The Trend of Horror Remakes — Blue Fairy Film Blog

When you’ve watched as many horror movies as I have, eventually you will have to start watching remakes. Sometimes remakes are a great idea. Most horror films are made for little to no funding, with tiny recognition from the studio system, and therefore aren’t given the proper respect they deserve. These parameters can lead to complete disaster, as with straight to streaming garbage content, or lends to simplified films made with petite budgets. Most of the horror remakes of the past ten years are from forty or fifty years before, so time should have granted some respite from the looming shadow of the originals. Sadly, because horror is contingent on originality, there’s very few that replace, or take the mantel of, the original classic.

Horror remakes are not a recent or even semi-recent trend. As early as the fifties and sixties, the Universal monster movies of ten or twenty years prior were being remade. Of course, because film was still such a young medium, these horror remakes had to do something new with the material. The obvious choice was to go much gorier. The Universal monster movies of the thirties and forties were much more interested in a quick fright and ghoulish apparitions than blood and gore, so the remakes had to step it up immeasurably. Christopher Lee rose to fame in a set of Hammer films starring him as Dracula, and many other Dracula iterations were released in the Blaxploitation genre as well. Throughout this period horror films began to be better respected for their psychological twists and turns. The sixties quickly spawned many popular and iconic horror films, including “Psycho,” “The Wicker Man,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “Night of the Living Dead.”

Fenix Films, Filmar, and Corona Filmproduktion GmbH

Throughout the seventies and eighties remakes weren’t a popular bet, but horror sequels were all the rage. With the advent of the slasher genre (after the release of John Carpenter’s “Halloween”) droves of teenagers went out to see the newest “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Friday the 13th,” or “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” film. While these films were not direct remakes of the original property they were about as contrived and one-note as recent remakes have been. The same kills, characters, and clichés peppered these films and led to a degradation period where very few good horror films, with original ideas, were being released. Some remakes were made during this period, including “Cat People,” “The Bad Seed,” and “The Fly.”

Fast forwarding through the waning nineties and into the aughts, we see slashers dying out and new and innovative ideas are widely accepted in the horror genre. Films such as “The Blair Witch Project,” “28 Days Later,” “The Others,” and “Cabin Fever,” ignited a horror renaissance and lent to new directors pushing for unique and creepy films. In my opinion the recent trend of horror remakes began with the 2002 film “The Ring,” which was an Americanized version of a Japanese horror film. With its success as an obviously disturbing and culture defining horror film, there came a set of studio decisions to remake old American films that people had forgotten about. The next big remake was the 2003 release of a remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” starring Jessica Biel. This trend quickly snowballed and created a long list of old, forgotten horror classics turned modern, such as “Black Christmas,” “The Amityville Horror,” “The Last House on the Left,” Rob Zombie’s “Halloween,” and “Friday the 13th.”

Most of these remakes were made between 2003-2010 and often were not very scary. Sometimes a film would break the mold, but many films only reminded fans of the originals, such as “When a Stranger Calls,” “My Bloody Valentine,” and “Prom Night.” The originals were not hugely successful when they came out, but the generation before ours went to see them, perhaps made them into a cult hit, and then forgot about them just as quickly. Reviving nostalgia has become a huge trend in the studio system lately, but it’s often for already huge franchises like Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and Marvel superheroes. These were not huge franchises, or big films. They were made by creative, yet hopelessly indeterminate directors with little resources and no mass appeal. The reason why many of these remakes were made was just recycling ideas for an audience craving something new but unaware of anything made before the slasher genre emerged.

Recently the mass remake trend has been stymied by innovative horror films such as the satirical “The Cabin in the Woods,” the psychological horror films “Oculus,” and “The Babdook,” and the throwback “The Conjuring.” These are of course not without moorings in past films: “The Conjuring” has a historical relationship with “The Amityville Horror,” and “The Cabin in the Woods,” is in the same vein as “Shaun of the Dead,” and “Scream.” Sometimes originality stems from refashioning what we once thought was too ubiquitous to scare, and make it frightening once again. Today there are still many horror remakes, including this year’s “Martyrs,” “Lights Out,” and “Cabin Fever” gracing our screens, but these are not in the same category as the shot for shot remakes of even ten years prior. That being said, some of my favorite horror films are remakes, including 1986’s “The Fly,” “1978’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and 2010’s “Let Me In.” This Halloween season there’s nothing wrong with delving into a remake, or even a classic horror film. Just know that your screams are your own, no matter where the blood and gore originated.