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 best horror remakes!
Our Favorite Horror Remakes
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.
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.