Editorials
Found in Translation – Making a Case for Remakes of Foreign Horror Films
Growing up as an immigrant in a non-English-speaking household, subtitled movies were pretty standard for me. In fact, I still have the bad habit of turning on subtitles whenever they’re available, regardless of language. As a young man, it never occurred to me that this wasn’t the norm, and that’s why I always thought it was strange that American studios would remake foreign films in English instead of simply distributing them normally.
Obviously, there are a myriad of cultural and economic reasons explaining why this isn’t the case, but it’s also worth noting that not all remakes are created equal. I may have spent a large chunk of my life lamenting every time an American remake of a foreign horror flick was announced, but even I have to admit that some filmmakers are actually capable of successfully translating the elements that made scary stories effective in their countries of origin and making them more palatable for new audiences.
In fact, my view on the matter has shifted quite a bit over the years. While I’ll always defend the original execution of an idea as its definitive version (that’s why I think A New Hope is superior to The Empire Strikes Back despite being a decidedly less polished experience), I’d like to take this opportunity to make a case for how American remakes of foreign horror can in fact result in some pretty entertaining films.
During the early days of cinema, localization was as simple as translating silent film cards and splicing them into existing footage. From Haxan to Nosferatu, this meant that early cinemagoers actually had the opportunity to enjoy stories from around the world with little to no changes to the source material and presentation. That all changed with the advent of sound, which made it harder to sell non-English films abroad and kickstarted the creation of new ways of conveying dialogue to viewers.
“Let me tell you about the time I visited Japan and got attacked by a radioactive dinosaur.”
While most countries contented themselves with subtitles and even dubbing (which would become a staple of cheap late-night entertainment in the US), the hegemony of Hollywood storytelling meant that language wasn’t the only obstacle for American audiences, so it was often worth investing in completely new versions of movies in order to assure wider acceptance. Initially, this meant re-editing and sometimes shooting completely new footage, like in the case of Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, where Raymond Burr was inserted into the remixed movie as an American reporter covering the atomic dinosaur’s rampage.
Later on, we’d start to see full-on remakes of popular international movies, with studios alternating between celebrating their “new and improved” versions of these stories and refusing to acknowledge that these productions were in fact based on pre-existing films. When it comes to horror, remakes became a tentative issue during the J-horror boom of the early 2000s. Partially motivated by Scream’s critique of tropey genre flicks, Hollywood began looking for inspiration elsewhere, funding a slew of Americanized retellings of foreign horror stories.
While a handful of these remakes were incredibly successful, like Gore Verbinski’s iconic The Ring, some producers confused Americanization with genericization, creating bland and utterly soulless renditions of what had once been great ideas. Films like 2006’s Pulse, which removed the complexity and apocalyptic dread of Kurosawa’s original and replaced it with subpar scares, established a dangerous precedent by refusing to acknowledge the context which spawned these stories in the first place.
Even when these movies weren’t bad, it’s hard to justify relocating a story if you’re not going to address how that relocation would change characters and situations. I mean, 2008’s Quarantine is technically just as good as REC, recreating most of the film shot-for-shot with a talented cast and crew in a rare example of a Found Footage localization. That being said, the remake’s refusal to commit to its new context makes it feel just as redundant as Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (itself a veiled critique of unnecessary remakes).
An interesting middle ground can be found in 2007’s Funny Games, as the English language remake is still helmed by Michael Haneke, who shielded it from outside interference. However, the updated movie was only produced because the director wanted his original vision to reach a larger audience and knew that a remake was the only way to gain a foothold in American cinemas, making this film a mere alternate version of something that already exists rather than a unique piece of artwork in and of itself.
Same scares, different story.
Fortunately, the world of horror remakes isn’t solely comprised of soulless cash-grabs. There are more than a few interesting films derived from foreign scares, though they often take an unorthodox approach when retelling their respective stories. While it wasn’t as well received as The Ring, I’d argue that a great example of this is 2004’s The Grudge, as Sony brought in Takashi Shimizu to direct the American re-imagining and allowed him to tie the story into his existing mythology through an alternate timeline that still took place in Japan. Shimizu has even gone on record saying that he saw this as an opportunity to address the flaws of the original (kind of like how Sam Raimi viewed the Evil Dead sequels), which is why he continued expanding the franchise with the 2006 sequel.
There are other interesting cases as well, such as Matt Reeves’ Let Me In which embraced the story’s relocation by placing it in Reagan-era America, but I’m usually partial to remakes that work as companion pieces to the original. For example, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria has no intention of replacing Argento’s film, sharing the same basic premise as the 1977 original but almost nothing else as it transforms a technicolor Giallo into a somber reflection on collective trauma.
When remakes of foreign films don’t work, it’s often because the industrial pipeline nature of Hollywood productions result in the original idea being stripped of its unique qualities – but when they do, it’s usually because the right filmmaker knew how to identify the heart of the narrative and when to embrace cultural differences. Much in the same way that foreign remakes of American properties are fascinating even when they’re not necessarily good (like Sssshhh…, the Bollywood version of Scream), the question that producers should be asking isn’t “how do we sell this idea again?”, but rather “what if this story happened in another time/place?”.
While I’d still prefer a world where remakes were obsolete and horror hounds didn’t mind subtitles when looking for new scares, I think we’ve come a long way from the haphazard Americanizations of yesteryear. That’s why I don’t mind admitting that I’m rather excited for upcoming remakes like The Last Train to New York (based on Train to Busan), so long as studios continue to produce original new ideas alongside them.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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