The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of Hollywood’s Recent Horror Remakes

It’s been almost ten years to the day since the release of 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The gory film was an instant success at the US box office and single-handedly sparked the much-maligned trend of horror remakes that continues to this very day with Kimberly Peirce’s new take on Carrie.

It’s awfully convenient that these two films should so neatly bookend a ten-year period (nine years and 51 weeks to be exact!) that saw the horror genre cannibalise itself (pun intended) to wildly deteriorating results. Rule of thumb suggests that all horror remakes are bad, but it’s never quite been that clear-cut. The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986) and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978) are just some examples of remakes that surpassed their predecessors, but what’s the score over the past decade?

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The Good

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

It’s somewhat telling that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains, to me, the very best of the remakes. Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original is perhaps the single scariest movie ever made, so it was clever that director Marcus Nispel didn’t attempt to copy it. Instead, his new version is a sweaty, high-gloss re-imagining that achieves a sense of unrelenting dread thanks to atmospheric camerawork, ghoulish design, and sympathetic victims characters. The film was a flop at the Australian box-office and the franchise’s latest installment, the woeful Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013), went direct-to-DVD here, but I remember having my knees curled up against my chest in the cinema thanks to the film’s unflinching terror.

The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

One of the remakes that most obviously attempted to ape The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s style was Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes (2006). Taking the immediate nuts and bolts of Wes Craven’s 1977 original and turning them up to 11 resulted in a ferociously brutal version that trumped the original and the cheap knock-off sequel from 1984 that features a dog flashback.

Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

Zack Snyder may now be known for superhero movies like Watchmen (2009) and Man Of Steel (2013), but his best work is still Dawn Of The Dead (2004). While it keeps the plot of George Romero’s 1978 classic of combatants taking shelter from hordes of zombies in a suburban shopping mall and all the social commentary that comes with it, it also turns the zombies into super-fast monsters with more grotesque, bloody shenanigans to go with it. It’s a wickedly entertaining movie.

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The Bad

Carrie (2013)

Poor Carrie. When this latest reincarnation of Stephen King’s famous first novel isn’t being slavishly devoted to Brian De Palma’s 1976 original, it’s botching up any and all attempts at being new. The biggest problem, however, is that star Chloe Grace Moretz is entirely miscast: she’s simply incapable of projecting fragility and meekness, especially when she looks like she just walked off the set of a Pantene commercial. Still, it’s at least better than the official sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999). Small comforts.

The Hitcher (2007)

Remember Sophia Bush? Like many actors from teen-oriented dramas, the husky-voiced star of One Tree Hill parlayed her minor fame into the lead role of a horror movie. Sadly, it was this remake of The Hitcher (1986), a wholly illogical affair that verges on ridiculous when Bush starts strutting down the highway brandishing a Mossberg 590 shotgun (thank you, Internet Movie Gun Database!)

When A Stranger Calls (2006)

The original When A Stranger Calls (1979) isn’t a particularly good film, but it does have a great, famous opening scene featuring Carol Kane as a babysitter who gets telephone calls that are “coming from inside the house”. It’s hardly surprising then to discover that the 2006 remake by Simon West (he made Con Air, folks!) was more than a little dull, considering they only remade the one scene. A 10-minute sequence stretched out to 90 minutes was always going to be rough, but with blank-faced Camilla Belle in the lead, they really had no hope.

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The Ugly

Halloween (2007)

Repellent and extremely unpleasant is Rob Zombie’s “new vision” (as the trailer calls it) for John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece, Halloween (1978). Revelling in all sorts of nastiness — animal cruelty, the Manson murders, incest — Zombie’s Halloween (2007) is a slap in the face to everything that made the original such a compelling classic. It’s sequel, H2 (2009), is even worse.

A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

When I say “ugly”, I basically mean this remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010). Future Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) star Rooney Mara has wisely disowned it and Wes Craven, director of the 1984 original, was none too impressed, either. A top-notch cast also featuring Jackie Earle Haley and Connie Britton can’t save this grotesque parade of sickening imagery and limp CGI-assisted scares.

Friday The 13th (2009)

There are exactly 12 films in the Friday The 13th franchise, and at least half of them are terrible. So when I say that this 2009 remake is the worst of the lot, you have to take my word that it is despicably awful. This ‘remake’ shamelessly proves that it’s little more than a marketing ploy, pulling a hack trick to make the film about Jason Voorhees when he didn’t even show up in the 1980 original until a few seconds before the end. Seemingly unaware of the franchise’s virtues, director Marcus Nispel made it into a replica of his own Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.

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The Insane

The Wicker Man (2006)

I watched Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man remake for the first time purely for the sake of this article, and it’s as ridiculously absurd as you’ve heard. There’s even a James Franco cameo in it, which probably shouldn’t surprise me, but does. I genuinely don’t know what to say about this film other than recommending you watch that infamous YouTube compilation again (“Oh god, not the bees!”).

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Carrie is now showing in cinemas nationally.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer and film critic from Melbourne, and currently based in New York City. His work has been seen online (Onya Magazine, Quickflix), in print (The Big Issue, Metro Magazine, Intellect Books Ltd’s World Film Locations: Melbourne), as well as heard on Joy 94.9.