If you’ve read enough Kurt Vonnegut, you’ve probably heard of Kilgore Trout. He’s a (fictional) science fiction author with great skill at coming up with vivid and exciting premises, but almost no ability to actually turn those premises into novels that are worth reading. Most horror remakes have the opposite problem. They take material that is already well-known and well-respected and usually put it in the hands of someone with either equal or lesser skill than the original filmmakers, which is a similarly pointless exercise.
But what about those Kilgore Trout movies? The ones with great premises that suffered either through poor execution or a limited budget? Why not remake those movies, and thus bring audiences more exciting versions of premises that were somewhat wasted? We’d certainly have a more interesting slate of remakes to contend with than most of the IP-driven sludge that dominated the mid to late 2000s, even with the number of entries that turned out to be pretty solid. That’s what drove me to compile this list of movies that really do deserve the handsome, well-mounted remakes that so many minted classics have received in the last twenty years and change.
6 Horror Remakes We Need to See Made
A note: This is a chronological list, in no way meant to indicate the movies’ relative level of quality. Also, each and every one of these movies has its fans (including me, in some cases), so please know that this isn’t intended as an outright dismissal of the original works as a whole.
I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
It’s a hell of a premise. A woman gets married to a guy played by Tom Tryon. Considering that he’s one of the most handsome men in the world, this seems like a great decision at the time, until she slowly begins to realize that he’s a monster from outer space. The movie was very ahead of its time, presenting a story about a woman who is trapped in a patriarchal structure and recognizes a problem but isn’t able to find anyone willing to believe that it exists. With the right budget and the right (non cis male) director and writer, this could really sing. Hell, Sofia Coppola basically already remade this movie as Priscilla. And Jacob Elordi might just be the modern-day answer to Tom Tryon, so… Let’s make it happen, folks.
Satánico Pandemonium (1975)
I think many would argue, correctly, that this Mexican nunsploitation outing is not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. But I think a remake could turn its already overwhelming and propulsive style into something even more lurid and captivating with the right filmmaker on board. Imagine. Luca Guadagnino going ham on the third act like he did with the ending of his Suspiria remake. Or Panos Cosmatos giving it the full Mandy treatment. Or hell, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez teaming up on this beauty, which they have already referenced by bestowing its title upon Salma Hayek as the name of her character in From Dusk Till Dawn.
Sorority House Massacre (1986)
Sorority House Massacre is a perfectly pleasant slasher movie helmed by Carol Frank, a rare 1980s female horror director, but it’s just so cheap. Considering the fact that it is loosely interrelated with the Slumber Party Massacre franchise, which just got a surprisingly solid remake in 2021, I think it’s time for Sorority House to get its due as well. If the vivid nightmare sequences are fleshed out and the female gaze is turned up to 11, we could have a hell of a good time on our hands.
Mimic (1997)
This is a remake where you wouldn’t even have to change directors. The original Guillermo del Toro movie, about a species of bug that has evolved to camouflage itself among human beings, was chewed to pieces by the Dimension Films woodchipper. But imagine the man who made The Devil’s Backbone and Blade II and Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water and Pinocchio coming back to remake his first English-language project, applying all the lessons he learned in the meantime. Glorious.
When a Stranger Calls (2006)
“But Brennan,” you’re saying, “this movie is already a remake of that 1979 movie with Carol Kane!” And you would be quite right. But here’s the thing. The 2006 remake makes exactly one good choice (expanding the terrifying “Have you checked the children?” opening sequence into a full feature instead of doing a pointless time jump and watching a cop wander around the city for an hour), and essentially no others. There is a very good full feature buried somewhere in the When a Stranger Calls premise, but nobody has quite been able to find it yet.
Winchester (2018)
Making a movie based on the most historical and aesthetically interesting building in California and giving it a boilerplate Conjuring plot with absolutely no sense of place is a criminal act. (Did I mention it was shot in Australia?) Also, I hardly think a demon twink was the worst of the real Sarah Winchester’s worries, to be completely honest. Let’s try this again. Once more, with feeling!