THANK YOU. I was gonna add precisely this to the discussion, but I'm happy to see I am not alone. Hostel, Saw, etc. are a subgenre called "Torture Porn" that has been gaining popularity recently. These films are popular enough that their impact on the horror film industry is inevitable. The horror film genre IS in trouble if all we get for the next ten years is more Saw-clones. Saw has a cool concept. But plain violence is only plain violence, not horror in the truest sense.

I fucking hate this. Once in a while, like you said a good one is made, but for every "Dawn of the Dead" remake, there is ten more that should not have been made.

I also heard they are thinking of remaking Hellraiser too. The only possible way this could be good is if they don't overuse CGI and torture scenes, and if Clive Barker has a lot to do with it.

A remake of Child's Play could be good, but it probably won't be. New effects can make an old film better, but CGI is the latest craze now, and it sucks. A CGI chucky doll running around killing people would look fuckin stupid, as well as a Pinhead with CGI pins and torture wounds would look fuckin retarded.

Whatever happened to the old days, when better effects were made with puppets, makeup, prosthetics and good old fashioned elbow grease. If "The Fly", for example, were reremade today (and I have heard that idea might be in the works, god help us all), it would look like ass because everything would be CGI, and CGI looks like shit.

And please, "The Thing" is a horror classic. If Hollywood fucks this up I am going to be livid. Next to an "Alien" remake (which WILL NOT happen, as long as I am alive), this is the worst idea I have heard in a long time. But its all moot I guess. As much as I don't like seeing my beloved movies being turned into moronic remakes, you can simply choose not to see them and just watch the originals, they aren't going anywhere I suppose.

So to sum up, yes the horror film industry may be in trouble if torture porn keeps filling up theatres, crappy remakes of classics keep popping up and shitty CGI keeps being used. There are some classics being released today, someone mentioned "Bug", but there is a lot of shit being made too, a lot of which seems to be pretty influential.

The CGI argument is valid but we're at a point where it needs to be done. Effects people have to play with technology and try to pull the best results from it so as technology progresses as do special effects. CGI is a good thing, or at least it will be. I can't believe I'm going to make this statement again and those who have read this time and time again please feel free to skip it. In 1975 there were only 38 films released to theaters. Compare that with 2005, a year in which 594 film were released! The good films are still out there, there's just more dreck to wade through to get to them. Simply become a more educated viewer.

I think a few remakes have the potential to change a story and tell it in a way that does indeed make the remake more entertaining. Think about fairy tales and folklore, stories passed down from generation to generation shaped and changed to fit the current audience and honed into a better story as years passed. It's all in how the story is told...

A lot of our "original movies" are based on an older tale. In that sense, a lot of movies are simply visual representations of somebody else's story.

Definitely. Somes of the greatest horror films of all time were remakes. For example, Mad Love is a remake of Hands of Orlac. Creature from the Black Lagoon is deeply indebted to King Kong, which is deeply indebted to Heart of Darkness. Christopher Lee would never have put on a cape were it not for the genre's debt to the old stories. Problems occur when the stories either a.) don't move or b.) weren't all that archetypal to begin with. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake failed because it had nothing new to say about the characters or the situation. It also ignored the fact that TCM shows a nation on the verge of moral apocalypse. Had TCM been framed in a contemporary context but still showed that the themes were not old hat, it would have been a great reimagining. Rob Zombie's Halloween, pale though it might have been, at least made new statements about universal evil, and moved the story from a whitebread moral context to a greyer splatpunk context. Carpenter's movie was about how a squeaky clean world was still vulnerable to monsters. Zombie's was about how much monster can be in a person and how much person can be in a monster. There are no easy answers in splatpunk. If this were executed better, it would have served as an aggressively modern reexamination of old values. It gets a B- from me, and it made me think about how smart Zombie might be someday. In linguistic terms, they call this "enhancement", translation with the intent to improve. Other flaws or quirks in translation can include changing cultural context out of fear that you won't be understood, updating a piece or robbing it of complexity. Bad remakes are guilty of this often. So are good remakes. Without solid intent, this doesn't work. Enhancement and modernization are the only modes that can really work in forming a remake, but you need to have a good understanding of differences and similarities between the times. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood transplanted Macbeth to Japan and worked because Kurosawa had a thorough understanding of feudal Japanese culture. If somebody did the same thing because they wanted Lady Macbeth to be hot and Asian and for there to be lots of high octane swordplay, it wouldn't have worked. Too many of these people doing remakes just lack perspective and don't get what made the originals good and what makes our times different, and a true breeding ground for horror.

I almost forgot Kurosawa's contributions to the field of "remakes" or maybe more appropriately "re-imaginings". Ran was a beautiful take on King Lear.

i think these arguments pretty much answer this question.

horror (in its true form) has never been about mass ingestion. horror has always been the underdog of film genres. when you try to throw mass appeal into the mix, the outcome is generally not good. sometimes good horror comes to find you, and then there are times where you have to go looking for it. there have been plenty of great releases over the past few years if you really look:

the descent, grindhouse, behind the mask, session 9, the orphanage, bug, the devil's backbone, hatchet, etc.

i guess what it comes down to here is this: at this point in time, if you're looking at horror on the surface, you're going to see a bunch of uninspired, unoriginal crap-jobs, but by looking below you can find stuff that the "golden age" horror genre would have been proud of. and who's to say we won't see another golden age of horror in the future? with people like us supporting and creating within the genre (rod's got some really exciting stuff in the works), who knows what's waiting beneath that crappy horror exterior?

I don't think that the horror genre is in trouble at all. I think that the classic horror genre is in trouble being remade every ten seconds. But if you think about it, we are actually helping the old genre of horror. By remaking it people want to see the original, and by making remakes the youth like myself are seeing them so that they actually never die. If there ever was a time for horror it's now. People love being scared, suprised, all that stuff. Right now SAW is the horror saga of this generation. And in the future the original is going to be remade and guess what, we'll be talking about it then. It's a never ending cycle.

Very good point. My points made above at my anger at most remakes aside (which I wrote this morning with a slight hangover), this is a very good point that I considered, but thought was maybe too idealistic. I suppose, since you make a very good point, I was partly wrong.

The flipside though (as a journalist, I know there is always 2 sides, so bear with me) crappy remakes may make newer viewers think the original sucked just as much, if not worse than the remake. While this is rarely the case, a lot of kids these days, who are weened on "big special CGI effects and nonstop action", may already believe that if its older, it sucks.

But remake after remake of good films, if one wants to take it far into the future, may turn into the film industry version of "telephone". You said remaking classics essentially makes them immortal, but remakes are known to significantly alter the formula/message of the original. Like with a game of "telephone", more retellings distort the original message. Just some food for thought.

Yes, unless you choose to retell the story to change or recontextualize the message or to show how things are different. It's not a great movie, but look at the Bride with Sting. Frankenstein becomes a story about love and liberation, or even at the Bride of Frankenstein as an adaptation of Shelley's novel, it turned the story into a sounding board for James Whale's views on sexuality,organized religion, gender politics and scientific ethics. At its heart there remains a similar message, but the message is augmented. I wouldn't call it a good adaptation of Shelley's novel, but I would call it a good film that takes credit where it's due and gives credit as well. This is pretty necessary to do. Of course the message gets diluted and changes, but this is how folklore has worked for ages. From one village to the next in Slavic countries, what a vampire was used to change, as did the ways to get rid of it. Some towns said you needed to find a pair of twins born on a Saturday and convince them to wear their underwear outside of their clothes. We do this with our monsters and with all of our narratives. It gets harder with movies because they're more concrete. You can't say "I saw Nosferatu yesterday. Max Shreck was ten feet tall and had three heads and he was eating cows two towns over. My sister's friend swears it's true!" However, we have a natural need to. So,Todd Browning makes Dracula and says that Dracula is something different. The same thing happens nowadays, but its also done out of greed and stupidity when nobody has a new slant. What Rod says about supporting horror that's original is definitely true, but I think some well conceived remakes might also be in order. Demon Seed would be pretty cool with CGI technology and a greater knowledge of artificial intelligence behind it. Old Monogram thrillers turned into fun period pieces or updated would be kind of cool. An update or homage to radioactive insect movies would be awesome. If anything, we need smart people helming and writing our remakes to deal with a natural cultural imperative.

lots of good points in this thread, so no need for me to congratulate you all on good posts, but I did find this interesting...

I could not agree with you more, though I think in America today you would find most people would disagree. Why? Because most Americans are of the mindset of, "There's so much real-life horror in the world today, why create more things to be afraid of?"

well, if that is the case, my fellow American, then you just argued against your own point.

the "real life" world is a scary place, and, in most folks's opinion, getting worse every day. environmental issues, war, ever-rising crime rates, the steep plummet of an economy based on consumption... you name it, the earth, and all those aboard it, are doomed (can you tell my glass is half-empty?).

but it's now, more than ever, that we need Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger, or Frankenstein, to let us blow off some steam and walk out into the sunlight after a matinee and say, "Well, the dollar might not be worth shit, but at least I don't have a burn victim with a knife-glove coming after me in my sleep! whew!"

we need horror films, to remind us that maybe things aren't as bad as they seem, or if they are, at least they're not that bad.

there have been unending books and essays about how the horror film, more than any other genre, is a reaffirmation of life. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but just thing of that high you get after watching a good horror movie (in b4 "horror movies don't scare me" bullshit). that's because your mind went into "fight or flight" and you fought (unless you ran screaming from the theatre which, if you did, please tell what movie it was so I can take the rest of the day off from work and visit my local theatre). not only did you fight, but you won. you survived it, and that satisfies some primal instinct in us, which in turn reminds us, once again, that we are alive and could, presumably, overcome any obstacles set before us (except perhaps that dude in the sweater). :D

I'll quite happily take that dare. I find the original Halloween to drag. The pacing is definitely not what it could be. Carpenter tries to build tension by moving the plot slowly (very minimal plot with gaping holes when you get right down to it anyways), but I feel like it backfired. The movie gets too slow and my interest wanes. It's a good movie, but I found Zombie's interpretation of it to be better. The somewhat more fluid pacing and the background on Michael make it a far more enjoyable movie to watch for me.

That being said, did it need to be made? No, not really. Halloween is a classic, and icon in the horror genre and stood fine on it's own.

But therein lies the problem. Hollywood is filled with pussies who will not take a risk. Instead of going out on a limb and doing something fresh, they will gladly fund a remake of either a Japanese or American classic horror film. They knew people would go see The Ring because people had heard of Ringu, but never saw it because of either the lack of availability or many peoples' fear of subtitles. They knew people will go see a remake of Halloween because it's Michael Myers. But will people go see some new property with no background whatsoever? Unless it's something like an Eli Roth gorey T&A teen sex flick or some over the top torture-porn like Hostel it becomes a big gamble.

At the same time though, can you blame them? People in general are idiots when it comes to films. A ridiculous, overblown piece of Hollywood crap like Transformers or the Spiderman franchise does amazingly well at the box office, but then something trying to pay homage to a genre and bring something back to the people like Grindhouse tanks. I realize Grindhouse couldn't exactly be called 100% original, but as far as mainstream movie theatres go, it basicallly is. People don't want originality. They want something safe and familliar. Hollywood is more than happy to spoon feed them their regurgitated childhood memories. For $15 a pop no less.