THE STATE OF THE GENRE: Everything Old Is New Again
The next installment of my monthly column, "The State of the Genre," is now up at Fear Zone. This time I deal with the ubiquitous issue of horror movie remakes, and the fact that 2009 will be chock-a-block with them -- more so, perhaps, than any other year previous.
In Hollywood, the name of the game has long been Ride the Bandwagon -- keep making movies just like the ones that made money before until they stop making money -- and too often for us fans of the creepy and the kooky, that bandwagon's license plate spells "remake." Admittedly, the remake is hardly a recent concept. They've been around since the dawn of movies themselves, and in some rare cases they're even better than the originals (John Carpenter's remake of 1951's THE THING springs immediately to mind). But when we're talking about horror movies, it seems like more and more remakes are getting greenlighted each year. Taking a look at the months ahead, for instance, we see 2009 offers no fewer than eleven horror remakes. Just for reference, that's roughly twice as many as were released in 2008.
In Hollywood, the name of the game has long been Ride the Bandwagon -- keep making movies just like the ones that made money before until they stop making money -- and too often for us fans of the creepy and the kooky, that bandwagon's license plate spells "remake." Admittedly, the remake is hardly a recent concept. They've been around since the dawn of movies themselves, and in some rare cases they're even better than the originals (John Carpenter's remake of 1951's THE THING springs immediately to mind). But when we're talking about horror movies, it seems like more and more remakes are getting greenlighted each year. Taking a look at the months ahead, for instance, we see 2009 offers no fewer than eleven horror remakes. Just for reference, that's roughly twice as many as were released in 2008.
