Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don't They Do It Like They Used To?

Introduction

The main idea behind this book is quite simple: Why are the American blockbuster horror remakes of the 2000s less disturbing than the independent American horror movies of the 1970s? The question sounds incredibly subjective and nostalgic. The attempt to answer it could even be deemed pretentious, since it implies that not only do I believe my judgment of these films to be valid, and thus that I know what makes a good film, but also that I believe I know the answer to how you make a good film in the first place when I am not a filmmaker but an academic and a fan of the genre.

What exactly do I mean by disturbing? The word is used in the opening lines of Robin Wood’s seminal article, The American Nightmare (1979), when he states that the American horror films of the 1970s tended … to be more disturbed and more disturbing (63). It is frequently employed by audiences, critics, casts, and crews alike: Rick Worland has used it when describing the effects of terror as an emotion (10); Stephen Prince when talking about contemporary horror movies (3); critics Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, on the one hand, and actress Jessica Biel, on the other, when describing, respectively, I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) (Clover 114) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974); J. P. Telotte when discussing the scene where The Shape attacks Lynda in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) (142); the lead actors of Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978) when commenting on the scene where the living dead burst through the boards; Kim Paffenroth when considering the violence inflicted on the female characters by the male characters in Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985) (80); Gregory A. Waller when evoking the possibility of having to kill an undead creature who in life was [one’s] closest friend (Land 313).¹ Thus, the word has been used to describe the horror genre in general, specific films and scenes, imagined situations, emotions like horror, terror, and disgust, and questions of representation related to violence inflicted on children, women, and loved ones. In short, horror films can be disturbing in part or in whole because they produce unsettling emotions and/or tap into subversive politics.

The subtitle of this book echoes the title—They Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used To—of Steffen Hantke’s introduction to a recent and significant collection of essays entitled American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millenium (2010). My coming up with the subtitle before reading that collection would tend to lend weight to Hantke’s arguments about the rhetoric of crisis employed by critics, academics, and fans of the horror genre when discussing the current state of American horror cinema. The negative reception of the mindless series of remakes of William Castle movies, Asian horror, and domestic horror appears to be symptomatic of this rhetoric (ix–xi); another contributor to the volume, Andrew Patrick Nelson, has also noted that critics’ and fans’ responses to the remakes have been fairly negative overall (103). According to Hantke, for these critics, remakes demonstrate the triumph of economic over artistic considerations, signaling the creative bankruptcy of a national film industry or a cinematic genre operating within this film industry (x). In other words, Hollywood and/or the American horror film are dead and done for. Although Hantke does use the term cycle himself when discussing today’s phenomenon (x), he then attempts to downplay its novelty by pointing out that remakes and sequels are staple features of the genre (xvi), and that some like Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935) or The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) are even considered to be just as good as, or even better than, their predecessors (xv). Of course, Hantke is more intent on explaining why contemporary American horror films have not been well received by those most knowledgeable about the genre (xxiii), when horror remains an incredibly profitable genre (vii). For Hantke, assessing the quality of contemporary films in the light of the canon has, for critics, as much to do with the negotiation of legitimacy in the context of institutionalized professional structures as with the perpetual misalignment between film production and academic criticism on the other (xix), while fans aggressively protect a subcultural capital that is threatened by, and thus must be defended against, the continuing and perhaps even rising popularity of American horror film (xxi). Hantke then takes up David Church’s argument (2006) that American horror’s renaissance in the 1970s remains a largely romanticized period now (xi): [i]t is when measured against this criteria of its canonization—transgressiveness coupled with the mystique of rebellion and political subversiveness—that contemporary horror films, with their mainstream credentials, fall short (xviii).

All in all, Hantke’s argument makes perfect sense: the benefits fans, reviewers, and academics derive from the canon in terms of group identity could and probably do, to some extent, blind them to the qualities of contemporary films. My dislike of the remakes would, then, have more to do with the way they threaten my identity as a fan and an academic than with the actual films, and the answer to the question raised in the subtitle would quite simply be: They don’t necessarily (not do it like they used to, or do they?); I just like to think they do (because it safeguards my identity). In fact, Hantke’s argument only explains the second proposition, not the first, and it is safe to assume that the American horror films of the 2000s are different from those of the 1970s, if only because of differences in the historical context, modes of production, and aesthetic trends. Of course, Hantke by no means tries to answer the question I raise, but analyzes instead the evaluative statement made by critics and fans alike in order to promote analysis of contemporary American horror films (xiii–xiv). This leads Hantke to establish the legitimacy of contemporary films in respect to the canon, as well as his own position vis-à-vis prior critics who made horror studies a respectable practice in the first place, thus simultaneously acknowledging and denying his debt to the symbolic fathers. That said, Hantke does not particularly celebrate the remakes themselves—but rather the remake as a creative process—and the contributors to the volume do not seem keen on defending any of the domestic remakes except for The Hills Have Eyes (Alexandre Aja, 2006) and Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007).

It is undoubtedly true that American horror’s renaissance in the 1970s is a cultural construct like any other, established by an interpretive community. Stanley Fish developed the concept of an interpretive community in order to limit an entirely relativist perspective according to which any interpretation goes:

An interpretive community is not objective because as a bundle of interests, of particular purposes and goals, its perspective is interested rather than neutral; but by the very same reasoning, the meanings and texts produced by an interpretive community are not subjective because they do not proceed from an isolated individual but from a public and conventional point of view. (14)

For Hantke, then, the closely related and complicit communities of horror movie critics and fans have agreed that there were more key American horror movies in the 1970s than, say, in the 1950s or 1980s.² Yet, an interpretive community does allow for some heterogeneity and evolution, and a canon is never fixed once and for all; for instance, few critics picked up on Wood’s enthusiasm for Larry Cohen’s films or contempt for David Cronenberg’s. The contributors to American Horror Film further exemplify this heterogeneity as well as the capacity for change within an interpretive community. They, too, are attempting to justify their own tastes and defend new auteurs like Alexandre Aja or Rob Zombie (xii). And Pamela Craig and Martin Fradley turn out to be just as judgmental as Reynold Humphries and Kendall Phillips are in Hantke’s eyes (xiii), when they list films they like without explaining why (85). They, too, are attempting to establish their own methodologies and sets of criteria: Nelson’s comparative analysis of the Fantastic in both versions of Halloween takes up Church’s suggestion of resisting historical continuity in order to look at films on their own terms (237) by revisiting a structuralist approach often accused of ahistoricism (103); Craig and Fradley endorse a political analysis à la Robin Wood of the narratives of several contemporary teen horror movies (79). The various articles in the volume clearly suggest that Hantke and his collaborators do not necessarily endorse a relativist perspective.

Notwithstanding the critical consensus that the social consciousness of American films of the late 1960s to the mid-1970s goes well beyond the horror genre (Cook xv), what bothers me most about Hantke’s introduction is not so much the fact that he attacks the very criteria used by critics like Wood, Tony Williams, Sharrett, and Humphries, who participated in the elaboration of the canon, but the way he goes about debunking their work. His use of the word mystique associated with the criterion of political subversiveness seems to me inappropriate not to say a little dishonest. These critics had a clear set of criteria and an established methodology, and they set out to demonstrate that the films were, in effect, subversive or not, progressive or reactionary. Hantke could, no doubt, point out the flaws in their definitions or argumentations, or complain that political subversiveness is not a valid criterion or should not be the only one, but I do not see how one could call a mystique something that has clearly been demonstrated within the films, explained in terms of national and individual contexts, and accepted by the interpretive community, without concluding that the whole community is psychotic. To do so would require demonstrating that these films are by no means politically subversive, and not just stating, as Craig and Fradley do in their conclusion, that what is so striking about the hallowed horror films of the late 1960s and 1970s is less their articulation of any kind of coherent politically oppositional stance and more their (entirely symptomatic) outright nihilism (97). The analyses in the following chapters will reveal how coherent the political subtexts of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and Dawn of the Dead (1978) actually are.

What is at stake, then, is the problem of assessing the quality of a film, an issue Laurent Jullier takes up in Qu’est-ce qu’un bon film? (what makes a good movie?). Jullier notes that critics in the popular media often fail to clearly establish their criteria (12) and do not prove that a movie is good or bad so much as assert their judgment as if it were self-evident (15); in so doing, they impose a form of terror on their readers who include fans (207–9)—hence the link between the two communities noted by Hantke. In a way, this is what Hantke is accusing earlier critics of doing when he says that aesthetic standards are applied without much sense of their origin or appropriateness (xxiii), which no doubt explains the irreverent tone he adopts in his introduction. Jullier then identifies six criteria used by moviegoers and critics alike to evaluate the quality of a film: economic success, technical achievement, enlightenment (i.e., what the film teaches us about the world or about film), emotion, originality, and cohesion (15). He also points out the limitations involved for each criterion. For instance, economic success tells us very little about the quality of a given film since (1) the act of paying to see a film precedes the viewer’s evaluation of it (67), (2) the fifteen-to-twenty-five-year-old movie audience is not a representative sample of a country’s population (69), and (3) the range of movies can be very limited due to historical and/or geographical contingencies (70). Jullier also underlines the fact that both the criteria of originality and cohesion can only be established after repeated viewings (153). Assessing a film’s originality and coherence requires, respectively, external and internal analysis (172). The first entails knowledge of film history (155) and runs the risk of being disproven (172), while the second is by no means a foolproof criterion, as some masterpieces are incoherent and perfect coherence runs the risk of being too predictable and compromising originality (173–74). Jullier ultimately proposes "a position between relativism and objectivism" where several criteria are clearly established and one’s evaluation is based on an actual demonstration (49, my translation).

My aim in this book is different from Hantke’s, or rather, it is a lot closer to that of the volume he has edited as a whole, since the contributors’ answer to the problem seems to be that contemporary American horror movies should be analyzed on their own terms. Like Nelson’s article on slasher remakes, this book offers comparative analyses of the films of both periods, which will be examined from different angles, an approach Church suggests when discussing House of 1,000 Corpses (Rob Zombie, 2003) (Afterword 239). However, I also aim to interpret and ultimately assess the quality of these films according to the six common criteria identified by Jullier: economic success in the introduction; technique in Chapters 7 and 8; enlightenment, i.e., what the films tell us about the period or the genre, in Chapters 1 to 5; emotion in Chapters 6 and 7; originality in Chapters 5 to 7; and cohesion between content and form in all eight chapters. Thus, I use the word disturbing deliberately because the range it affords both on the referential and emotional levels encompasses most of these criteria: presumably, a film can disturb because of its subtext (enlightenment), because of its perlocutory effect (emotion), or because it thwarts viewer expectations (originality). Analysis of the films will lead to a much more nuanced position than my initial dislike of the remakes and the rhetoric of crisis I probably had, in fact, been adhering to. Indeed, although my primary responses to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), and Halloween (2007) were fairly similar, I now appreciate aspects of all four and think that Halloween (2007) is an intelligent and at times powerful film, for me Rob Zombie’s best; conversely, my dislike for Dawn of the Dead (2004) has only grown. In short, I acknowledge the personal nostalgia involved in the initial viewing of the remakes as well as the limits of my own subjectivity, but I trust other members of our interpretive community will acknowledge my endeavor to establish a clear set of criteria and to offer rigorous internal and external analyses.

If I do not necessarily see the remakes as symptomatic of the decline of contemporary American horror cinema, I do, however, see them as symptomatic of aesthetic, political, and economic trends in the Hollywood industry of today. Thus, I am opposing not so much two periods as two modes of production at given periods in time. Indeed, I believe that the aesthetics and politics of the films of both periods are intimately linked to their modes of production.

Critics generally agree that the Hollywood industry resorts to remakes and other pretested material at times when it feels threatened economically (Forrest and Koos 4; Verevis 6). In the 2000s, Hollywood has produced a great number of what Constantine Verevis calls pre-sold titles, whether comic book and TV adaptations or remakes of classic domestic or foreign films (22). The secondary cycle of cult domestic horror remakes, which represents the massive dark heart of the phenomenon (Wetmore 14), was inaugurated by the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) (Hantke x; Nelson 110). Producer Richard P. Rubinstein admits that "the timing [for Dawn of the Dead (2004)] was good"³ since the trailer was shown before The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), which did well at the box office. 2004 saw the release of Dawn of the Dead and The Toolbox Murders; 2005, The Amityville Horror and The Fog; 2006, When a Stranger Calls, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, Night of the Living Dead 3D, Black Christmas, and Sisters;⁴ 2007, The Hitcher and Halloween; 2008, Prom Night and It’s Alive;⁵ 2009, My Bloody Valentine 3D, Friday the 13th, Last House on the Left, Sorority Row, and The Stepfather; 2010, The Crazies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, I Spit on Your Grave,⁶ and Piranha 3-D; 2011, Fright Night and The Thing. Some of these remakes have also rebooted new franchises, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), The Hills Have Eyes II (2007), Halloween II (2009), and Piranha 3DD (2012).

Four of these films—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its prequel, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street—were produced by New Line Cinema, an American studio founded in 1967 which has since merged with Warner Bros. Four others—The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Halloween I and II—were produced by Dimension Films, which was founded in 1991 by the Weinstein brothers and later merged with Disney. Wes Craven coproduced with Mary Maddalena the remakes of The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and its sequel. Many of these remakes were produced by independent companies, sometimes created just to finance the movie, e.g., Alive Productions for It’s Alive and Family of the Year Productions for I Spit on Your Grave. The budgets of these films average from $10 to $20 million, with only Dawn of the Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Fright Night, and The Thing budgeted around $30 million. The third lowest budget,⁷ $1.5 million for I Spit on Your Grave, is roughly the equivalent of that of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), one of the highest budgets ($1.8 million) among the original films.⁸ In terms of production, this cycle of remakes has brought together films that are not of the same period and that, in their time, were not in the same league. Most of the original films were independently produced on small budgets ranging from $100,000 to $600,000. The Omen (1976), however, was a 20th Century Fox production with a major star, Gregory Peck, and a budget of $2.8 million, twice as much as Taxi Driver, which came out the same year. It’s Alive (1974) was produced by Warner Bros., Friday the 13th (1980) by Paramount for $550,000, and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) by New Line Cinema, which became successful as a production company thanks to the franchise. The cycle of remakes mainly includes films that belong to the canon and that have often been found worthy of academic attention, with directors like John Carpenter, Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, and George A. Romero having reached auteur status. It is also comprised of some lesser-known films that enjoy less regard, such as Black Christmas (1974), The Toolbox Murders (1978), Piranha (1978), Prom Night (1980), and My Bloody Valentine (1981).⁹ So the current phenomenon of domestic horror remakes goes against the a priori idea posited by Daniel Protopopoff that a remake is necessarily the remake of a successful film (Serceau 13). What the films ultimately have in common is not so much their status as cult films as the familiarity of their titles.

The Hollywood trend of remaking cult and B movies into blockbusters seems to have started in 1999 with the remake of House on Haunted Hill (William Castle, 1959; William Malone, 1999), followed by the series of Asian horror remakes (Hantke ix). This trend has been discussed extensively by Constantine Verevis in his excellent book Film Remakes (5). The horror remakes above can best be described, perhaps, by the oxymoronic term low big-budget movies, as a low-budget movie is generally considered to be under $1 million. Indeed, the production strategies deployed for these films represent a mix of those of contemporary blockbuster films and 1960s–1980s exploitation films. Like many of the films produced by American International Pictures and Roger Corman’s New World Cinema, for instance, they are genre films targeted primarily at the teenage and young adult market. In order to cut down on costs, producers give a chance to young and unknown directors and screenwriters. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and Dawn of the Dead (2004) were the first feature films of Marcus Nispel and Zack Snyder, Black Christmas (2006) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) the second of Glen Morgan and Samuel Bayer, Halloween (2007) the third of Rob Zombie, and The Hills Have Eyes (2006) the first American film of French director Alexandre Aja, who had previously made two films in France. Morgan and Nelson McCormick had some experience in TV series, Bayer and Nispel in music videos, while Snyder had just made a few commercials and music videos. Tobe Hooper, who directed The Toolbox Murders (2004), is an exception only to a certain extent, since he has been more or less forgotten since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). As we shall see in Chapter 8, these remakes also provide opportunities for TV actors like Jessica Biel and Scout Taylor-Compton, as well as well-known actors who have been little used in recent years, such as Malcolm McDowell and R. Lee Ermey, or actors more specifically associated with classic horror movies, like Ken Foree and Dee Wallace. The budgets and the marketing strategies, however, are of another order and suggest that independent companies have appropriated the strategies of major studios in order to make independent blockbuster films, a neat swinging of the pendulum, considering that, in the 1970s, the industry borrowed practises like saturation booking and heavily targeted advertising from exploitation films to promote blockbusters (Cook xvii).

In spite of the all-encompassing tendency of the cycle of remakes, I will limit my discussion to the independent films of the 1970s and their remakes, thus excluding Hollywood productions like The Omen (1976, 2006) and The Amityville Horror (1979, 2005), or 1980s films like My Bloody Valentine (1981, 2009), The Thing (1982, 2011), The House on Sorority Row (1983, 2009), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, 2010), Fright Night (1985, 2011), The Hitcher (1986, 2007), and The Stepfather (1987, 2009). I have also set aside Sisters (2006) and Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006) because of their modest budgets. Though I will mention other films and remakes in my conclusions when relevant, I have chosen to narrow the bulk of my analysis down to four pairs of films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, 2003), The Hills Have Eyes (1977, 2006), Halloween (1978, 2007), and Dawn of the Dead (1978, 2004). Texas (1974) represents a landmark horror movie, while Texas (2003) launched the cycle of 1970s–1980s horror remakes. Halloween (1978) is usually considered to have initiated the slasher cycle of the early 1980s (Conrich and Woods 99) and started a highly successful franchise. Although Night of the Living Dead (1968) often vies with Psycho (1960) and Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) for the title of first modern horror film (Waller, American 2; Schneider 144), director Edgar Wright (2005) sees Dawn (1978) as the granddaddy of the modern zombie movie. The original films are all part of the canon and still popular, and, with the exception of Hills (1977), have received much critical attention. Historically speaking, The Last House on the Left (1972) is, perhaps, a more important film with a far more disturbing intensity (Wood 114) than Hills (1977), but my decision to include the latter has to do with the fact that The Last House on the Left (2009) went direct to video in many countries and enjoyed less critical success than Hills (2006), which has been praised by Hantke, Craig, and Fradley, among others (Hantke x; Craig and Fradley 85). The four remakes were successful at the box office on their opening weekends, Texas (2003) tripling its budget, Halloween (2007) doubling it, and Dawn (2004) and Hills (2006) covering their costs. Since its release, Texas (2003) has grossed the most worldwide, with Dawn (2004) a close second; the two films were among the twenty-five top-grossing American horror movies between 1998 and 2007, according to Blair Davis and Kial Natale’s survey (46).

The production history of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) provides a paradigmatic example of the modes of production of the remakes of the 2000s. Two young producers, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, contacted Michael Bay, the successful director of blockbuster Pearl Harbor (2001), then found a young screenwriter, Scott Kosar, and finally a director, Marcus Nispel. The story behind Dawn of the Dead (2004) is pretty much the same, with producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman talking Richard P. Rubinstein, producer of Dawn of the Dead (1978), into coproducing the film, then hiring Zack Snyder to direct and James Gunn to write the screenplay. Wes Craven and Peter Locke explain that they chose Alexandre Aja to write and direct Hills (2006) because they found his premise concerning nuclear testing interesting¹⁰ and believed he was a "real filmmaker."¹¹ The case of Halloween (2007) is slightly different, as Dimension Films wanted to renew its franchise, which the Akkad family had owned since Halloween (1978). The producers clearly sought out Rob Zombie to write and direct in order to bank on the latter’s status as rock star and up-and-coming horror auteur, asking him to "make [Halloween (2007)] more Rob Zombie."¹²

The production history of the original movies tells a somewhat different story. The impetus also came from the producers—Peter Locke talked Craven into returning to the horror genre (Robb 35–36), Irwin Yablans asked Carpenter to work on a story about a killer stalking some babysitters,¹³ and Dario Argento contacted Romero about a sequel to Night of the Living Dead (1968)¹⁴—but the directors had little to go on. Simply put, Argento, Locke, and Yablans went to a specific director to get him to make an original movie, whereas producers having secured the rights for a remake or an adaptation already have a movie in the form of a pre-sold title regardless of who writes and directs it. Carpenter, Craven, Hooper, and Romero were, from the start, more closely involved in these projects. Carpenter wrote the music and cowrote the screenplay of Halloween (1978) and Fog (1980) with coproducer Debra Hill; Craven wrote the screenplays of Last House on the Left (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984); Hooper cowrote the screenplay of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) with coproducer Kim Henkel, and the music with Wayne Bell; Romero wrote the screenplay of all his living dead films, edited Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), and picked much of the library music for the latter. All four had final cut on their films. In other words, the main driving force behind these films was the tandem made up of a director and a producer. The small size of the cast and crew seems to have allowed for a lot of creative input from the actors, obviously, as well as from makeup artists like Tom Savini for Dawn (1978), production designers like Tommy Lee Wallace for Halloween (1978) and Robert A. Burns for Texas (1974) and Hills (1977), cinematographers like Daniel Pearl for Texas (1974), Erica Saarinen for Hills (1977), and Dean Cundey for Halloween (1978), and composers like Wayne Bell for Texas (1974) and Don Peake for Hills (1977). This input was especially important for Craven and Hooper since they had little filmmaking experience.

I am not arguing the case for an auteur approach to the American independent horror movies of the 1970s. Rather, I want to emphasize that, in spite of the incredible amount of data available in the production notes, interviews, and DVD extras, it is often easier to identify the source of an idea in the films of the 1970s than in the remakes of the 2000s, if only because they are older, and the casts and crews have been interviewed more frequently. Nor do I want to idealize the filmmakers of the 1970s. The latter were hoping to be successful, both artistically and economically, and were not just making art for art’s sake. However, it does seem to me that the predominant role of the producers in the remakes of the 2000s indicates that success is above all considered in economic terms. Symptomatic of this is their use of the word product to refer to the remakes. Both Michael Bay¹⁵ and Scott Kosar¹⁶ describe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) as a product, while Richard P. Rubinstein is more ambivalent about Dawn of the Dead (1978), explaining that he and Romero followed the auteur theory and functioned in a European fashion, yet using the word product all the same.¹⁷ Carpenter has related the use of this word to the businessmen who, according to him, took over Hollywood in the 1980s and [didn’t] love films (Conrich and Woods 172). In any case, the auteur theory can be employed as a marketing strategy (Verevis 9–10), as is clear from the example of Rob Zombie, or from the producers of Dawn’s (2004) attempt to market a first-time director as an auteur (Verevis 10). The line between art and product is by no means clear-cut, but the emphasis in most cases does seem to be more on one or the other.

Several critics have proposed typologies of the remake. Although Verevis says that Michael B. Druxman’s approach to classifying remakes is commercially grounded and Harvey Roy Greenberg’s is more authorial (8), their typologies are, nonetheless, fairly similar. Druxman distinguishes between "the direct remake, the disguised remake, and the non-remake (173–74); Greenberg between the acknowledged, close remake, the unacknowledged, disguised remake, and the acknowledged, transformed remake (126). Thomas Leitch has identified four stances of the remake vis-à-vis its source material (45), without making it absolutely clear whether these stances are pragmatic, formal, or both: the readaptation"¹⁸ and the update involve different attitudes towards the adaptation of a previously adapted literary work (45, 47); the homage or the true remake different attitudes towards an original film. The homage pays tribute to a classic (47) and renounc[es] any claim to be better (49), while the true remake combines a focus on a cinematic original with an accommodating stance which seeks to make the original relevant by updating it (49); the producers of the [true] remake wish not only to accommodate the original story to a new discourse and a new audience but to annihilate the model they are honoring—to eliminate any need or desire to see the film they seek to replace (50). At stake, then, is the position the remake adopts vis-à-vis the original films on the formal and paratextual levels.

The remakes we are dealing with here are all acknowledged: that is the whole point of their economic viability. However, they do, to various degrees, oscillate between close and transformed. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) keeps the basic narrative (five teenagers traveling in a van fall into the hands of a psychotic family), key motifs (the meat hook and the chainsaw), the geographical and temporal setting of Texas (1974), but adds a contemporary frame story which relates the disclosure of documents thirty years after the events, and invents new characters with different names; only Leatherface gets to keep his, the name obviously belonging to cultural memory just as much as the movie’s title.¹⁹ Dawn of the Dead (2004) maintains the basic premise—survivors hole up in a mall—but increases the cast of characters, changes all their names except one (Steve), starts before the outbreak, thus negating Dawn’s (1978) status as a sequel, and taps into the success of 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) by having the living dead run. The Hills Have Eyes (2006) stays truer to the basic storyline—the Carter family is attacked by cannibal hill-dwellers in the desert of the southwestern United States—but it updates the time setting, renames some of the hill-dwellers (who form a community rather than a family), and gives a new spin on their origin: the mutants are the victims of federal policies, whereas the 1977 Jupiter was cast out by his father, Fred. Halloween (2007) maintains the geographical setting (Haddonfield, Illinois), the main characters and their names (Michael Myers, Dr. Loomis, Sheriff Brackett, Laurie Strode, her friends, Annie and Lynda, and the children they babysit for, Lindsey and Tommy), the mask and the Halloween Theme, revisits scenes from Halloween (1978), but the time setting has been updated by about 15–20 years, many characters have been added (namely, Mrs. Myers and the Strodes), and the Myers family is represented as a working-class (and not middle-class) family.

Out of these four films, only Dawn (2004) would qualify as acknowledged, transformed remake or non-remake, while the others would be located somewhere between the transformed and close remake. A quick look at the other remakes of the 2000s suggests that the non-remake is fairly frequent among the lesser-known films. The only things The Toolbox Murders (2004), When a Stranger Calls (2006), Black Christmas (2006), Prom Night (2008) and Sorority Row (2009) borrow from the original films are the basic premises—a psychokiller who uses various tools, a psychokiller in a sorority house during Christmas, a psychokiller stalking a babysitter in a house, a psychokiller stalking the prom, a psychokiller stalking a sorority house during a graduation party—but they often change the names, make major plot changes, and provide entirely different answers to the original whodunnits.²⁰ The most plausible explanation is that producers and filmmakers feel more at ease modifying films that are neither well-known nor well-considered; Dawn (2004) would, in this respect, represent an exception.

Indeed, the original films do not all benefit from the same degree of respect; the homogeneous approach to the cult domestic horror films noted above only goes so far. This lends weight to the idea taken up by Verevis that what matters above all is the title, not the story or actual film: "in a contemporary context, remakes increasingly take only the pre-sold title of an original property as a point of departure to create a non-remake, with all new characters, settings and situations" (22). The producers of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) conducted research showing that 90 per cent of the film’s anticipated core audience (eighteen to twenty-four year old males) knew the title of Tobe Hooper’s original but had never seen it (Verevis 146). What the survey revealed, then, is that the narrative image that viewers are assumed to have some prior experience of can practically be reduced to the cult or classic film’s title. It is the title that the producers of these remakes set out to exploit because it carries the aura of the original (Verevis 134). Significantly, the producers of Texas (2003) preferred to retain the popular spelling of the title rather than the original title with chainsaw in two words.

The notion of a pre-sold title confirms, however, Verevis’s argument that contemporary remakes of American films do not set out to erase the original films because the latter, in a sense, guarantee the quality of the former:²¹ on the official film websites, filmmakers often enthuse about the ‘timeless’ attributes and ‘classic’ status of originals before going on to insist upon their own value-added transformations (17). In the DVD extras, producers, screenwriters, and directors repeatedly emphasize how much respect they have for the original movies and filmmakers. Marcus Nispel was scared Tobe Hooper would not like the remake when he met him at the premiere.²² Screenwriter James Gunn claims that Dawn of the Dead (1978) is his favorite zombie movie and was done perfectly, while Zack Snyder says that he was aware he was committing a sacrilegious act, but that at least Dawn (2004) does not impede on the territory of the original.²³ Rob Zombie explains that he called Carpenter so he’d be the first person to know, just out of respect, but they never had any creative discussion.²⁴ The case of Hills (2006) is somewhat different since Wes Craven and Peter Locke were, as producers, more directly involved and discussed specific plot points with Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur.²⁵ If one is to believe the producers’ and filmmakers’ claims, then, these four remakes are all meant as homages: the classic is already relevant as such and the remake can in no way improve on it. It is unlikely, however, that the producers have as much respect for the lesser-known films they adapt. Furthermore, it is doubtful that most of the producers would by any means be concerned that new audiences discover the original film, unless, like Rubinstein or Craven, they themselves have a commercial interest in it. Presumably, they would prefer it if the audience would watch the remake over and over again. On this view, their homages would, in effect, be closer to Leitch’s true remake:

In true remakes, the notion of empire is essentially economic rather than philosophical, since the producers of the remake wish not only to accommodate the original story to a new discourse and a new audience but to annihilate the model they are honoring—to eliminate any need or desire to see the film they seek to replace. (50)

On a pragmatic level, the distinction between homage and true remake depends on exactly how much trust you place in the producers’ and filmmakers’ good faith. In Chapter 5, I shall attempt to determine whether the stance of the remake is made any clearer on the formal level.

The distinction between homage and true remake says a lot about the legitimacy of the original film as well. Ironically, the supposed near-perfection of the original, which, as an exploitation film, did not, of course, enjoy canonic status when it was released, becomes the reason or the excuse not to be faithful to it and unabashedly cash in on the name of a symbolic father that has, to varying degrees, been usurped. Elsewhere, I have metaphorically described these filmmakers as bastards who want their heritage to be acknowledged (Bastard Remakes 137). The young producers of Dawn (2004) not only secured the rights from the producer of Dawn (1978), but convinced him to produce the remake, thus ensuring the recognition of the symbolic father; it is telling that they sought out the producer rather than the director. They also cast three of the main actors from Dawn (1978)—Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, and Tom Savini—in minor roles. The producers of Texas (2003) hired Daniel Pearl, in charge of cinematography on Texas (1974), and John Larroquette, who did the voice-over in both films. Subsequently, these filmmakers depict themselves as respectful bastards who want to do their own thing. In a sense, they invoke the name of the father only to reject the master plot. Whether their respect is heartfelt or not, it is necessary to guarantee the economic life of the remake. Both the acknowledgment (of the title) and the transformation (of content and form) are central to the marketing strategies behind these remakes. Hence, the paradoxical promise of the remake identified by Leitch, "that the remake is just like its model, and that it’s better (44), leads him to call on the trope of disavowal (38) in order to delineate the dance of invocation and denial" typical of the remake (52):

Disavowal—that is, the combination of acknowledgement and repudiation in a single ambivalent gesture—is apt in far more specific ways to the remake’s model of intertextuality, since remakes by definition establish their value by invoking earlier texts whose potency they simultaneously valorize and deny through a series of rhetorical maneuvers designed at once to reflect their intimacy with these earlier texts and to distance themselves from their flaws. (53)

The paradox is that the big-budget remake legitimizes the low-budget original in order to legitimize itself, so that in the end the original and remake mutually benefit from each other, as Verevis has convincingly shown. The StudioCanal Collector’s Edition of Texas (1974) came out in 2004, a few months before the DVD release of the Metropolitan Collector’s Edition of Texas (2003), the Wild Side Video edition of Hills (1974) in 2006, the year the remake came out, the Starz/Anchor Bay Ultimate Edition of Dawn (1978) came out the same year as Dawn (2004), providing a new opportunity to market the original, as well as several occasions for Rubinstein, Foree, Reiniger, and Savini to promote Dawn (2004).²⁶ Verevis has noted that the original film and the remake are often found side by side on the shelves of rental outlets (12). My experience in France is that you are nevertheless more likely to find the remake in your local store because it is recent, as opposed to, say, an online store where the films appear in the same list; stores in the U.S. still carry a wide selection. However dialogical the relationship between original and remake may be in terms of economics, it is, in all likelihood, not the true remake producers’ concern whether or not the original benefits from the remake; the original can only derive a secondary benefit whereas the remake derives a primary one.

Finally, it remains to be seen how many viewers will actually watch the original after watching the remake. According to Leitch,

the remake aims to please each of these audiences: the audience that has never heard of the original film it is based on, the audience that has heard of the film but not seen it, the audience that has seen it but does not remember it, the audience that has seen it but liked it little enough to hope for an improvement, and the audience that has seen it and enjoyed it. For some of these audiences the existence of the original film will not even be an issue; for others it will provide a benchmark against which to measure every scene in the remake. But even though these different audiences will have very different expectations of the remake, most remakes do their best to satisfy them all. (40–41)

I agree with Leitch’s typology, but I would adapt it to my corpus by introducing film genre as a major criterion. My impression is that the American horror remakes of the 2000s are targeting three types of audiences: (1) older fans of the genre who know the original and will go and see the remake out of a nagging curiosity; (2) younger fans of the genre who may or may not have seen the original, but could be interested in seeing Rob Zombie’s latest film; (3) wider audiences who will pick the remake because they are in the mood for a horror movie and the title may ring a bell. In other words, the viewers who are more likely to discover the original after seeing the remake would belong to the second category. My hunch is that, although the filmmakers address the first two categories in the interviews and DVD extras, the budgets of the remakes are a clear indication that the film is mainly aimed at the third category, which is necessary to make a profit on opening weekend and immediately reimburse production costs. In this respect, the rhetoric of address in the paratext of the remakes is a partial disavowal of the remake’s economic terms: the paratext is aimed at the mid- to long-term audience, that is fans of the horror genre, when the remake, like any film, is just as determined (if not more so) to bank on an immediate neophyte audience. My contention is that the