Month of Horror: Science!
Current mood: shocked
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

The "Month of Horror" continues.

Jason Voorhees probably isn't the smartest fella around. And nobody would be surprised if Freddy Krueger couldn't point out Zaire on a map. Pinhead isn't that smart; he's just British. For the most part, horror-movie heavies are really good at scaring you, but they're not known for their sophistication or intellectual depth.

That is where a whole 'nother category of villain comes in.

Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of silence, if you will, for the least appreciated of shock-cinema bad guys, the mad scientist.

He's a thoughtful man, well-spoken and educated beyond his intelligence. He is a patron of the arts and fluent in numerous languages. He has traveled the world, and now all he wants to do is rule it. The mad scientist is out for blood-- and any other useful body parts he can get his hands on-- and he's not too careful about where he gets his supply. Usually he has minions to do his bidding, whether it's a lone, cross-eyed hunchback or a few overeager pre-med students who consider the scientist's "experiments" a good way to earn extra credit. Rarely does the mad scientist get his hands dirty, but there are exceptions to the rule, as we will see.

The prototypical mad scientist-- perhaps the first really well defined example of the type in literature-- would be the eager medical student (and title character) of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein. Although usually referred to as a doctor, in popular culture at least, Victor Frankenstein was a struggling student-- full of new ideas but not doing too well in his medical-ethics class. He digs up the parts he needs and creates life, sure of himself but ill-prepared to deal with the consequences of playing God. His stitched-together Adam winds up wrecking his life, and Frankenstein becomes the first in a long line of mad scientists to pay the price for using secret knowledge as a weapon.

Elsa Lanchester as the title creature, and Colin Clive as
the stark-raving-barmy mad doctor, in Bride of Frankenstein

Cinematically Frankenstein has been portrayed by a wide range of actors, from Kenneth Branagh to Gene Wilder. The most enduring image of this mad scientist would have to be Colin Clive's depiction, in Universal's original Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935): Clive presented Victor as completely unhinged, barely concealing his various manias behind the veneer of cold, dispassionate science. When his creations come to life, Clive is all over the place, physically and mentally, making one wonder whether the lightning has struck him or his project.

Peter Cushing as Victor F. in Curse of Frankenstein

After Clive the most memorable Frankenstein would have to be Peter Cushing. Beginning with Curse of Frankenstein (co-starring another Hammer regular, Christopher Lee, as the creature) and in five other features, Cushing portrayed a somewhat less manic version of the scientist, making Frankenstein cold-blooded and detached from the people around him, but still unable to master the things he brings to life.

Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg's version of The Fly

But not all mad scientists believe that people have to suffer in order for them to succeed in their schemes-- well, they don't all start out thinking that. Take Seth Brundle, for example. Brilliant, if somewhat socially inept, he is more of a geek than an evil genius, and is more likely to own a video-game system than a death ray. He's the protagonist of David Cronenberg's version of The Fly, and since he is portrayed by Jeff Goldblum, he's not just a geek, he's a lanky geek with a funky hurry-up-slow-down speech pattern. Unfortunately-- since it happens to be a Cronenberg movie-- Seth starts to mutate in all kinds of disgusting ways (a consequence of his teleportation machine mixing his molecules with those of a common housefly), and his altruism goes right out the window. Along with his lower jaw. Although the Brundlefly (as he refers to his increasingly hybridized form) eventually takes over Seth's personality and he becomes the stereotypical mad scientist bent ..ing his work no matter how many people have to die, at least he didn't start out that way.

 
Jeffrey Combs as Dr. Richard Vannacutt in House on Haunted Hill (Combs also portrayed another great mad scientist, Dr. Herbert West,
in the classic '80s shocker Re-Animator), and House of 1,000 Corpse's
Dr. Satan, an urban legend who proves to be all too real.

Then there are the polar opposites of Seth Brundle: the mad scientists who not only want their work to result in the deaths of others, they actually want to cause those deaths themselves. They may have minions, henchmen, accountants, all the usual followers, but they seem to have no problem getting blood and gore-- and lots of it-- all over their nice, white surgical garb. Take Dr. Richard Vannacutt (Jeffrey Combs), of House on Haunted Hill, or Dr. Satan (Walter Phelan), of House of 1,000 Corpses. Both doctors did good, even noble work with the mentally ill-- up to a point-- before their methods of treatment became a bit too sadistic, and finally homicidal. Each mad doctor racked up hundreds of victims, maybe a thousand in the case of Dr. Satan, before being called to account.

John Lithgow chewing the scenery in Buckaroo Banzai

Quite different from the Frankensteins and the Brundles and the Vannacutts, is a New Jersey scientist named Dr. Emilio Lizardo, who is kinda, sorta, also known as Lord John Whorfin. It's a long, complicated story, more or less explained in W.D. Richter's delightful cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. To explain the film in any great detail is to invite madness, or at least provoke indignation from people who didn't get the movie-- all I can say is that Banzai is a total crazy-quilt of genre references, comic strips, crypto-science, and Japanese cool-- if Godzilla and Doc Savage had a baby, and that baby was raised by wolves who listened to Warren Zevon and Parliament all day long, and then that baby grew up to be a crime-fighter in a really fast car, then that guy would be Buckaroo Banzai, and his friend-turned-mental-patient-turned-master-villain-archenemy would be Dr. Lizardo (John Lithgow, in a one-hundred-percent manic performance). There are Lectroids, aliens named John, and Orson Welles references. And mad scientists. What else could you want?

   
Like other horror staples, the mad scientist has gone through a long, painful process of being watered down by popular culture: whether it's Victor Von Doom, alias Doctor Doom, in the Fantastic Four comics, or Dr. Weird exhorting his neighbor to turn down his stereo on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the once-scary mad doctor is now often mined for laughs

No review of the mad-scientist sub-genre would be complete without a nod to the greatest, the most diabolical, and certainly the sexiest mad scientist of them all, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who came to the relative wilderness of Ohio from a planet called Transylvania to spread the gospel of free love, gender ambiguity, and '50s rock and roll. The character was conceived as a '70s answer to all the great old mad-scientist characters, and all their worn-out cliches, but in many ways Frank embraces those cliches and makes them cool all over again. When he asks, "Whatever happened to Fay Wray?" he's also asking what happened to all those great old movies where a mad scientist would run around in his lab-- full of outsized equipment and Tesla coils, lightning sparking menacingly in the distant hills-- and be an object of fear and respect, and not merely a punch line.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), flanked by his cronies
Magenta (Patricia Quinn) and Columbia (Nell Campbell),
in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Mad scientist honorable mentions:

Dr. Alphonse Mephesto, the resident mad scientist of South Park

Dr. Phibes (Vincent Price), in The Abominable Dr. Phibes
and its various (interminable) direct and indirect sequels

Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. Not really
one of the all-time-great movie mad scientists,
but, y'know, the guy is freakin' huge in France.

Currently watching : Maniac Release date: 2007-01-30

6:30 AM - 6 Comments - 16 Kudos - Add Comment

Month of Horror: Vamp It Up
Current mood: fascinated
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

The "Month of Horror" continues.

Vampires.

The bloodsuckers are everywhere, it seems. From earliest childhood memories of Count Chocula haunting your cereal bowl to Sesame Street's Count teaching you the importance of numbers, they've been a part of our lives for years now, and as those years go by, these vampires have grown increasingly, well, anemic. Following the success of Anne Rice's novels, we have whole shelves devoted to fiction in which the vampire is either the well-defined protagonist, or at least the thoroughly sympathetic heavy. Thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer the slayers have become the neurotic, morally ambiguous ones, and the vampires are merely doin' their thing and trying to live up to their jacked-up biological requirements.

Somewhere, Bela Lugosi must be turning over in his coffin.

Assuming he's still in it.

Centuries ago the vampire was not just a literary device. In eastern and central Europe he was taken for granted as a more-or-less living, breathing entity, one of the many night-beasts to contend with, and guard against. Historians say that a few overly publicized cases of premature burial led to the "vampire craze" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perhaps. Perhaps not. The Catholic Church, for its part, commissioned a study of these reported cases of vampirism, assigning it to no less an authority than the prolific French theologian Antoine Augustin Calmet, whose 1746 report constituted a "definitely maybe" on the subject of the existence of vampires.

While the Church continued to mull over the question, novelists got their hands on the elusive creatures right away and convinced the reading public that these creatures were, if not quite real, at least real enough to cause nightmares: in 1819 John Polidori published The Vampyre, and a few years later the immensely popular (if atrociously written) "penny-dreadful" novel Varney the Vampire appeared to keep the creatures in the public consciousness. And after the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897, presenting the tragic story of an undead Transylvanian warlord who left his darkly enchanted homeland to find love in an unfamiliar, modern London, the vampire was no longer in any danger of being forgotten. Real or not, this creature was here to stay.

With the advent of motion pictures, filmmakers seized on the vampire story as a sure-fire way to find an audience. F.W. Murnau's German horror film Nosferatu (1922) starred the strangely-moving, reptilian Max Schreck as the title vampire, and portrayed the creature as repellent, unattractive, and the villain of the piece. Less than a decade later Universal released its take on Stoker's novel: Dracula starred Bela Lugosi, who had portrayed the vampire on stage, in a career-making (and, the actor would later discover, career-limiting) role. Lugosi's lines were often hard to understand beneath his thick Slavic accent, but he delivered the charisma and the menace expected of the character, and for many Lugosi's work remains, more than seventy-five years later, the definitive cinematic vampire.

Max Schreck as Count Dracula (later prints identified him as
"Count Orlock" when Stoker's estate sued) in Murnau's Nosferatu.

Bela Lugosi as the title vampire in Universal's Dracula.

Times changed and tastes changed, but the public's interest in vampires did not. While atomic-age American filmmakers presented their horror films with more of a science-fiction bent throughout the '50s, in England they stuck to the classics, and vampire movies remained a staple thanks to the efforts of Hammer Films-- in seven classic (if slightly campy) movies, the great Christopher Lee portrayed Dracula as a refined creature who moved with an animal's grace-- and ferocity. Frequent Hammer player Peter Cushing appeared numerous times as Dracula's nemesis, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. (In an earlier Hammer project Cushing had portrayed Dr. Frankenstein, in full raving-mad-scientist mode, and Lee had been the monster.) Some of the films in this series did not age well, but the first movie, Horror of Dracula, is effective enough, and a genuine classic in the genre.

Christopher Lee starred as Dracula in a series of Hammer Horrors.

But even the usually reliable Hammer Studios couldn't resist tinkering with the basic vampire-movie formula, and as receipts for their more traditional movies dropped, they began to increase the sex and violence present in their films-- and along the way they gave Dracula a sex change: in 1971 the studio released the film Countess Dracula, reviving the Elizabeth Bathory legend and giving blonde bombshell Ingrid Pitt room to do her thing as a change of pace from Christopher Lee. (Pitt also starred, in a similar role, in Hammer's The Vampire Lovers, with Peter Cushing appearing in full Van Helsing mode.)

Ingrid Pitt as the lady vampire in Countess Dracula.

In the swinging '70s, it was five to a coffin: The Vampire Lovers.

Through the '60s and '70s American filmmakers paid relatively less attention to vampires than they had in previously: films like Black Christmas and The Hills Have Eyes and Halloween dealt with menacing characters who had absolutely no supernatural background, and whose evil was all too realistic. Frankenstein's monster and Count Dracula and other characters seemed quaint, even amusing, to increasingly jaded filmgoing audiences. Directors like John Carpenter and Wes Craven would get around to telling vampire stories, much later on in their careers, and with mixed results. Carpenter revisited the church-secrecy subplot of his film Prince of Darkness, and imbued it with a vampiric twist: his movie Vampires (starring an over-the-top James Woods as a foul-mouthed, church-sanctioned vampire hunter) has minor cult-classic status today, but was poorly received by critics at the time of its release. Craven's take on the vampire myth, Vampire in Brooklyn, is widely considered the Heaven's Gate of the genre.

It's bad. Really, really bad.

There were more successful vampire tales in the '80s and '90s, and most of them included some twist on the familiar story arc: The Lost Boys presented Kiefer Sutherland and his cronies as vampires masquerading as California street punks; Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark was a slash-and-burn road trip carried out by an assortment of vampires (led by Lance Henriksen) who are never actually referred to as vampires at any point in the movie; Tom Holland's Fright Night was a vampire-themed variation on the "little boy who cried wolf" story; and the John Landis horror/comedy Innocent Blood pitted vampire Anne Parillaud against Pittsburgh gangsters.

The most important of the '90s vampire movies were adaptations of novels with cult followings: Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire (1994). Fans of the books found a lot to dislike about each film, but for the general public these movies did a lot to broaden perceptions about how vampires could and should be portrayed, and moved the story away from the more narrowly defined monster/slayer dynamic. Gary Oldman's tortured Dracula, more closely related to his historic counterpart, is certainly the better piece of acting, while Tom Cruise's surprisingly good work as the vampire Lestat in Interview also helped move the vampire's image away from some stiff-armed, pasty-faced Eastern European in a tuxedo saying "Good eeeeeeevening."

OK, they look like Type O Negative roadies, but Brad Pitt
and Tom Cruise deliver in Interview with the Vampire.

Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

In the twenty-first century, those hard-to-kill masked lunatics with huge torture chambers and an endless supply of power tools made a comeback and knocked the vampire from his place of prominence in the horror genre. Movies like Saw, Hostel, and The Devil's Rejects placed the emphasis on man's cruelty to man, and decidedly non-supernatural settings. Although vampire movies have been less frequent in recent years, there are a few recent efforts worth checking out.

Canadian filmmaker Lee Damarbre made the ultimate cult vampire film in 2001, unleashing Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter on an unsuspecting world. The movie features a kung fu-fighting Jesus teaming up with the masked Mexican wrestler El Santo to save Ottawa's gay community from particularly nasty bloodsuckers.

Re-read that last sentence.

Yes, that's what the movie's about.

And yes, it's excellent.

And no, I'm not high.

Danny Huston as vampire leader Marlow in 30 Days of Night.

There was something of a horror-fan backlash against the recent film version of the Steve Niles-Ben Templesmith graphic novel 30 Days of Night. Some horror websites and publications complained that the movie wasn't all that it was made out to be-- that its vampires went pretty strongly against vampire canon-- and as it was one of the best-marketed horror movies of the last few years, perhaps a backlash was to be expected.

But the movie works. It really does. And it works in large part because these vampires aren't held up to the standards of all the books and movies that have gone before. The vampires of 30 Days of Night act more like evolutionary offshoots, bloodthirsty hyper-humans, than the tragically hip damned souls of so many earlier vampire stories. These vampires don't want you to interview them; they want to ram a straw into your skull and drink, drink, drink.

On the indie-horror circuit, a recent film that's made quite a splash is Mike Watt and Amy Lynn Best's A Feast of Flesh, a fun and inventive blending of several genres. The film pits IRA gunslingers against vampire hookers, and featurs a cast of well-known indie-horror players from Debbie Rochon to Chainsaw Sally herself, April Burril. It's not a film that sets out to break new ground, but it does what it does with style and a sense of humor. Recommended.

    
The most recent version of Dracula, a 2007 production from the BBC,
features Marc Warren as Dracula and David Suchet as Van Helsing.

And we can't conclude a review of vampire movies without taking a look at the latest, and in some ways the most well thought out, adaptation of Stoker's hardy perennial, Dracula. A BBC production featuring Marc Warren as Dracula and David Suchet as Dr. Van Helsing, the film introduces several subplots (a sinister cult that backs Dracula wherever he goes, veneral disease as a bond between several of the male characters) not found in Stoker's book, but by bringing these topics into the storyline the filmmakers get to the heart of the several forms of madness that drove Stoker from the time he wrote Dracula to the end of his life. This version of Dracula no longer assumes that the viewer "gets" the subtexts of the novel, and brings them into play directly. Warren and Suchet offer interesting takes on these well-worn characters, and make something familiar new and compelling. As with earlier adaptations, die-hard fans of the book complained, and complained loudly, about liberties taken with the text. It may not be for all tastes, but it's a welcome "re-imagining" of the quintessential vampire story.

Currently watching : Dracula Has Risen from the Grave Release date: 2004-04-27

6:30 AM - 7 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

Month of Horror: The Art of Horror
Current mood: creative
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

The "Month of Horror" continues.

So far this series may seem like a lot of complaining about contemporary horror films and contemporary horror filmmakers. To a great extent this is true. There are many talented, original voices working in the genre today, though one often has to stalk deep within the jungles of independent and underground film to hear what those voices have to say, but for the most part the major studios are quite content to churn out watered-down, ineffectual crap because they know the target demographic will turn out to support the PG-13 "re-imagining" of this or that horror classic. It's dollars and cents, asses in seats, with very little focus on the many nuances, large and small, that go into making a good film. This is not a problem unique to the horror-film genre, but it is most conspicuous in the horror-film genre.

Take, for example, the problem of the lowly movie poster. It's "just" a piece of advertising art, nowhere near as important as the film itself, right? So of course a studio isn't going to put a great deal of thought or money into designing a quality poster-- why should they? Throw a few chopped-and-screwed buzz-cut trailers on MTV before a big weekend, and the kids will turn out to see it anyway.

These days the posters are, for the most part, fairly lazy Photoshop jobs meant to highlight the presence of a certain actor, telling the viewer next to nothing about the film itself. The posters are as lifeless as the movies they advertise. Two recent examples, I Am Legend and Resident Evil: Extinction, are typical of the larger trend:

Then there are the truly brain-dead posters, showing you exactly what the film's title implies, as though a good chunk of the movie's target demographic will not be able to speak English, and things cannot be conveyed with any subtlety at all. My favorite film in this category is the "old-school horror" movie Hatchet, whose poster shows, well, see for yourself:

You know, it wasn't always like this.

If posters for straightforward dramatic films were subdued, artistic affairs, then the posters for horror movies were anarchic, primordial, screaming at the viewer with irregular layouts and color schemes usually found on asylum walls. The films never pretended to be award-winners-- they had one purpose in this life, to get inside your head and rearrange the furniture there-- and the posters provided you with all the information you needed before wandering into the movie house:

These are some of my favorites; you'll notice that none of them represent films more recent than the mid-1980s. The only horror-movie poster I can honestly appreciate from within the last decade would have to be the "Last Supper" motif poster for Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects-- it's self-conscious in its desire to shock, especially since the film's target demographic stopped finding that kind of "blasphemous" art shocking after, oh, sixth grade-- but in its totally nontraditional approach to contemporary movie-poster design, it's memorable and different, two things that cannot be said about most such efforts in the past few years.

But as with most forms of art, taste is subjective.

These are some of my favorites from the genre.

What horror-movie posters stick out in your mind as the best-- or the worst-- of their kind?

Currently listening : Boots of Hell By Ghoultown

6:30 AM - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Month of Horror: Survey Says
Current mood: fascinated
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

The "Month of Horror" continues.

Usually I do this a few days before the series begins, but this year life, and all the usually successful attempts to schedule it, have been all over the place, so I am doing it a couple of days into October.

Oh, well.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.

I'm gonna throw open the floor to suggestions. There's no shortage of ideas for talking about all things horrific: upcoming topics include the art (and artlessness) of the horror-movie poster, a defense of the misunderstood mad scientist, the changing face of the scream queen, and the science of zombiehood, just to name a few.

But as I've always said, the key to the success of this series has been input from readers (and fellow horror fans), and I want that to carry over to the topics that we talk about here, too.

So rack your brains-- but not literally, 'cos that would be a mess-- and give me an idea or two for future entries in this series.

And, just so you know, the Biden-Palin debate is not an acceptable topic. Scary as hell, yes, but not quite the kind of terror I'd like to focus on here...

Currently watching : Halloween III - Season Of The Witch Release date: 2003-10-07

6:30 AM - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Month of Horror: Play It Again...Again
Current mood: artistic
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

The "Month of Horror" continues.

This topic is something of a sore spot among die-hard horror fans, so let's talk about it now and get it out of the way before we get any closer to Halloween.

Yes, my friends, we are talking about remakes.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Fifty, thirty, even twenty years ago, the horror remake was a rare and usually an exciting thing; today you can't go two or three months without one venerable title or another being announced as remake fodder. Usually the director is a novice-- or, worse, French-- and the cast is led by one Dawson's Creek refugee or another. And in at least eight cases out of ten, the thing will be rated PG-13, guaranteeing watered-down scares and plot twists that can be glimpsed within a few minutes of the opening credits.

This trend is why many horror fans are a) deeply cynical, b) inclined to avoid the multiplex, and c) happier with their Fulci and Bava DVDs.

Actually, the horror remake or "re-imagining" has pretty deep roots. Go back and look at the catalog of Universal horror classics, and how many of those franchises got hopelessly entangled in sequels, prequels, remakes, crossovers, and all sorts of retcon. By the time Lugosi, Chaney, Karloff and their ilk were finished with those characters, it was impossible to tell what was canon and what was cannon fodder. We revere Frankenstein and The Mummy and The Wolf Man, but what can be said about Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, one of the worst continuity mash-ups from that era? (It featured Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi reprising their signature roles, and the voice of Vincent Price, as the Invisible Man, in a throwaway gag at the end of the movie. Boris Karloff, the definitive Frankenstein's Monster, declined to participate in the film, considering it an insult to fans of the earlier, better movies. Glenn Strange played the monster instead.)

A few years later, when the Hammer Studios horror movies were in full swing, a few Hollywood observers considered them remakes of the Universal classics-- to the point that Terence Fisher's production The Curse of Frankenstein was put on notice by Universal that the classic "Karloff look" (designed by legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce) could not be utilized by the Hammer team in their design for the monster. Although it was panned by critics on its original release, fans turned out in droves to see Curse (starring horror greats Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee), resulting in Hammer mining the other Universal franchises for more, and better-funded, movies. The studio's next release, Horror of Dracula, was a hit as well, proving that horror fans of the '50s were much less particular about remakes, so long as they provided something different from what went before.

In the '60s and '70s, horror filmmakers, particularly in the U.S., found it difficult to keep their movies scarier than real life: with political assassinations, the Vietnam war, and Watergate splashed all over the headlines, the pale figure of Bela Lugosi in a dinner jacket was quaint, not horrifying. Directors eschewed the classics, for the most part, and took horror in whole new directions. Filmmakers like Wes Craven, George Romero, Bob Clark, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, and many others, pushed the envelope in terms of violence, content, and overall intensity. Although many of their horror movies would be remade by later, lesser directors, this generation of filmmaker avoided earlier movies like the plague. If these were The Good Old Days, yielding films like The Exorcist, Suspiria, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Black Christmas, and Halloween, the '80s would represent the beginning of The Bad Time.

Maybe it started with the Philip Kaufman remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The 1978 version of the film was and is popular with horror and science-fiction fans, because it was more faithful to Jack Finney's original story, and kept Finney's downbeat ending. The movie was a critical and financial hit-- the famously hard to impress Pauline Kael of the New York Times called the Kaufman version "the best film of its kind ever made"-- and guaranteed that the trend of remaking earlier genre films would continue well into the twenty-first century.

Whether it was Kaufman's film, or the emergence in the early '80s of cheap, quickly-filmed horror sequels, the floodgates were open. David Cronenberg and John Carpenter each turned in high-quality remakes of minor '50s films, The Fly and The Thing, respectively. F/X wizard Tom Savini directed an excellent remake of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Werner Herzog and his usual leading man, Klaus Kinski, made a brilliant Nosferatu, rivaling the classic silent film by F.W. Murnau in many scenes. Longtime Martin Scorsese collaborator Paul Schrader released an intense, highly atmospheric remake of the '40s classic Cat People. Not all the remakes were bad; some of them were made by legitimate filmmakers with legitimate budgets. But throughout the '80s, as Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street and their countless sequels and imitators kept horror in the foreground, most directors knew to keep away from the classics-- there was a fine line between a remake and a desecration, and most filmmakers appreciated the distinction.

Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu (1979)

More recently, the distinction has been blurred by less-than-competent directors and production companies who are spurred by the desire to release movies with a built-in name recognition. It was bound to happen, most fans agree, but it has been, well, horrifying, to watch the greatest movies in this genre get taken apart like Rhodes in Day of the Dead, and by people with all the sophistication and smarts of a Romero zombie.

There were small, mostly unsuccessful efforts along the way: Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers, a Willard remake with Crispin Glover. These movies did their damage, too their hits from fans and critics, and went away.

Then Michael Bay showed up, and it all went to hell.

In 2003 Bay's production company, Platinum Dunes, released The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a joyless, soulless, utterly unremarkable rehash of Tobe Hooper's ground-breaking '70s movie. The Bay remake was glossy, polished, and featured a bunch of beautiful young actors going through the motions. It was a critical misfire, but it made lots and lots of money, guaranteeing an immediate sequel, and other efforts from the same company, remaking earlier horror films with the same amount of gloss to conceal the same amount of incompetence: The Amityville Horror with Ryan Reynolds and The Hitcher with Sean Bean, to name just a few. And Bay isn't done yet: Platinum Dunes is releasing a Friday the 13th remake next year, and we know it's going to suck in the same way we know poison will kill us and clouds are white and fluffy. Some things we know.

Hellraiser is going to be remade. Near Dark is going to be remade. Nightmare on Elm Street is going to be remade. Black Christmas, Halloween, Prom Night, and The Wicker Man have already gone through the Wringer of Suck, with disastrous results. We know where the trend started. What we don't know is where it will end. And that, far more than any of these remakes themselves, is scary.

Currently listening : Fear’s in the Water By The Vincent Black Shadow Release date: 2006-07-11

6:30 AM - 8 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment