Prompted by the new version of A Nightmare on Elm Street hitting theaters this weekend, Keith Phillips has written this piece for The Daily Beast on the trend of horror remakes. Phillips argues (and I agree with him) that the real trouble with horror remakes is not so much their reuse of familiar characters and scenarios but that these films transplant the bogeymen of a earlier era into contemporary cinema but do not adapt them to reflect, embody, or comment upon the anxieties of contemporary society. An excerpt:
But mostly, horror remakes just look lazy because, well, they are lazy, dragging yesterday’s monsters into a world they’re ill-equipped to scare. Though imitated to exhaustion, the technology-wary films of the Japanese horror cycle (the original version of The Ring, for example) and the torture porn sub-genre—particularly Eli Roth’s Hostel films—have roots that sink deep into millennial anxieties. Most rehashed monsters never even touch the ground.