Hollywood has run out of ideas, especially in the horror department. Instead of thinking of new and original ways to scare people, directors have decided to revive old movies. When the amount of original horror films in the past five years can be counted on one hand, one has to wonder: Why is Hollywood creating all these remakes?
“It’s funny because a lot of horror films are more or less telling the same story. You know, ‘The Shining’ and ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘Amityville’ are terribly close. It seems to me they’re a little bit like fairy tales anyway. They’re interchangeable and you know they are perennials,” said Andrew Douglas, director of the “The Amityville Horror” remake at the film’s premiere.
Douglas argued that there are several key stories told in horror films. The difference tends to be that fairy tales work their way into the plots of various original films, while horror fairy tales just stick to the same movie with slight alterations. Many fairy tale adaptations seek to put a twist on the original story whereas horror films tend to stick to the same dimensions.
One of the primary reasons for the remake is new technology. We have all seen Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” It is not a surprise that the birds appear very fake. It is not just technology, but the ability to profit all over again without taking any risk. With a movie that has already been distributed it is easy to tell how the remake will fair in the market. Investors think that the new technology will push the films to gross an even higher amount of money.
A good example of the profit machine is “House on Haunted Hill” (1999) recreated from the original “House on Haunted Hill” created in 1958. The original was in black and white and starred Vincent Price. While the original received impressive reviews, the remake did not.
The newer version follows the plot of the original. A creepy millionaire offers $10,000 to a group of people if they can spend the night in a haunted house. In the remake, it is no longer a haunted house but an insane asylum and inflation has increased the amount of money to a million dollars. The main problem is that newer the more recent “House on Haunted Hill” focuses too much on special effects. There is a complete lack of suspense, and this problem also holds true for the remake of “The Haunting.”
Directors think that the modern audience is scared by gore, but audiences really fear the unknown. It is this obsession with technology that has led to the ruining of classic horror films. In the remake of “Psycho” nothing changed but the fact that it was in color.
The real reason audiences keep going back to the remakes is that they know what happens. Our fear of the unknown is so great that we crave it, yet we also try to avoid it by subjecting ourselves to the same plots hoping not to be as scared as we were the first time around. Maybe we are hoping that our fears have changed, that no longer should we be afraid of the insane asylum or the abandoned house down the street. Whatever the new fear may be, let us just hope it is new.
Leave a Reply