snook is a fish

My friends and I go round and round fairly frequently on the subject of horror film remakes; I suspect that most of you that traffic this site find yourselves in the same sort of conversations often as well.

I have friends that dismiss ‘em outright. I have friends that look forward to dissecting each and every one, and are generally satisfied by what they see. I even have friends that are genuinely able to put aside their love/reverence for the original flicks, and digest remakes on their own merits.

Me, I can’t do that, but I still remain somewhere in the middle. I don’t hate the very idea of classic horror movies being remade; it makes me somewhat uncomfortable on a personal level, just because the originals were such a big part of my inspiration and development as a writer, but I have to agree with the fact/rationalization that human beings are always tweaking/embellishing/re-imagining stories, from Grimm’s right up to the story your buddy told you about the interesting thing that happened at the bar last week. Stories belong to the ages–once you tell it, you release it into the wild. It’s all just a big game of telephone, just one that involves optioning rights.

But yeah, I approach each remake differently, but with the same sense of vague trepidation. My buddy Jack cannot stomach the very idea of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre being defiled via remake; I thought the remake was excellent, gritty and taut. At the same time, however, I tend to think most remakes are terrible, not only because I can’t divorce myself from my fondly remembered reactions to the original material but also because, hey, most horror movies are terrible in any case. I never saw George Romero’s The Crazies, and I really want to see the new one. I don’t want to see the new A Nightmare On Elm Street, because for some weird reason the original really did scare the bejesus out of me (and I still don’t know why–subsequent adult viewings have revealed even the first in the series to be, at least in my opinion, pretty shitty), but I know it’ll show up at my house in a red envelope at some point in the not-too-distant future.

I think all this debate over the validity of remakes serves to gloss over a much more important subject: the lack of new big-budget horror stories for the screen. I doubt we’d all be arguing over remakes quite so much if they were just a part of the offerings, rather than the majority. Yes, there are a ton of indie/underground/straight-to-DVD horror releases every year, but it’s a lot easier to talk about a movie everybody’s heard of than to explain plot points and exposition before even getting into whether or not the film is any good. Also, a lot of them suck; some truly great ideas, probably some great scripts, but too many people think “lo-fi” and “underground” and “improvised dialogue” and “we made it for two hundred bucks” automatically equate to indie genius, and they don’t. Bad cinematography, bad actors, bad effects–any number of things can and do turn awesome concepts into really crappy movies.

For what it’s worth, I think that we as horror-movie fans need to try as best we can to put aside our proprietary feelings about the films that are being remade, and try to view the remakes as something new, to be judged on their own individual merits. At the same time, however, every time a new remake is announced, we need to find a way to let the studios that (sorry) still run the movie industry know that we’re still looking for and will financially reward something new and daring, that when we say we’re always looking for another Descent, another High Tension, another Splinter, we don’t mean that shit literally.

(Oh, and none of this refers to American remakes of foreign horror films. American remakes of foreign horror films are almost always a horrible idea, and should be embargoed pretty much across the board. We got lucky with The Ring and The Strangers–exceptions which prove the rule–and we should’ve quit while we were ahead.)

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