Editorials
William Bibbiani Revisits the 11 Best Horror Remakes of the 2010s
*Keep up with our ongoing end of the decade coverage here*
At some point, remakes developed a bad reputation, even though quite a few of the best movies ever made were just new versions of a story already made into a movie before. And quite a few of those classic remakes are horror films, like David Cronenberg’s The Fly, John Carpenter’s The Thing and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring.
So it’s no surprise that some of the best horror movies of the last decade were also remakes. A great horror story ties into something universal and timeless, but sometimes the trappings of the filmmaking could benefit from a little updating. The best horror remakes have to choose what’s important to keep, what’s important to change, and most importantly how to make the newest rendition a valuable addition to the tradition.
These are the films that, more than many others (some of them also very good!), succeeded in making a familiar story seem new, exciting, and powerful.
11. The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014)
Some movies defy conventional categorization, and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s intelligent and stylish The Town That Dreaded Sundown is one of them. The film takes place in a world where the original influential horror classic is a real film, but based on a true story, and in which a serial killer has started remaking the horrors of The Town That Dreaded Sundown in “real” life. Spiritually a remake, arguably a sequel, and despite the dense meta-narrative that the filmmaker is weaving, it’s not an exercise in irony. It’s one of the very best slashers of the decade.
10. Fright Night (2011)
Craig Gillespie’s remake of the self-aware horror classic Fright Night abandons most of the horror in-jokes, streamlining the story of a teenager who thinks his sexy new neighbor is a bloodsucking vampire into a suspenseful and threatening horror yarn. The late, great Anton Yelchin carries the movie beautifully, and David Tennant steals scenes as the Las Vegas magician who’s forced to fight the forces of darkness in real life; but the film belongs to Colin Farrell. The actor plays up his sensual appeal, only barely hiding a streak of macho intimidation, and easily earns a spot as one of the scariest modern vampires.
9. Piranha 3D (2010)
Joe Dante’s original Piranha was an inventive, low-budget Jaws riff with a great sense of humor, and far superior to the majority of the Corman films of the era. But Alexandre Aja wasn’t interested in making a quirky flick for eccentric horror fans. His remake is an ultraviolent, ultrasleazy, completely unapologetic splatstick extravaganza, in which a species of prehistoric man-eating fish are unleashed on spring break and eviscerate the flesh of every human foolish enough to get into the water. Piranha 3D isn’t trying to make its 3D gimmick immersive, it’s using the technique to call attention to just how crazy a movie can get, highlighted by a scene involving a severed sex organ that’s so completely tasteless you almost have no choice but to respect it.
8. The Crazies (2010)
George Romero was one of the greatest and most influential horror filmmakers in history, but it’s fair to say that his low-budget 1973 virus thriller The Crazies wasn’t his very best work. So there was a lot of room to expand on the basic premise of an epidemic that drives people murderously insane, and Breck Eisner’s remake does just that. The Crazies features a great cast of actors – Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell and Danielle Panabaker among them – whose characters find themselves in one impossibly deadly confrontation after another with former friends who can’t help but try to commit heinous acts of murder. Wildly entertaining and effective.
7. We Are What We Are (2013)
Jim Mickle’s impressive remake of Jorge Michel Grau’s horrifying drama transports the action to a small American town, where a father has to depend on his conflicted daughters to continue their obscene traditions when their matriarch dies unexpectedly. Bill Sage is terrifying in We Are What We Are before we even understand the nature of the frightening family, and Amber Childers and Julia Garner give nuanced and sympathetic performances as young women suddenly dealing with unthinkable responsibilities. We Are What We Are is a fantastic horror movie, stylish and freaky, in large part because at its core it’s potent allegory for familial abuse and cult-like mania.
6. Let Me In (2010)
Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is, rightly, now considered one of the best vampire movies ever made. But the remake, directed by Matt Reeves, is arguably just as good. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays a troubled adolescent who befriends a mysterious girl, played by Chloe Grace Moretz, with frightening secrets. The icy isolation of the original gives way to a more warm-blooded, violent and emotional remake, with excitingly filmed set pieces now punctuating this effectively creepy story about isolation and manipulation. It’s the same great story told with just a slightly different sense of taste, not quite pulpy but significantly more visceral.
5. Shin Godzilla (2016)
Ishirô Honda’s classic and groundbreaking Gojira wasn’t just a giant monster movie, it was a potent metaphor for a world struggling to cope with and combat destruction on a hitherto unimaginable scale. In 1954 that meant having difficult conversations that related directly to nuclear weapons, and in Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s riveting, loose remake Shin Godzilla it means navigating impenetrable bureaucracies to combat more modern global, existential threats. In the end, only the young and motivated can cut through the red tape and get anything accomplished. The new version of the title monster, a rapidly evolving and bizarre leviathan, is arguably the scariest version, and the renewed emphasis on Japan’s plausible reaction to such a gigantic disaster keeps Shin Godzilla refreshingly, effectively grounded.
4. Maniac (2012)
The original Maniac, directed by William Lustig and starring/written by Joe Spinell, is one of the most captivatingly brutal and ugly depictions of a serial killer ever filmed. Unromantic, unappealing, and emotionally raw. But the remake takes a very different approach, stylishly filming a killing spree from the first-person perspective of the murderer, putting the audience in the position of the predator as we stalk victims throughout Downtown Los Angeles. It’s an impressive gimmick, and director Frank Khalfoun and the film’s star Elijah Wood (who appears whenever the camera looks in a mirror) wisely avoid making their shocking killer too sympathetic. The remake of Maniac is a terrifying and absolutely distinctive trip behind the eyes of a monster.
3. Suspiria (2018)
How do you remake a film like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, in which the film’s defining characteristic is its absolute inscrutability? If you’re Luca Guadagnino, you fill the film with so much subtext it practically bursts open by the end. The story of a haunted ballet school in Germany has been reframed as a world in microcosm, in which a supernaturally matriarchal society has become so insular that it’s lost its way, and is susceptible to unexpected influences, not unlike the Cold War environment that serves as the movie’s backdrop. Undeniably of a piece with Argento’s film, but undeniably new and singular, the new Suspiria demands repeat viewings to unlock its intellectual and emotional depths.
2. It: Chapter One (2017)
There’s some debate over whether Andy Muschietti’s It is a new film or a remake of the classic 1990 tv mini-series directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. (The distinction is even the subject of a legal battle.) But at some point, we simply have to acknowledge that this story was already told, in two parts no less, and then it was told again, in two parts once more, so it’s at least spiritually in the “remake” category. And it’s certainly one of the best remakes of the decade, in any genre. The tale of a group of adolescent “Losers” who confront the demonic personification of their fears takes an epic, iconic quality in Muschietti’s interpretation, like a modern fable with a demon clown in place of a big bad wolf. The first half is a modern horror classic that stands completely on its own, and it’s a good thing too, because just like the original mini-series the second half of the new It falters.
1. Evil Dead (2013)
Some of the best remakes of the decade recaptured the magic of the original. Others forged a brand new path. Fede Alvarez’s remake of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead does both, recreating the dizzying camerawork and ultraviolence of the groundbreaking 1981 film, and seemingly following the original template until the film begins unexpectedly developing its own identity. Framing the horrors of being trapped in a room with violence and emotional manipulation with helping a loved one detox from serious addiction, and giving the story more real world resonance than ever before, Alvarez’s film explodes into gore and madness, and culminates in a new and extremely satisfying finale. Evil Dead is everything the original was and more. What more could you possibly want from a remake?
HONORABLE MENTIONS: All Cheerleaders Die, Black Christmas, Child’s Play, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Frankenweenie.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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