Editorials
Stay Home, Watch Horror: 5 Remakes to Stream This Week
Horror remakes often get a bad rap. For fans, nothing draws ire as fast as a remake announcement of a highly regarded original. In other words, there’s immense pressure for any filmmaker attempting to approach a beloved property with their own vision.
But while there have been plenty of maligned horror remakes over the years, there’s also been a significant number of fantastic movies that reworked genre favorites. Some of which even managed to eclipse the original, like 1986’s The Fly or 1982’s The Thing. Whether bad or good, a new take on a film doesn’t erase the pre-existing movie and often offers the discovery of the original for modern audiences.
These five horror movies showcase what successful remakes do well; they honor the source material while developing their own identity to set themselves apart.
All of these, as always, are available to stream right now.
Blood Diner – Hulu
Might as well kick this week’s picks off with a movie that bends the rules of what defines a remake. Technically, Blood Diner was initially intended to act as a sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast before becoming a standalone film. That change resulted in a zany ’80s horror-comedy that remakes the splatter classic; at its core, the premise is essentially the same. Directed by Jackie Kong, Blood Diner follows two brothers tasked by their dead serial killer uncle to continue his attempts to resurrect the goddess Sheetar. They do this by using their diner to host ritualistic feasts and lure women from which they harvest body parts. A pair of detectives struggle to keep up with the carnage. The original played it straight, while Kong dials up the ’80s excess for maximum gonzo laughs.
The Crazies – Pluto TV, Prime Video, Tubi
This update to George A. Romero’s 1973 goes heavy on the suspense and dread. Set in small-town Iowa, residents start turning inexplicably violent. One crashes a baseball game with a shotgun, another sets his house on fire with his family locked inside, and former friends turn on each other with the intent to kill. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), his deputy Russell (Joe Anderson), David’s wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), and her assistant, Becca (Danielle Panabaker), band together to survive against the onslaught of crazed citizens and the military that’s arrived to snuff out the outbreak. It’s a harrowing race to escape for the foursome, dodging armed forces and infected alike. That it’s an outbreak movie means that it might hit a little too close to home these days. Still, it’s a solid, intense remake that too often gets overlooked.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Prime Video
This update of the 1956 sci-fi film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is regarded as one of the best remakes. For good reason. Strange pods land on Earth, grow, and invade San Francisco. They take over humans while they’re asleep, creating emotionless duplicates to take over the world. It’s a story that should feel quite familiar at this point, considering it’s been remade so many times, but it’s hard to shake the imagery from this version. The botched duplicate that spliced a man’s face over a dog’s body, the horrific scream of the mindless copycats to alert the alien hive, and the eerie reveal of the pod’s body takeover all contribute to an unnerving invasion flick. The cast is stacked here, too; Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Art Hindle, Leonard Nimoy, and Jeff Goldblum star.
Nosferatu the Vampyre – Prime Video, Tubi
Silent film Nosferatu famously bypassed a lack of permission to adapt Bram Stoker’s Dracula by changing specific vital details. Dracula became Count Orlock and was given a monstrous makeover. Considering it’s the best film to hail from Germany, it’s fitting that Werner Herzog wrote and directed a remake. Only this time, the copyright to Dracula had entered the public domain. While visually paying homage to F.W. Murnau’s film, Herzog reverted his characters to Stoker’s original. Klaus Kinski makes a compelling monster in Count Dracula, and Isabelle Adjani’s Lucy Harker is equally fantastic. A lush visual spectacle that hones in on Dracula’s loneliness and isolation, with a moving score, too. For those that like a heaping of moody pathos in their horror, this is a must.
We Are What We Are – Pluto TV, Prime Video, Shudder, Tubi, Vudu
From the director of Stake Land, Jim Mickle, and co-written with its star Nick Damici, this remake tackles the 2010 Mexican film. It follows the reclusive Parker family, a religious bunch that follows ancient customs, including ritual fasting and feasting. Their mother’s unexpected death forces Iris (Ambyr Childers) and Rose (Julia Garner) to assume responsibilities no normal has to endure. A slow build of unsettling horrors, this remake gives a unique approach to cannibalism. It also stars Bill Sage, Wyatt Russell, Kelly McGillis, and Michael Parks. Parks’ performance as a man suspicious of the family after his daughter’s disappearance would be worth the watch alone, but the grisly climax more than pays off the meditative depiction of religious fervor.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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