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What Are the Scariest Horror Remakes?

Should horror remakes exist? Should they not? I’m not too interested in answering that question. But the truth is that they exist, and considering how bleeding many of them there are, the question we need to ask is: Are they scary? I would like to take you on a tour of a few of the movies that respond to that question with an emphatic yes. They’re not ranked, because horror is such a subjective experience that the rankings would mean even less here than usual. And there are plenty I haven’t included, so if your favorite isn’t on the list, that doesn’t mean it’s not scary. That just means it’s not on my list. Also, a movie’s presence on the list doesn’t mean the original isn’t scary. OK, that’s the housekeeping out of the way. On with the frights!

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Horror remakes get a bad rap. In an increasingly IP-driven movie marketplace, it’s easy to understand why. Many audiences want fresh, original horror movies with unique points of view and new things to say about the world. And they want to complain when those movies get remakes and sequels down the line. It’s how things are supposed to work!

Should horror remakes exist? Should they not? I’m not too interested in answering that question. But the truth is that they exist, and considering how bleeding many of them there are, the question we need to ask is: Are they scary?

I would like to take you on a tour of a few of the movies that respond to that question with an emphatic yes. They’re not ranked, because horror is such a subjective experience that the rankings would mean even less here than usual. And there are plenty I haven’t included, so if your favorite isn’t on the list, that doesn’t mean it’s not scary. That just means it’s not on my list. Also, a movie’s presence on the list doesn’t mean the original isn’t scary. OK, that’s the housekeeping out of the way. On with the frights!

The Woman in Black (2012)

This is a new mounting of the Susan Hill haunted house novel of the same name following a TV movie adaptation from 1989. Notwithstanding the chronologically confounding choice of casting Daniel Radcliffe as a father just one year out from the end of the Harry Potter franchise, it goes without saying that applying a movie budget to the title allowed it to bring the eerie Eel Marsh House to life in all of the elegant, crumbling squalor that Hammer Films (and its many partners) could provide. 

This is a very jump scare heavy movie, so it won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but it pairs those jack-in-the-box moments with an atmosphere of such thick, oppressive, foggy gloom that the creeping damp of its central location gets into your bones even if you’re impervious to everything else going bump in the night.

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Evil Dead (2013)

The thing this remake gets most right about Sam Raimi’s original 1981 masterpiece and its follow-up Evil Dead II, is that a movie can provoke a reaction by pushing the boundaries to the extreme, whether it be a laugh or a scream. There can be something terrifying about the sheer visceral nature of the gore in Evil Dead all on its own, especially in the smaller, more relatable moments like a person’s skull being slammed into the solid porcelain of a toilet.

But on top of that, you have director Fede Alvarez’s go-for-broke aesthetic there to disorient you while the movie throws scene after pulse-pounding scene of unmitigated mayhem upon the screen. It’s bound to get under your skin at some point or another. And maybe even deeper.

The Invisible Man (2020)

The Invisible Man, an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel that so memorably became one of the cornerstones of the Universal horror unit in 1933, has big shoes to fill and does so with aplomb. It certainly helps that when Elisabeth Moss is scared of something onscreen, you can’t help but believe her. But this is also another entry where, whatever layer you peel back of the onion, there’s something different and disturbing underneath. In addition to some of the most exquisitely crafted scare gags of the decade, at its heart, the movie is about the very human and devastating violence that one person in a couple can inflict on the other. 

The Thing (1982)

The Thing is a new adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There?, which was previously adapted in 1951 as The Thing from Another World. Here’s the thing about The Thing. It ups the ante something fierce. In addition to throwing mind-bending, state-of-the-art special effects at the screen every opportunity it gets, John Carpenter uses every item in his toolbox to build and sustain a sense of creeping dread, from an all-timer cast of stars and character actors to Ennio Morricone’s brooding, lurking score.

The Ring (2002)

The Ring is an English-language remake of the 1998 Japanese-language movie Ringu, which itself was adapted from a novel by Koji Suzuki. So if there’s anything we’ve learned from this list, it should be that horror authors really deserve their flowers. Gore Verbinski directs the movie with aplomb, adding lavish visual elements that threaten to drown you in all their heady, vainglorious grandeur.

But he doesn’t shy away from the muscular, intense scares of the original movie, either. The Ring is a movie about someone trying desperately to save themselves while the clock ticks down to their death, and though it takes its time to get to the big, iconic showstopping moment, the movie doesn’t let up in its constant reminders that certain doom lies around every corner.

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Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the  Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can also find his full-length movie reviews on Alternate Ending and his personal blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.

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Editorials

The Evolution of Black Religion & Spirituality in Horror

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Jobs for Black actors were scarce in the early days of Hollywood, but that didn’t mean there weren’t Black roles in the films being made. The silver screen had a ceiling for Black actors but not for our culture. White audiences got a gag out of the Black caricatures that white actors portrayed whilst the dehumanizing regurgitation of our culture was used for plot development. Thus, one of the very first Black tropes was born: the magical negro. The early media depictions of Black spirituality were a tool to villainize the community off-screen. Some could say we’ve come a long way since then. I would say we still have a ways to go. The progress is still worth reflecting on, though.

Christianity is one of the largest faiths practiced in the Black American community. But before the missionaries spread the good Lord’s word, most enslaved people aligned with West African religious practices: using herbs, charms, and other metaphysical tools. Tituba, an enslaved Afro-Caribbean woman, was one of the first women accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials— except they identified it as ‘hoodoo’ or Vodou. It was later demonized as the seed that sprouted the uprising of enslaved Haitian people. With these stepping stones (and American imperialism in Haiti), white screenwriters had fuel for a genre on the rise: horror.

White Zombie (1932) is one of the earliest examples of Vodou in horror and, considerably, the first zombie movie. It isn’t the most harmful, though. Black Moon (1934) made history for a few reasons: being violently racist and starring the first Black American actress to sign a film contract. There’s too much irony in that.

The depiction of voodoo in Black Moon, like many other common Black tropes, reinforces black inferiority to their oppressors and makes a monster out of Black men. It wasn’t until 1941 that audiences saw an authentic portrayal of a different Black religion: Christianity. The Blood of Jesus (dir. Spencer Williams) stars an all-black cast and follows a woman on her journey between heaven and hell. It was a turning point for Black cinema as a whole.

Narratives such as this, Def By Temptation (1990), and, most recently, The Deliverance (2024) depict the liberation that Black Christians often find in their religion. They draw a direct connection between identity and virtue. Ganja & Hess (1973), however, takes a different approach. Director Bill Gunn doesn’t offer the Christian God as an entity of power capable of salvation. The ending is representative of the religious guilt that weighted Hess Green (played by Duane Jones). Neither vampirism nor religion can save him from the trauma he’s running from. 

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Almost any Black film that I’ve seen, Tyler Perry included, involved Christianity to some extent. 2023 was the first time I saw a Black religious practice given proper respect on screen. Stay with me here– The Exorcist: Believer (dir. David Gordon Green). Rarely have I seen a positive opinion on this extension of the franchise. Unfortunately, DGG left a bad taste in horror fans’ mouths with his Halloween films. I don’t think it’s so much of his style rather than the loyalty that fans have for these franchises. They have high expectations that very few people can meet. I admired the way he represented the beauty of Haitian culture, though. Particularly, hoodoo was an integral part of the story in a way I haven’t seen in mainstream horror. It wasn’t evil nor was it dramatic. The rootwork healer isn’t crushing bones or conducting blood sacrifices. Its authenticity was commendable compared to the genre’s predecessors that have demonized this very spiritual work for decades. 

The late, great Tony Todd added to the list of authentic Black spiritual horror films this past year with The Activated Man (dir. Nicholas Gyeney). Todd stars as a lightworker, named Jeffrey Bowman, who helps the main character defeat an evil, fedora-sporting spirit. He’s dripped out with a rose quartz bracelet and a mala necklace. Though the movie suffers in its respective areas, it’s a tick in the timeline. It’s one of the few times that a Black character has helped to defeat evil with a spiritual practice and faith that isn’t Christianity. Like The Exorcist: Believer, its depiction of Bowman isn’t an unstable practitioner leading with dramatics. It’s easy to get lost in the fine details– some movies won’t live up to our expectations. However, even the most disappointing watch can shift the trajectory of cinema. Where Black characters were once monolithic religious apostles, modern cinema is more willing to diversify Black characters beyond those tired tropes. 

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Editorials

The Art of Politicizing a Dumb Killer Clown Movie

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“Horror is not political” is a recycled firestorm on the internet. The smoke smells the same as it did before, the burn isn’t that bright, and the outcome is always the same: we’ve done this dance before, and we will do it again.

Damien Leone has joined the club of Joe Bob Briggs and dozens of others who have voiced that very hollow opinion that “Horror is not political”. Because I do, I think above all else, above the very clear negotiation with the part of his audience who got angry, the very clear fear of backlash for actor David Howard Thorton’s admonitions of the current Trump administration and his support for the LGBTQ+ community, is…

Hollowness.

“Horror is not political” is not an opinion.

It’s an absence of opinion. It’s a platitude; it’s meant to appease people. It’s a free dessert for the person raging in the restaurant that their soup was cold and that they won’t stand for it. It’s bargaining.

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Are the Terrifier films Political?

Mind you, this is not a call-out of those people angry at the concept of political horror, and I doubt you could call it a call-in post either; chances are you’re not reading this if you feel that so strongly. The goal is to do what I always do: talk about movies and what they mean, and this current firestorm is a very convenient way of doing that. It’s a well-timed way to toast my analytical marshmallow (promise, that’s the last fire metaphor).

So, what are the politics of the Terrifier films that Damien Leone wants to put away while the irate hotel guests are here? The Terrifier movies are political beasts by their nature, and their killer, the beloved jewel of the Terrifier franchise Art the Clown, is just as political as his actor’s commentary on current-day America. Because through and through, Art the Clown is a monster carrying with him the shadow of sexual violence, a harbinger of how truly despicable that kind of violence is, and shows how the world is not set up to help its victims.

And Leone has said as much to support that.

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After all, he believes he’s tackled sexual violence quite well in the films. In an interview with Rue Morgue, he goes on to elaborate why he believes just that:

“I think I’m just so comfortable [tackling sexual violence] because I was raised by all women that I don’t think about those things when I’m doing it. […] I’m not trying to offend, so there’s really nothing I’m not afraid to show. There’s things I won’t show; There’s lines that I try not to cross, believe it or not. No matter how grotesque and intense these scenes get, I always keep it in the back of my head like, ‘How far can we push it [..]?’

And I find it fascinating, because no matter how much negative space Leone leaves in terms of explicit sexual abuse on Art the Clown’s part, that negative space speaks just as loudly as if it was actually on screen.

The Politics of Clownery

On a meta-textual level, the extremity, the explosive and sensationalized nature of violence in the Terrifier films, the draw that most people go to see at the theatre, puts sexual violence on a pedestal of shame. It makes it untouchable. Horror is the genre that explores the violation of bodily autonomy, the violation of human life, most freely. In making a spectacle of the wildest and most nauseating kills most filmgoers will ever see, turning the killer into a Bugs Bunny-esque monster that’s always pushing the envelope alongside the filmmaker orchestrating him, and then setting boundaries on what Art won’t do, Leone has made a political statement about the truly reprehensible nature of sexual violence.

Art the Clown is bad, but he’s a surreal type of evil. He is jokes and gaffs at the expense of chainsawing couples and bashing people with spiked bats, not the mutants from The Hills Have Eyes, or the hallway scene from Irreversible. He is not the sobering, disgusting kind of evil most people run into in the real world. He is evil incarnate, sans sexual violence. Because if it’s too far for Art, it has to be a special kind of unthinkably cruel.  

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On a textual level, I think the enduring and surreal violence Sienna and Jonathan endure throughout the series is a perfect metaphor for continuing through life after an assault of that magnitude and cruelty. The aftershocks of violence that permeate your whole being, long after society expects you to have just “gotten over it”. To walk through life, afflicted by paranoia, self-doubt, and self-hatred. To navigate being around other people after having experienced that, and more importantly, living without justice for the crimes done to you, is unthinkable.

True Crime and Horror Collide

And the way that the Terrifier franchise mocks a true crime culture that trivializes that suffering, something a lot of horror fans have to decry as the space tries to worm into the horror genre at large, gives another layer of credence and reality to the misery of Arts victims. Victims who have to see their pain commodified and treated as a tool, something many victims of sexual assault themselves have been forced through thanks to true crime.

And despite each film seeming to end off worse than the last, Leone highlights the grace of a victim escaping that pain and trauma by giving Sienna the means to fight back. Supernaturally granted or otherwise, it is a perfect encapsulation of victims’ desires to overcome seemingly unending suffering, that will to live, to thrive, that burns bright in all victims. It’s a glimmer of hope in a mostly hopeless franchise, and it serves as a mirror to the light at the end of the tunnel many sexual assault victims strive to reach.

At the end of the day, artists don’t really get to buy in or buy out of how political their art is, the same way you don’t get to buy in or buy out of living in a political system. Much like Art’s random and unpredictable violence, it sort of just happens to you. It happens whether it’s the high concept art film horror, or what most people see as a bog-standard dumb killer clown movie. But to embrace that political nature is one of the most important things you can do as an artist.

To leave that meaning behind, to try and void art of the political messaging people might find in it, is to do a great disservice to the people who found comfort and joy in that message. Because once that vessel has been emptied of the love people can find in it, the hate people had isn’t going to stay inside of it for long.

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That hollowed art won’t be overflowing with a new audience of people. It will simply be empty.

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