The Current Slew of Horror Remakes

The Current Slew of Horror Remakes

The Current Slew of Horror Remakes

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the remakes began. It's not as if horror movies haven't been remade before. George Romero's Living Dead trilogy has been remade before the latest version of Dawn of the Dead, which walked all over Romero's original ideas of what constitutes the walking dead (hint: the word 'walking' is the key word in that phrase), and countless other films have seen the light of day in several incarnations. But these are not a part of the remake frenzy that has been going for some time now. The remakes we are seeing today are something different.

Perhaps it all started when American movie producers started looking to other countries for their horror ideas. When a horror film in Japan or Korea was popular to the extent that someone went to the trouble of translating it and adding English subtitles to the foot of the screen, it usually meant it was good. Unfortunately, American producers knew their audiences and agreed that it was worth remaking the film themselves rather than allowing it to be screened on US shores. Why read a film when you could watch a version of it made by your own kind? And once one film got remade, the floodgates opened and they all started. We had The Ring (Ringu), The Grudge (Ju-On), The Eye, Quarantine ([REC]), and most recently, Let Me In, an American remake of Swedish masterpiece Let the Right One In.

But the foreign film remakes seem to just have been the start of it. Now, the horror movie industry is inundated with remakes of classic horrors just a couple of decades old. Halloween has seen two remakes already and Friday the 13th also underwent surgery for a new version of the same story. What's more Freddy Krueger returned this year in a remake of the classic Nightmare on Elm Street - bringing back all of the most famous slashers of the eighties. And on top of that, we've also seen remakes of The Amityville Horror and Prom Night, to name just a few others.

In an industry whose most recent trend involved nothing more than offing hapless victims in the most grotesque and horrific ways (Saw and Hostel type movies), it's easy to think that the slew of remakes are around just because film makers have truly run out of ideas. However, it at least draws attention back to the classic films that are being gutted for the newer audiences - and the foreign counterparts of many of today's most popular horror flicks - which means that more people will tune into the originals on Sky - and that can only be a good thing.

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