Horror Remakes: The Good, the Bad, and the Terrible




Over the past 5 years, the horror genre has been dominated by remakes and reboots of classic films. To some people, the newer films are the only ones they've seen. So are these remakes helping the genre or destroying it?


The most destructive factor that comes in to play when it comes to horror remakes is fans that are new to the genre. To some naive fans who don't know very much about horror, 2006's The Hills Have Eyes is the only one they've heard of. I'm not saying that I have anything against this film, I happen to like it, but it isn't the original and no matter how good a remake is, you should always see the original first and this is mostly due to the fact that there are those terrible remakes out there.

Take, for example, the 2009 "reboot" of Friday the 13th. This is by far one of the worst horror remakes in history. First of all, I don't even know how this can be called a reboot or remake considering both the plot and the killer are completely different then in the 1980 Friday the 13th which featuring no Jason Voorhees character until the last few seconds and this Jason certainly wasn't a full grown man in a hockey mask. Now, I'll give the directors the fact that this Jason has become the most iconic figure in horror, so I understand why they used him, however, Marcus Nispel, who also directed the much better Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, had apparently never seen the first 3 Friday films. To avoid ranting about this film for the next half hour, I'll finish by saying that this remake plays out as if the person who wrote it had only seen Freddy vs Jason and none of the actual Friday the 13th movies. 

Yet another horrible remake is, of course, the 2006 version of The Wicker Man (NO NOT THE BEES!). The fact that Nicolas Cage is the star of this film should automatically give away that it'll be god awful, but it succeeds in being beyond that bad. The acting is so horrible that the movie actually plays out more like a comedy than it does a horror film. I can't even explain in words how badly it disgraces the Christopher Lee version (which is very good). Nicolas Cage is so bad in The Wicker Man that there's an entire youtube video dedicated to his awfulness in that film alone.

However, among the wreckage that that is horror remakes, there are some gems.

One of which is the masterpiece remake of the incredible Swedish vampire film known in the States as Let Me In. Going into this film last October, I wasn't sure what I was about to see. The Swedish version (Let The Right One In) is no doubt an instant classic, and as we saw with films like The Ring, foreign remakes usually flop. Surprisingly, I was blown away by Let Me In. It had everything that Let The Right One In had (minus the subtitles, of course) and much more. It's always great to see an incredible film get an equally incredible remake.

This is also true with horror aficionado Rob Zombie's reboot of the Halloween series. Some fans discredit Rob Zombie's Halloween by saying that it adds too much gore that wasn't present in the original. However, the absence of gore in the original is something that just wouldn't work in a modern slasher. After films like Hostel and Saw, people want blood and more blood and then some more blood. I thought that Rob Zombie did a great job of integrating the blood and gore into the story of Michael Myers and by remaking the film, it's obvious that Rob Zombie was going to put his own twist into it and as we saw with House of 1000 Corpses and The Devils Rejects, Mr. Zombie is pretty fond of piling on the bloody shocks and gory thrills.



When it comes to remakes, good or bad, new fans should always see the original first, and this is something I cannot stress any more. Hopefully over the next few years, remakes such as Fright Night (SEE THE ORIGINAL FIRST) and Hellraiser won't fail to deliver the same thing that drew us in to the original film and got us hooked.

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