Scary Movies

This past weekend witnessed the opening of "new" horror/thriller The Stepfather, a remake of the 1987 cult film of the same name. Many of the movie's reviews have since dismissed it as "forgettable" or "unnecessary," and, perhaps most pointedly, "[setting] the bar for pointlessness." Which brings me to my question: has anyone else noticed Hollywood's recent rash of uninspired horror remakes, reboots, and revamps?

In the last few years, studios have retooled numerous slasher classics, including Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, and the Night of the Living Dead series. While these horror classics may, by today's standards, be a bit dated, with bad special effects and worse acting, their latter-day clones rarely improve on them… if anything, they are often much, much worse. The model appears to be: take the basic story of the original, tweak a couple plot points, add a few more arbitrary sex scenes, up the gore factor 100x (see the definition of "torture porn"), and then hey, presto: you've got yourself a remake! For a moviegoer, this formulaic approach to filmmaking can get pretty tedious, not to mention downright insulting.

Despite that, almost to a one, these reboots receive lackluster reviews (Dawn of the Dead being one notable exception), the assembly line churning them out shows no signs of slowing down—if anything, it is accelerating. Coming up next under the remaker's knife: the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot (replacing perennial Freddy Krueger veteran Robert Englund with Jackie Earle Haley), soon to be followed by Predators, Hellraiser, Fright Night, and Poltergeist.

So: why? Why are all the good (and not-so-good) scary movies of yesteryear being recycled en masse? Has Hollywood, as is so often suggested, finally run out of new ideas? Are studios cynically squeezing every last penny out of tired franchises, or are they instead responding to a demand driven by audience nostalgia? Your thoughts?

I should admit that, all curmudgeonry aside, I am looking forward to Universal's reimagining of The Wolfman in February, starring Benicio Del Toro, Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt, and Anthony Hopkins. (70 years or so, I think, is a decent amount of time to wait for a remake.) Feast your eyes on the latest trailer:


--Brooks Sherman