Horror Remakes

This article aims to address the largely negative critical response to Steven R. Monroe’s remake of I Spit On Your Grave (2010), by both analysing its themes in comparison to Meir Zarchi’s 1978 original film, and by positioning the new version within its own generic context. Using examples from feminist film theory which analyses Zarchi’s film (Clover 1992, Creed 1993, Read 2000), I suggest that Monroe’s version not only interprets, but actively enhances the perceived feminist message of the original, and consider how role reversal during the revenge section of the film contributes to this. I also outline the way in which Monroe’s film can be understood as representative of recent trends in the horror genre – most notably, its inclusion of explicit, gory violence and themes of retribution. Ultimately, the portrayal of the remake’s female protagonist as less sexualized and arguably more monstrous than the original character works in conjunction with other changes and a torture porn aesthetic in order to position the film clearly within the context of contemporary horror cinema.

Horror Video Game Remakes and the Question of Medium: Remaking Doom, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil. In Fear, Cultural Anxiety and Transformation: Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films Remade. Scott A. Lukas and John Marmysz, eds. Lexington Books, 2008.

Se hace un análisis de la película predecesora de "La seducción" de Sofía Coppola, de Don Siegel, con Clint Eastwood, en la que se estrena como actor de carácter y Geraldine Page, donde se muestra una tragedia a puerta cerrada, donde el infierno son los demás, en medio de una moral de la ambigüedad.

Since the 1980s, feminist film theory has made the horror movie one of its main concerns because of the genre's focus on the body, its treatment of female victims, and the conspicuous transformation of female characters into heroines from the 1970s on. This article proposes to examine the extent to which feminist film theory has been taken into account in the Hollywood domestic horror remakes of 2000s, and more precisely, how the genre has become exemplary as the site of a tension between the second wave feminism that informed feminist film theory and the media phenomenon of post-feminism. The article attempts to assess the political contradictions of the adaptations regarding narrative, characterization and camerawork made to the original material, with particular attention to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003), Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007) and I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010).

The 2000s have seen a number of remakes in the horror genre. If critics have generally argued that Hollywood aims at erasing the original movie when it is foreign, the marketing strategy of domestic remakes relies on the audience’s awareness of the existence of the original film. As the prefix “re-” suggests, producing a remake generally rests on the belief that a profit can be made by improving on the original in terms of technique and technology. This article attempts to foreground some of the contradictions immanent to the remake by arguing that what Thomas Leitch calls its “stance” is, in effect, a disavowal of the very terms contained in the prefix. The remakes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) and Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)—are examined as paradigmatic examples of this disavowal through a study of both pragmatic and formal levels.

Reanimated offers a new perspective on twenty-first century American horror film remakes. Counter to the critical dismissal of genre remakes as derivative rip-offs, this book instead approaches the films as intertextual adaptations which have both drawn from and helped to shape horror since 2000. Covering films from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) to Candyman (2021), and identifying distinct cycles, production strategies and patterns of reception, the book illustrates the importance of the remake to contemporary horror cinema and addresses key cultural, industry and reception contexts. Rather than representing the death of horror, Reanimated argues that remaking instead demonstrates the genre’s capacity for creative recycling, adaptation and evolution.

In recent years, the raft of horror film remakes which dominated the genre in the 2000s and early 2010s has slowed, only to be replaced by television adaptations of horror films and franchises including Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015), Rosemary’s Baby (NBC, 2014), From Dusk till Dawn (El Rey, 2014-), Ash vs Evil Dead (Starz, 2015-), Scream (MTV, 2015-), Wolf Creek (Stan, 2016-), The Exorcist (Fox, 2016-) and The Mist (Spike, 2017-). The shift returns the horror remaking trend to a recognisable form of adaptation which takes place across media (Stam 2005), circumventing the common criticism of film-to-film remaking as inherently worthless. The opportunity to add characters and subplots, and expand narratives and story worlds within the realms of new “quality” television, marks the series as perhaps the ideal location to revisit existing stories in new, imaginative ways. The patterns of sameness and difference essential to the function of remakes (Hutcheon 2006, Horton and McDougal 1998) can be realised in series format in a way which avoids many of the criticisms of film remaking as pointless or irreverent.
This paper uses Bates Motel (A&E, 2013-2017) as a case study to explore these ideas. Adapted from Robert Bloch’s novel and hugely influential on modern horror cinema, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) has been sequelised, referenced and remade, each new text contributing to its ultimate canonisation as a classic horror film (Verevis 2006). Bates Motel, marketed as a contemporary prequel to Psycho, should be counted among these texts, but over five seasons the series simultaneously aligns with and sets itself apart from the film. Self-referential aesthetic, dialogue and performance offer homage even as the narrative avoids expectations by altering key plot points. The show adopts a nostalgic position which posits Norma (Vera Farmiga) and Norman (Freddie Highmore) as “old souls” (as one character terms them); their mid-century retro styling, family values, language, and the old-fashioned domestic space of the eponymous motel exists in a bubble that not only emphasises the “special” mother-son bond at the heart of the narrative, but sets the family apart from the contemporary trappings of their fictional town and its inhabitants. This striking clash of old and new, coupled with the series’ persistent theme of “starting over”, makes Bates Motel ideal for examining the shift from film to television horror.

The intention of this paper is to revisit Pet Sematary (1989), and to explore the connective tissues between this film and the recent remake, Pet Sematary (2019) in addition to the relationship of each film to the 1983 source novel.

With the release of Pet Sematary (2019) following closely after ‘The Year of Stephen King’ (Donaldson, 2017), this paper will explore the overarchingly negative reception the film received, and the critical revisitations of Pet Sematary (1989) that it inspired. Some noted that even when viewed through the rose-tinted lens of 80s horror nostalgia, the original film is ‘little more than gross, stupid, and incompetently made garbage’ (Sobczynski, 2019), while others argued that Pet Sematary (1989) ‘feels more violent’ (Cohen, 2019) than the remake, which is – in comparison - ‘less personal, and less engaging’ (Adkins, 2019).

After contextualising both films within their respective horror genre contexts in 1989 and 2019, this paper will investigate how they both endeavour to capture the nihilistic tone of the source novel and the rawness of the story of grief within it. This paper will then move on to examine the different positions that the two films occupy in the corpus of Stephen King cinematic adaptations, with the 1989 film using Stephen King’s screenplay, but the 2019 version being both an adaptation of the novel in addition to being a remake of the 1989 film.

The following is the research essay written for my Film Studies MA, which studies the evolution of Hollywood's various approaches towards remaking international cinema. The featured case studies are City of Angels (the 1998 remake of Wings of Desire), The Grudge (the 2004 remake of Ju-On: The Grudge), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the 2011 adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel, previously adapted to film in 2009).

The 2000s have seen a number of remakes in the horror genre. If critics have generally argued that Hollywood aims at erasing the original movie when it is foreign, the marketing strategy of domestic remakes relies on the audience’s awareness of the existence of the original film. As the prefix “re-” suggests, producing a remake generally rests on the belief that a profit can be made by improving on the original in terms of technique and technology. This article attempts to foreground some of the contradictions immanent to the remake by arguing that what Thomas Leitch calls its “stance” is, in effect, a disavowal of the very terms contained in the prefix. The remakes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) and Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)—will be examined as paradigmatic examples of this disavowal through a study of both pragmatic and formal levels.

This article describes the differences between two film adaptations of Ira Levin’s controversial novel Rosemary’s Baby. A detailed comparison is made between Roman Polanski’s 1968 feature film and its remake in the form of a TV miniseries directed by Agnieszka Holland for NBC, in order to demonstrate the difficulty of reimagining the literary original and, to an even larger degree, its iconic adaptation. More specifically, the consequences of changing the location and time frame of the story in the TV adaptation are characterized and an attempt is made to explain its striking topicality for the Millennial Generation.

This article examines traditional oppositions between terror and horror in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and its recent remake (2004), by focusing on one of the major changes made by the producers of the remake: the use of running zombies, which emphasizes the danger the creatures represent to the characters, and enables the film-makers to resort to the kind of cheap startle effects that abound in contemporary slasher and action movies. That the living dead of 1978 were slow-moving allowed for contemplation of their pathetic state and questioned the border between living and dead. The 1978 film underlined how incompatible the living dead were with such techniques that rely on the use of the off-camera, for the horror they inspire (as well as their political significance) is intimately linked to their excessive on-screen presence. The 2004 remake even contradicts its own terms by returning to the imagery of the 1978 film, while its politics also turn out to be very much antithetical to those of the 1978 film. The film-makers seem to display a tendency, which may be fairly typical in contemporary Hollywood cinema, towards nurturing contradictory desires for verisimilitude and artifice in film.

"The continuing trend for remaking genre cinema is now so prolific that it has become, for many fans and critics alike, a tiresome exercise in reproducing and rebranding cherished films in order to make money at the box office, while seemingly challenging the status of the originals. Academic studies have largely aligned themselves with this popular critical opinion, focusing on ‘derisive’ changes between versions, arguing that the remake can negate the memory of the original (see Frost 2009, Lizardi 2010), or using the new versions to lament the loss of creativity and originality within the genre (see Hantke 2010, Conrich 2010). Key production companies such as Platinum Dunes, responsible for the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel 2003), Friday the 13th (Nispel 2009), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer 2010) remakes (among others) are often as vilified by fans and genre press as the films themselves.

This paper aims to move away from (usually, negative) comparative textual analysis, and instead interrogate the commercial logic of remaking horror cinema across key stages of production, distribution and marketing. Using Platinum Dunes’ films as a case study, I will outline how, in ‘rebooting’ key genre franchises, the film makers attempt to rewrite the mythology of the earlier films, adding backstories and developing new characters while maintaining that their new versions will ‘honour’ the original films. I will also discuss key marketing strategies used in promotion, and show how campaigns typically adopt a two tiered approach. Firstly, they rely on ‘brand recognition’, through ancillary promotional materials such as posters and trailers that work to invoke nostalgia in audiences familiar with an original film (or its legacy). Secondly, other marketing discourses (interviews, previews) work to emphasise the differences (improvements, for promotional sakes) in their new, rebooted versions. Finally, this paper will also give consideration to the decisions not to make further sequels to the remakes and thus fulfil the commercial potential of ‘re-franchising’ – despite the financial success of the films.
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