For the past twenty-four hours I have been trying to think of horror remakes that were better than the original, and I still haven't come up with anything!
There are plenty of remakes that are fairly good and perfectly enjoyable in themselves - in fact, this category is huge - but none (IMO) that surpass the original.
Thinking about it, this is perhaps not surprising. Filmmaking is a very conservative industry. They repeat whatever was successful in the past and are terrified of deviating from it, because of the enormous amounts of money that are on the line. Consequently, anyone who suggested remaking a poor film would have their suggestion shot down very quickly. They take the safer option of remaking classics, because they are guaranteed to draw a large audience, and then they almost inevitably fail to recapture that intangible magic that made the original so good in the first place.
Well, those are my thoughts for today, folks. Two modern remakes that I haven't yet seen but would like to are
The Wicker Man and
The Ring. Has anybody seen them, and did you enjoy them? How do they measure up to their mighty predecessors?
Exceptions for the "remake never as good as the original" rule might be things like
Dracula or
Frankenstein, which have been filmed countless times. This feels like cheating a bit, as they are not so much "remaking" the previous film, but rather just making their own independent adaptation of a great book. Still, Christopher Lee was certainly not the first person to play ol' pointy teeth, but his version was probably the best.
