persists ceaselessly. A “Basic Instinct” remake is in the works, and is being described by its creators as “anti-woke.” (Was the original “Basic Instinct” woke?) The 1983 cult classic “Sleepaway Camp” is a film infamous for its transphobic “twist” ending that has now been reclaimed by some in the transgender community with a nuanced and cultural renegotiation of the film that hinges upon understanding the era in which it was made. “Sleepaway Camp” also has an incoming remake, spearheaded by “Saturday Night Live” cast member Kenan Thompson. Their only options will be to (likely clumsily) reckon with the trans aspects of the film or be rid of them entirely — neither outcome is the best option, because the best option is leaving the original “Sleepaway Camp” be. 

I think before anyone is permitted to remake another culturally nuanced cult classic, they have to, at the very least, be able to answer why, exactly, they are doing it. The promise by Thompson’s co-creator, Johnny Ryan Jr., that they are “adding some insane new twists and going crazy with the merch, too” for the “Sleepaway Camp” reboot does not inspire confidence. Instead of these “reimaginings” that are barely hidden attempts to reheat intellectual properties for streamers and sell a few Camp Arawak T-shirts, it might be nice to watch a horror film that is actually just freshly imagined, an idea entirely of its own.