Easy folks, it's all just for fun :)
To be fair, Villain, not everyone might agree with your definition of a remake. I think most would, but not everyone. There's plenty of grey area there, and I suppose everyone's entitled to define it however they want to.
I, personally, am one that limits the definition to some degree. (I'll admit I'm a huge nerd.) For instance, Zombie's Halloweens... It has the same name as the original, a few of the same character names, and the same mask (although at the end it's removed to reveal some hippie dude... wha-?). But the similarities pretty much end there. Imagine if Carpenter handed Zombie his script and asked, "Hey could you make this movie?" Zombie basically says, "Sure, but let me change pretty much every single thing first. And, dude, it's gonna be super
visceral and have lots of
F-bombs!"
So, out of convenience, I might refer to Zombie's movies as "remakes," but in my heart, I would consider it a re-imagining or reboot. If it doesn't pay ample respect to the
story of the original (I'm not talking frame-by-frame), I won't give it the honor of being called a remake. That not necessarily a bad thing though. Zombie was clearly inspired by Carpenter.
Evil Dead's not a bad example either. Story-wise, there are very few similarities to the original in the remake. (More than Halloween though.) Yes, there's a cabin in the woods, a Necronomicon (albeit a very different one, with some pretty different rules), some demon possession caused by reading the words, and one of the demons spends most of the film trapped in the basement. Other than that, the references to the original are mostly just insider nuggets that don't serve a similar purpose in the story. For instance, Natalie saws her arm off -- but not for the purpose of removing the evil hand and replacing it with a chainsaw to go kick ass with it. It's to fulfill the reboot's rule of "bodily dismemberment" so that she would expel the demon... then die. Mia's hand gets ripped off, but it's because she had no choice, and her shoving the stump through the handle of a chainsaw is a far cry from Ash purposefully (and groovily) arming himself with his iconic weapon to go demon-slaying.
Also, there are are rumors that Evil Dead is actually a sequel that will join up with the original franchise after Army of Darkness II. So what does that make it? More grey area I suppose.
The Thing (2011) is another one that's not cut & dry. I watched the whole movie thinking it was a straight remake because I thought it followed Carpenter's storyline very closely. (I hadn't seen the 1982 version for a little while, so possibly couldn't remember everything exactly.) But then at the end, it was revealed that it was actually a prequel. I suppose most people might have known that going in, but I didn't.
This article about the Poltergeist remake has a pretty good quote about remakes vs. reboots.
Quote:
According to Moviehole "the Kenan-directed Raimi-produced reboot – much like the “Evil Dead” remake – exists in the same world as the previous “Poltergeist” films. So while it is a ‘reboot’ of the franchise, it’s also somewhat of a sequel – taking place years after the Freeling’s were ran out of town.
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We've got sequels, remakes, reboots, re-jiggering... It's all worthy of us horror nerds discussing, disagreeing about, and maybe even agreeing about on occasion.
