Just Stop Already! Issue #1: Horror Movie Remakes/Reboots

 

Just Stop Already!

 

Movies are a great art form, but Hollywood is a business, so if something translates into a financial success—whether it’s a type of movie or a trend or a genre—chances are it will be exploited and repeated until people are sick of it. But, sometimes producers, writers, and/or directors want to cut corners, or are just desperate to make money, or are creatively bankrupt. All of these factors result in frustrations for the audience that take on many forms, and in this series I explore some of the tropes, trends, bad habits, and financial exploits of Hollywood films. Sometimes when it comes to movies, I feel like saying…just stop already!

 

Issue #1: Horror movie remakes and reboots

 

Of all the movie genres to suffer from unnecessary remakes, it seems the horror genre has suffered the worst. Now that I'm a seasoned horror veteran, I cringe when I look back at how I watched some of the terrible remakes of the 2000s as a kid and didn’t even realize they were a redo of an original film that was far better. Don’t get me wrong, there are some decent ones—the 80’s had a few horror remakes that were actually better than the originals, and a couple of them, The Thing and The Fly, are among my favourite movies of all-time—but the trend of remaking and rebooting movies that do not need it is still not dead. 

Part of the reason this happens over and over, though, is because of that name recognition. It offers built in advertising for free—people will go, “oh yeah, I’ve heard of that before” and see it just for that reason, and many will end up seeing a remake without even realizing it is one (like young me). The issue used to just be unnecessary remakes, but after Hollywood maxed out their horror movie remaking abilities, they started up a new trend: the horror movie reboot. Horror remakes and reboots have got to stop, and whether you already agree with me on this or not, let me shed some light on the problem.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a horror classic. It’s one of the grimiest, most convincing films of its kind from the 1970s, and helped pave the way for slasher films to take over in the 1980s. It had three direct sequels, then it was remade in 2003, and called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A-ha! Notice the title difference. No, I haven’t lost my mind (yet), “chainsaw” has a space in it in the original title, but not in the remake title. Minor difference, but still, at least there’s even a faint hint of a difference (if the title is the exact same you have to also specify the year when looking them up so you don’t end up watching the wrong one). Following the remake was a prequel, then a reboot-sequel called Texas Chainsaw 3D which was a direct sequel to only the original (we’ll get to more movies like this before the end) and a prequel to the original called Leatherface. Finally, they tried a legacy sequel, called Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and wouldn’t you know it? With every new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie that’s made the reviews get worse and worse.

After all the horror classics were remade, along with many lesser known flicks, then the horror reboots really started to kick in. Somehow The Exorcist avoided being remade, but I think that’s partly because there were so many sequels and unrelated movies that aped off its success by including the word “exorcist” in the title, and it got a legacy sequel in 2023, Exorcist: Believer. Just to name ten more horror classics that were remade, there was Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13^th, The Omen, Halloween, Poltergeist, The Wicker Man, When a Stranger Calls, The Haunting, and Dawn of the Dead. It’s worth noting that all of those remakes range from the late 90’s to mid-2010s, when the remake epidemic was at its peak.

To name five of the lesser known original horror movies remade in that era as well, there was The Fog, My Bloody Valentine, Piranha, Prom Night, and The Stepfather, and these are all from the first ten years of the 21^st century. The movie Cabin Fever from 2002 was actually one of the few original horror movies from this dark period in horror history, but guess what? It was remade in 2016! Horror movies aren’t even allowed to get old anymore before they get the remake treatment. We can’t forget about all the foreign horror films remade in the 2000s as well, like Dark Water, Pulse, Quarantine, The Ring, The Grudge, and The Eye. Apparently it’s more profitable to make the whole movie over again than to have people read subtitles.

I don’t think a legacy sequel is better than a remake, necessarily, but at least it sort of feels less bad, because a remake usually feels like it’s trying to outright replace the original. I dread the day Universal allows someone to remake Jaws. At least they figured out the sequels didn’t work way back in the 1980s, when they stopped making them after Jaws: The Revenge, but it still took three sequels for them to realize how futile the effort was. I don’t know how you could do a legacy sequel or reboot to the Jaws franchise today, but I’m sure there are some studio hacks out there somewhere working on it right now.

Do you know how many movies called Black Christmas exist? Three. Two are remakes of the same movie, and both remakes were made less than twenty years apart, further emphasizing my point that Hollywood needs to stop this nonsense. The original Black Christmas still holds up as a creepy, low budget horror film despite being dated in multiple ways, but just because something was made in a particular era for little money doesn’t mean it should be remade with slightly more money and transposed into a different era. Black Christmas is also an early example of a slasher movie, and speaking of slasher movies, we have to talk about Scream. Which Scream? Scream from 1996 or Scream from 2022? Well we have to talk about both, I guess, since neither are remakes, but one of them is mistaken for being a requel because of that title.

What is a requel? A requel is different from a legacy sequel. Requels follow continuity but take place a significant amount of time after the original or whenever the last sequel was and pass the story on to a new set of characters. You might think Scream is a remake or a requel based on it being called the same title as the original, but it’s neither, it’s actually just a direct sequel to Scream 4. If someone only watched Scream 2022 (the fifth Scream), though, without having seen any other Scream movies, they might be a little confused (I still haven’t seen it, by the way, so I don’t know exactly how confused they would be, but my point is it’s not a remake and not everyone would know that from the title alone). I think the fifth Scream was just called Scream because of the success of Halloween. No, I don’t mean Halloween from 1978, or Halloween from 2007, I mean Halloween from 2018, which wasn’t a requel either, it was a reboot-sequel (which you might think could be combined into the word “requel” but that’s something different) which ignored all previous Halloween sequels and the 2007 remake and was just a sequel to Halloween 1978.

If you are confused, don’t worry, you’re supposed to be. Apparently. It’s hard to make sense of any of this, and that’s my point! Hollywood should stop rebooting and remaking and adding on sequels and ignoring other sequels to these horror movies that all started out so simply and have now gotten more and more unwieldly, like an out of control mutation. So to be clear, Halloween is a sequel to Halloween that ignores all other movies in the Halloween franchise, and Scream copied it by calling the new sequel the same thing as the original, except Scream does not ignore all previous Scream sequels. I guess I need to circle back to that word “requel” because I’ve somehow talked about two dozen movies and none are examples of the dreaded requel.

The term requel annoys me. Some think it applies to sequels that continue the original story but also stand on their own, while others think it’s reserved for movies that follow themes from an earlier movie but are not a remake or a continuation of the story. Whatever you want to call them, movies that erase continuity and start over but are still basically the same as the original aren’t new—in fact, one of my favourite foreign movie franchises did this before Hollywood had made it a thing. Godzilla came out in 1984, and it was a reboot to the Godzilla franchise, but ignored all sequels that followed Godzilla 1954, which still makes it a sequel, even though it’s called the same thing as the original. It’s now referred to more commonly as The Return of Godzilla, or by its American re-edit title, Godzilla 1985. Luckily the Godzilla series revisited this American title strategy, and when it was rebooted again in the same way in 1999, Toho called it Godzilla 2000. But, Hollywood has been slower to learn. Godzilla came out in 1998—but now I’m talking about a movie that’s different from Godzilla 1954 and Godzilla 1984. For a long time it was referred to as the American reboot, but then Hollywood rebooted their own Godzilla franchise again in 2014, and just called it Godzilla. Again.

You know what? Now I’m getting off topic, so let’s wrap this up. What I’m basically trying to say is: stop remaking and rebooting horror movies, unless it’s the Evil Dead. The reason Evil Dead Rise worked, though, is because it doesn’t follow the same plot or characters or setting as any of the previous Evil Dead movies, but has all the stuff fans have seen before, so it’s still a reboot, but for anyone who doesn’t know anything about the Evil Dead franchise, it will seem like something new, and even if you go back and watch the old ones, the comparisons will be less direct. Do more movies like Evil Dead Rise.

Next time I’m going to look at this movie title problem Hollywood keeps having!