|
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.
|