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.)

So the wife and I finally got to see Paranormal Activity.

(We don’t go to the movies much, partially because of scheduling but mostly because, seriously, you can’t go two hours without talking on the phone or texting? You’re not a trauma surgeon, you know. Other people exist. For shame.)

I’ve gotta say, we liked-bordering-on-loved it. I’d heard all the muttering about doors being pulled closed with fishing line, and it seems to me that this little movie provides a perfect opportunity to talk about suspension of disbelief. Everybody knows horror films aren’t real, and PA didn’t even go through the Blair Witch rigmarole about pretending to be real “found” footage or whatever. No, there aren’t any big gags. But it’s surprisingly well acted (Katie Featherston, in particular, makes us forget we’re watching a movie), and if you’re not in it to judge–if you’re sincerely looking to get your neck hair raised, rather than to sit around and take a film apart and mention how much better you’d do if it was your flick–then the movie does a great job of getting under your skin.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King talks about how, as we get older, we have to want to help suspend that disbelief, that the imagination of childhood erodes, that after a while it starts to need a little conscious leg up. Maybe that’s why horror fiction and film offer fewer surprises and chills for fans in the new millennium–to butcher a cliche, kids have seen it all these days. Nobody’s a fan, everybody’s a critic.

But Rebecca and I went into Paranormal Activity excited, and willing to be chilled as well as charmed, and by the time Katie got dragged out of bed by her leg, we’d traded cynicism for that wide-eyed what’s-going-to-happen-next immersion. Yeah, it took setting aside that seen-it-all attitude, and reminding ourselves of the excitement we’d felt since first hearing about the movie. But the payoff was so much better than sitting through what some people see as an hour and a half of faux-real shaky-cam footage and picking it apart. We met the movie halfway, and got back much more than our investment.

So, Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s new movie, The Box, comes out November 6, and is currently the beneficiary of a crazy-expensive promo campaign. It looks a little more action-oriented than his previous stuff, but otherwise appropriately austere and slightly off-kilter and generally, erm, Kelly-esque. (Disclosure: I thought Donnie Darko was pretty OK, but I don’t understand all the cult-worship hoopla – its murky surrealism and fractured narrative remind me a bit of Gregg Araki, a filmmaker whose work I actively loathe – and I didn’t see Southland Tales.) But you’ve got to wonder, how is The Box going to take a Richard Matheson short story that barely stretched out to fill a half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone, and fill a couple of hours without a ton of incidental filler? Matheson’s “Button, Button” is a psychologically gripping update of the classic horror tale “The Monkey’s Paw,” which is surely one of the two or three best examples of macabre irony ever handed down. The Twilight Zone episode of the same name changes Matheson’s ending just a bit – who knows why, the original is every inch the sort of perfectly appropriate twist that defines the Zone‘s vibe – and The Box will necessarily change it further, for length and format and modernity and demographics and whatever the hell else.

My point is, in the vast majority of cases, each step taken away from the original creative work, be it a story, a song or a screenplay, seems to lessen the intent and impact of the original. And Kelly, whose Southland Tales tanked, probably labored under much closer studio scrutiny than he’s been used to. Maybe the movie will be great; Kelly is a gifted filmmaker. But the odds are stacked against it, and those computer-altered shots of Frank Langella’s face don’t freakin’ help. (Am I the only one who gets a weirdly cross-referential Vanilla Sky vibe from the trailer?) If both the Twilight Zone episode and Matheson’s story are unfamiliar to you, the simple, universal idea behind The Box will likely grab your attention. But, you know, seriously – seek out Matheson’s original vision of how that idea plays out.

Almost completely unrelated anecdote: On one of our first dates, my wife and I were talking film, and after a lull in the conversation, she asked me, “have you seen The Hole?” I immediately responded, “are you coming on to me?” She thought that was some extremely funny shite. Yeah, we were made for each other.

Just finished it today. Wow. Such a crazy yet coherent mix of noir, psychological thriller, horror, wartime paranoia … before I picked it up, I was really excited about the Scorsese adaptation coming later this year. Now, I’m just not sure it’s even going to be possible to come close to the book’s multilayered quality.

Ever since the folks that produce mainstream horror movies decided that the obvious next step beyond torture porn was to “reimagine” the classics for a next-generation audience (not that they’re all bad – but the vast majority of ‘em are, yeah, pretty bad), I’ve been on the lookout for a foolproof remake pitch that nobody else could cook up. And, thanks to a little inspiration via the current, ridiculous anti-Orphan outcry from people who apparently know the difference between reality and fiction, but think that other people might not, I think I’ve got just the thing.

I’m going to acquire the rights to one of the greatest pieces of satire ever written – Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal” – and “reimagine” it for a hip, young contemporary audience. And if I have to change a few of the less important points and contexts, well, then, that’s just an improvement, right? Instead of the simultaneously facetious and lethally pointed suggestion that the starving citizens of the nation turn to eating their own young, the filmed adaptation A Modest Proposal will be the harrowing story of a pair of orphans and a janitor from a huge Chicago adoption institution who get suspicious about the way that the kids over about seven or eight years old suddenly experience a huge surge in popularity – they’re being adopted (well, disappearing from the orphanage, anyway) at an incredible rate. Through their own investigations, the brave, intrepid trio discover that the institution is actually selling the older, “marginally unadoptable” kids to a sketchy baby-broker, who in turn is selling them to a crazed philanthropist who’s feeding them to the city’s homeless population. Naturally, there are the scowling, suspicious bureaucrats, and it’s too early to tell if one of our protagonists will pay for the discovery with his or her life (becoming chow, of course). But it’ll raise some serious questions about the problems of unwanted children and the homeless, or something, and there’ll be plenty of gratuitous shots of kids being fed into pulp-covered machinery. Oh, and we’ll fit some boobs in there somewhere.

Because that’s the same, right? I mean, basically. Or close enough, whatever.

Color me psyched. Hardware, a psychotic robot-gone-haywire flick from 1990 about a dude who brings his girlfriend back a semi-cyborg head from the wastelands of post-apocalyptic when/wherever – and then it tries to KILL HER – is finally coming out on DVD.

Unlike a lot of the post-Alien/Terminator dregs that I admittedly still sit through on a Saturday night when there’s nothing else on (Death Machine, anyone?), Hardware‘s got a great story and a creepy bleak vibe that really does split the difference between sci-fi and outright horror. Also, Lemmy. Hardware has Lemmy.

Severin Films will be releasing the flick on DVD September 29, uncut and with bonus features including commentary by director Richard Stanley.

Ever watch a movie, and find yourself completely unsure whether you thought it was amazing or terrible?

I’d been wanting to see Brotherhood of the Wolf ever since I missed it in theaters back in ’01. It looked like a pretty cool foreign period piece/horror flick about werewolves. I was bummed to keep checking Netflix and finding the movie’s DVD release status to be unknown, though, and eventually forgot it was in my queue.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I noticed it had been marked available, and immediately moved it to the top of my queue. It came, and last Friday Rebecca and I threw it into the player, kicked back … and were completely confounded.

It turns out Le pacte des loups isn’t a werewolf flick, or even really a horror flick, at all. It’s more of a brooding, existential detective story set in 18th century France, a character study of a man whose ahead-of-their-time beliefs and attitudes pit him against the unenlightened denizens of a village far from the science and scholarship of Paris. There’s a monster, sure, but for the vast majority of the movie, it’s just an unseen plot device, a reason for this educated man to find himself butting heads with ignorant peasants and backwoods religious freaks.

The film is slow, and rife with symbolism so obvious it’s clunky. It’s also gorgeous, and the climax, when it finally comes, is thrilling – more thrilling than it has any right to be, actually, after you’ve waited for it, gotten tired of waiting for it, and started to actually become interested in the story itself.

I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since, and still can’t decide how I feel about it. But I think these days, that in itself is a reason to recommend it – because it’s still sitting there, in my imagination, demanding to be considered.