Horror Remakes Make Money without Quality
Remakes of The Scary Movie Genre Get Away with Murder
With classic titles being recreated in the past decade such as House on Haunted Hill, The Grudge, The Hills Have Eyes, Halloween, Prom Night and its newest addition Friday the 13th Hollywood producers manage to cause a stir in teenagers and die-hard-horror-movie fans to get them to the theatre but fail to impress them.
Why are horror classics being remade?
Money - The stats say it all. A couple of weeks topping the box office and we’re in business. People love a good scare and they’ll pay full-admission price to get it – or get it mildly.
At least that’s the case with New Line Cinema’s Friday the 13th remake, which, according to IMDB, set the highest record for a single-day take for an R-rated horror firm that day it opened – ironically, on Friday, Feb. 13th. It topped the box office making over $43 million in that first weekend – then plummeted.
Natalie Dunkin, Miami-resident and long-time fan of the 1980 original slasher film, was less than overwhelmed about the movie itself.
“It wasn’t scary - like most horror movies today aren’t,” she said. “They just make them real gory and you will occasionally jump out of your seat, but it wasn’t like when I saw the original which kept me up for days.”
Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger… these legendary figures of the horror genre are being immortalized on a regular basis. It seems that nothing can kill them. According to Screenrant.com, a box-office hit will usually be the go-sign for terrible horror sequels.
The curse of horror flicks
Frankly, horror movies – with the exception of one or two such as 1992’s Silence of the Lambs – are not really Oscar material, yet they are appreciated to a strong degree by their fans.
Now, even the most adamant horror fans are starting to lose faith in the producers of these flicks because “it’s all been done before”.
“I don’t think horror movies are as impactful anymore; people don’t get scared as easily,” says Jonathan Leventhal, a Vancouver film student says. “Times have changed – people growing up with TV, video games, the media… they’ve seen more stuff than in 1975.”
It is fans like Dunkin and Leventhal who are disappointed with these new-age do-over’s of horror classics because they tend to emphasize a more visual - as opposed to a psychological scare.
“It’s all about blood and guts and body parts everywhere,” says Florida native Carlos Ravelo, another horror fan, “Whatever happened to the good old ‘whoa, that movie was something else’ – it’s just not there anymore.”
Ravelo also says that he usually goes to the movie with an open mind and generally walks out with the same feeling of disappointment.
So what is it that keeps teenagers from all walks of life motivated to fill seats at the movie theaters? These might be some of the reasons
- People like getting scared.
- The promise of something new and fresh.
- It's just another reason to go to the movies when Oscar-bound movies are not out.
The next chapter
Granted, Hollywood knows what makes kids tick and the real reason behind it all. As reported by Screen Rant, writers are already brainstorming ideas for the next Friday the 13th and Halloween series. For the sake of all horror fans out there, let’s hope that they’ve learned from their past mistakes and come up with something different when reviving these timeless classics.
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