Remakes are NEVER contentious in the horror community, right?
A quartet of universally reviled remakes worthy of reevaluation
Horror fans rarely have strong opinions about remakes. Indeed, anytime a beloved ‘70s or ‘80s classic is rebooted or revamped for modern audiences, the online horror community remains polite and reserved and never makes any assumptions about the newer films.
Oh wait, everything I said in the opening paragraph is the opposite of what really happens. Horror fans ALWAYS bemoan and disparage and rip apart remakes as soon as they’re announced, not only before seeing said films for themselves but before said films are even filmed. It’s a recipe for mouth-foaming nerd rage every single time, no matter how obscure the property or who’s in charge of the remake. Stanley Kubrick could come back from the dead tomorrow and announce he’s making a $100 million reimagining of Bloodsucking Freaks and I guarantee you there’d be a million posts on Twitter unironically calling for his re-death.
Sure, some horror remakes are regarded as genuine classics and some are even considered better than the originals. But for every John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, there are about 20 remakes like Day of the Dead (2008), The Wicker Man (2006), The Omen (2006), Poltergeist (2015), Prom Night (2008), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), The Exorcist: Believer (2023), The Crazies (2010), I Spit On Your Grave (2010), Cabin Fever (2016) … I mean, do I really have to keep going on?
To be fair, a lot of horror remakes are steaming piles of crap. That’s not in dispute. But every now and then we get a horror remake that is almost universally condemned by fans and audiences alike — which, in hindsight, really wasn’t that bad at all.
Now, I’m not saying that any of these four movies are necessarily “great” ones. And I’m definitely not saying that any of them are on par with the originals films (or even anywhere close to them.) But what I am saying here is that these films at least warrant another viewing, another reassessment and another consideration for one or two compelling reasons.
I mean, just because you fail to reinvent the wheel doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun spinning the tire, right?
The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)
Director: Katt Shea
Yeah, it may have technically been a sequel, but let’s be real, The Rage is a straight up remake of the Brian De Palma movie in everything but name. In hindsight I think the most noteworthy thing about the film (and the reason to go out of your way to see it) is actually a matter of circumstance. It came out about a month before the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado and it’s hard to imagine the movie not getting shelved altogether had it been planned to come out after the horrific real-world tragedy. Furthermore, the entire plot about a young woman being sextorted was DECADES ahead of the curve and something that definitely feels like a serious countercultural statement opposite films like American Pie, which treated what we now call “revenge porn” as nothing more than a “boys being boys.” Even now it’s kind of an overlooked and forgotten movie, but it doesn’t really feel all that dated at all. Plus, the all out murder-fest grand finale is SUPREME stuff, especially when that one guy from Home Improvement gets his testicles shot out with a harpoon.
Child’s Play (2019)
Director: Lars Klevberg
As soon as it was announced that neither Don Mancini or Brad Dourif would have anything to do with it, the internet automatically declared the Child’s Play remake to be unpardonable heresy. But you have to give the people behind Child’s Play ‘19 some credit, because they DEFINITELY took some risks resurrecting one of the most beloved mascot slasher franchises of all time. I mean, the chutzpah of rewriting the series lore to eliminate any and all supernatural elements and instead make Chucky a metaphor for the slow creep of A.I. and intrusive “smart” tech (which obviously makes the film feel a bit more prescient nowadays.) It’s got pretty much everything you’d want from a modern horror satire: great performances all around, a lot of weird humor (“This is for Tupac!”), some genuinely spooky music and a TON of gory kill scenes. Nobody’s ever going to say it’s a replacement for the Charles Lee Ray we all know and love, but as a one-off side story it’s not too shabby at all. And it gets bonus points for making The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 the canonical cause for all of the film’s violence, mayhem and bloodshed — I’m sure Tobe Hooper could relate.
Pet Sematary (2019)
Directors: Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer
I think the issue with this remake is that it seemed too superfluous, even at a time when virtually every other major horror property was getting the re-do treatment. Like, I can see directors wanting to update something like The Hills Have Eyes and Critters for contemporary audiences, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a pressing social reason to remake 1989’s Pet Sematary. I mean, it’s not like culture and technology has changed so much that it makes the ‘89 film feel like an irrelevant trinket of the past. 2019’s Sematary is pretty much a beat-by-beat impersonation of the ‘89 movie (albeit with the Zelda subplot dialed down considerably), complete with John Lithgow doing his best impression of Herman Munster. But the movie hits us with an out of nowhere plot twist that completely flips the script in more ways than one and actually manages to tell the old canard about parental grief differently … and, to a certain extent, even better than the original film. It’s a film with a much better than average cast, a fantastically macabre ending and a few scenes that border on the bleakly brilliant. And let’s don’t pretend that Starcrawler’s cover of The Ramones at the end of the movie isn’t a banger, either.
Black Christmas (2019)
Director: Sophia Takal
Gee, where to even begin on this one. I think audiences — particularly a vocal and obviously aggrieved class of male moviegoers who just plain didn’t like women — already made the declaration that Black Christmas ‘19 was unwatchable, preachy garbage before the opening credits even rolled. And let’s be real, this IS a heavy-handed movie, to an extent it almost becomes unintentionally farcical. But it’s that clumsy moralizing that actually makes Black Christmas ‘19 worth watching at least once. I mean, it’s a movie where the central villain is LITERAL toxic masculinity … as in, this evil living fluid that bubbles out of the ground like crude oil and turns college deans into date rapists. Very, very rarely do you see a movie go out of its way to make a blunt social statement and trip over its own feet this bad, to the point it almost crosses over into cartoon-ish Reefer Madness like hysteria. There’s on the nose, and then there’s watching a character beat another character to death with a menorah. And when a movie is THAT devoid of subtlety, you can’t help but champion it just a little — it may not be a good movie by any objective measurement, but as far as remakes go it’s certainly not boring.