HORROR 101: The 13 Best Horror Remakes

Craig Gillespie’s redux of Tom Holland’s cult classic has fewer of the camp flourishes that mark the original film but more of everything else. Start with a fantastic cast at the top of their game: Colin Farrell at his sexiest as the vampire who moves in next door, Anton Yelchin at his most unaffected as the kid no one will believe, Imogen Poots (who will reunite with Yelchin in Green Room) on the verge of her arrival, Toni Collette, David Tennant, Christopher Mintz-Plasse… an embarrassment of riches in the employ of a sleek, fun, breezy thriller that also finds room to talk about the suburban housing disaster in Nevada and the perils of being a single woman in a transient culture. It’s genuinely great and the fact we don’t talk about it more is as puzzling and frustrating as how the vampire keeps gaslighting everyone into believing those screams coming out of his house at night are just the television.

Where to stream Fright Night

This movie is so good, so nasty, so surprising in its absolute disregard for the rules of who’s supposed to survive movies like this and not, that no matter how many times I see it, it’s still upsetting. The special effects are inventive and exceptionally-disgusting, with my favorite the reveal that there will be help from the police in a telephone-booth homage to The Birds. A sequence set in a movie theater is ridiculously-cool (and played really well in an actual theater), and Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith make a surprisingly good screen-couple, just trying to survive the night. It’s shockingly good.

Where to watch The Blob (1988)

Jim Mickle’s remake of Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are follows the Parkers, a reclusive, religious family who may or may not be taking the whole communion thing a little too seriously. When the matriarch of the family dies and an autopsy raises some questions, the teen girls (Julia Garner and Ambyr Childers) and father (Bill Sage) desperately try to hold on to their way of life as the outside world starts pushing its way in. A gorgeous southern gothic punctuated by a handful of gruesome scenes and ideas, the strength of the picture is in the unaffected performances that touch on issues including the zero sum game of religious fanaticism, unchallenged tradition, and the ineffectiveness of ritual to hold the future at bay. It’s tremendous.

Where to stream We Are What We Are

I like this Gore Verbinski remake better than the Hideo Nakata original. I love the way it looks – the way it moves – that one jump scare early on that is unbelievably unfair and just as unbelievably effective, and as proof that Verbinski was the perfect blockbuster director even before Pirates of the Caribbean. The plot nominally about a cursed VHS tape that, once watched, results in the death of the viewer in a few days’ time, the film is among the first of the post-9/11 American remakes of Japanese “J-Horror” pictures that, among other things, are indicated by their nihilism and by their long-haired girl ghosts. I have a theory that these pictures, long seen in the United States as transgressive and unpleasant, became fodder for remakes in the United States after our own urban mass destruction event — and how the long-term result of that event is our own “kaiju” movies, the Marvel Cinematic Universe — but for the purposes of this list, sufficed to say that Verbinski’s The Ring is terrifying, taut, and is maybe more relevant now twenty-years on than it was even then.

Where to stream The Ring

Muschietti’s It (and It 2) is so much better than Tommy Lee Wallace’s affectionately-remembered made-for-ABC mini-series that there’s room for both of them: the one as camp nostalgia treasured as the first televisual fright for a generation of terrified kids; the other as a technically-proficient, beautifully-scripted and performed film about how the things you fear in childhood mutate through time into the things you fear as an adult. The “It” of the title is Harry Potter’s Boggart — a thing that assumes the shape of your greatest terror the better to feed off that fear. Muschiette correctly identifies that for the group of friends haunted by this creature over the course of their lives, their greatest fear is ultimately that of letting the other down, and, after the dust settles, of being alone in a cruel universe.

Where to stream It

Rather than try to recreate Dario Argento’s lush comic-book panel colors and dizzying supernatural dream-logic, Luca Guadagnino approaches this tale of a young dancer who travels to a prestigious dance academy in Berlin that happens to be run by witches, as a treatise on how women are extraordinarily powerful despite all attempts to turn their trauma into syndromes. I love a moment where women’s laughter is seen as literally castrating, and another where a young woman’s betrayal of her sex is met with a bone-breaking, deforming punishment in a room made of mirrors. It takes its cue from Suzy’s final, secret smile at the end of Argento’s film; indication of her discovery of her power right as the credits roll. For this new Suzy (Dakota Johnson), the discovery of her power is accompanied by her stillness in the midst of a whirling dervish of a grand performance and the eruption of old flesh in a concussive orgy of gore. It’s about the rage of the powerless and the oppressed and how it’s all ready to explode.

Where to stream Suspiria

Honoring the old movie techniques he grew up revering, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula is a nickelodeon of extravagant melodrama: an opera of sanguineous delight that finds the ancient count (Gary Oldman) traveling the oceans to find his reincarnated love (Winona Ryder) in all the offensive nouveau riche of the new country. A lavish visual feast matched pitch-for-pitch by Oldman’s to-the-rafters performance, Michael Ballhaus’ cinematography and the costume designs of the great Eiko Ishioka. Critics found it to be overwrought with Keanu Reeves outmatched by the requirement of an accent — for me, the film is an exercise in excess that you either decide you’ll swing with, or reject because you’re too sophisticated for its obvious charms. I’m just uncouth enough to adore it.

Where to stream Bram Stoker's Dracula

The last film most of us saw in a theater before the pandemic shut it all down, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man has cemented itself in my mind as the definitive film of this time. The notion of being trapped inside, hunted by an invisible killer in a nightmare surveillance state where no one believes just exactly how bad it is is almost too painfully on-point to be enjoyable. For it to center as its bad guy a billionaire tech genius who has constructed a suit made of cameras is just “chef’s kiss” on the scale of how to use genre to maximum, poetic, effect. Centered by a powerful performance by Elisabeth Moss and a creator who blew my mind with Upgrade and then again with this take on The Invisible Man, it’s deeply terrifying, profoundly-upsetting, and set up for a sequel — not unlike Bernard Rose’s Candyman, in which the future is woman. Astonishing.

Where to stream The Invisible Man

Herzog’s Nosferatu is creepy as hell. As played by madman Klaus Kinski, the way he insinuates himself against the breast of young Isabelle Adjani like a pinky rat looking for a teat is existentially repugnant and such is the intent, I think, of Herzog’s awe-struck treatment of Murnau’s interpretation of the Bram Stoker text. If there’s a comparison in Herzog’s filmography to Nosferatu, it’s his film Heart of Glass, made a couple of years prior to this and set in an 18th century Bavarian glassblowing factory. Myth has it that Herzog hypnotized his entire cast in order to capture the dazed, glassy, performances of largely non-professional actors in the telling of a story that is essentially about a magic glass that drives everyone into insanity. There’s a dazed quality to Nosferatu as well, a dream-like logic and pace that is part Jean Cocteau and part psychosexual fever hallucination. For the scene where his vampire arrives on his disease-ridden boat, Herzog bought out every rat he could find, inhumanely dyed them gray, and released them into the town where they were shooting where they quickly and to this day infested their new environment. It’s the Apocalypse Now! of vampire movies, in other words, and retains its mesmeric power.

Where to stream Nosferatu

The second of four adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel, Phil Kaufman’s version encapsulates the pop religiosity and big-city (San Francisco) mass cultural moment in the aftermath of the implosion of the 1960’s progressive dream. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams play co-workers at the city’s regulatory agency who notice, too late for them to do anything about it, that everyone around them seems to have become blandly malign. There’s a reason this story is resonant for new generations — made today, our heroes would notice their neighbors becoming anti-vaxxers and voting for vile, bloated game show hucksters but too late to prevent them from getting elected or killing us. The pods communicate with secret networks, attend meetings without telling their spouses, and before you know it, everything and everyone you ever loved is transformed into the same textureless gray paste. A masterpiece of mood and craft, note all the people staring at nothing throughout the film — what the garbage men are packing into their trucks, the cues and noises on the soundtrack that tell you that everything is bad before you realize that everything is bad. It’s as hopeless a film as has ever been made. It’s right about everything.

Where to stream Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The sixth film version of this tale, Kim Jee-woon’s is stunning. It’s, visually, almost tactile, opening with extreme close-up shots of wallpaper that are almost physical. It proceeds into a story about sisters in a home with a stepmother they dislike and a tragedy no one seems to want to talk about. Where are the sisters returning from at the beginning of the film, anyway? And what’s the deal with the wardrobe in the bedroom – the knocking late at night and the guests who notice that there’s someone underneath the sink during dinner. A haunted house movie, a fairytale about domestic trauma, a metaphor for the crumbling of traditional family structures, the shoulders of A Tale of Two Sisters bears a heavy burden of metaphor with dark grace. It’s smart and pretty, and there’s a scene in it so frightening, the first time I watched it, I stood up and walked around the room, afraid to look at it directly. One of the great horror films of all time.

Where to stream A Tale Of Two Sisters

One of the great films of all time, it’s a Howard Hawks squad picture; a men vs. nature, men in tension survival picture; a showcase for Rob Bottin’s practical effects appearing near the end of the golden age of such things; it’s also an efficiently, minimally-directed picture with a pitch-perfect cast and an Ennio Morricone score that brings home all the doom and hopelessness of its premise. Of all the things it always was, it’s also a quintessential pandemic picture in which a viral contagion threatens to destroy the world and the only person who’s right in the film makes the calculation that mankind can’t be trusted to care enough for each other to save themselves. A film has lost none of its power over the course of four decades and countless rewatches. Were it not in a devalued genre, The Thing would be correctly-evaluated as one of the best films of all time in any genre.

Where to stream The Thing

David Cronenberg’s The Fly is one of the single best films ever made about the labor of love. Its tale of a doomed scientist who makes one liquor-fueled mistake one night, consumed by sexual jealousy, and the horrific consequences of his moment of childishness is almost Greek in its tragedy. Real-life couple Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis give their courtship real heat and their eventual dissolution as the scientist Seth (Goldblum) physically-disintegrates over the film’s painful, gruesome middle, is flavored by their love and the grief over their love. When Seth begs her to leave him because he believes he’ll hurt her, his tortured “no… no” when she flees is the stuff that will haunt me when I’m on my own death bed. Seen at the time as an allegory for the AIDS epidemic, I see it as a film about aging – about how all of our bodies are decaying in real time and our hope is that we find someone who will love us even as we return to dust. Chris Walas provides the exceptional practical effects, Howard Shore provides the score, and Cronenberg’s body horror obsession finds its fullest fruition here in this brutally wise remake. It is one of the key films of my life.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream The Fly