Has the horror film market run out of ideas?  Headlines in the entertainment news at the moment are seeing filmmakers remaking Halloween.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  Halloween is one of the scariest films of its era and remains a cult film in many a horror fan’s eyes.  Why remake something that is already perfect just the way it is.  I can understand remaking King Kong and War of the Worlds as we now have much better special effects but Halloween doesn’t need special effects and will never need special effects to scare its viewers.  It scares them setting the mood and by letting your imagination run riot with the things that you don’t see.  I’m not sure that I really want to watch this remake as the only thing that the filmmakers could add to this film is gore and extra blood does not make a horror film any more scary.  Plus, Halloween, without Jamie Curtis as the scared babysitter fighting off Michael Myers, it just won’t be the same.

I have in my horror film collection both the original and remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and after watching both of these films all I can remember from them was the monotonous drone of the chainsaw as Leatherface hunted down his victims.  Neither of these two films scared me but the excessive amount of gore in the remake just made me laugh. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good bit of gore in a horror film to make me cringe but I want a horror film to make me scared to go to bed or open my curtains at night.  It seems like an eternity since I have had a good scare from a movie.  Had the Saw series not contained a good storyline to follow through the three films, I wouldn’t have enjoyed them as much as I did.  I definitely found Hostel extremely overrated as a horror film and have had more thrills from watching jelly set.

Come on film writers, stop remaking films unless they can be improved by special effects and come up with fresh ideas.  Knowing how the film ends makes it even less scary.  Take up the challenge, make a film to scare the pants off us!

Of course readers, it doesn’t stop there.  The filmmakers seem to remaking more old films than producing originals these days.  In my reckoning this sad affair is down to how we live our lives nowadays.  Children don’t read as much as they used to and they certainly don’t use their imaginations that much either.  They don’t go out and build dens, fight imaginary monsters or sit in the dark telling ghost stories at sleep-overs.  What they do nowadays is sit at their Playstations and Gameboys fighting alien monsters that have already been drawn up for them, most of which seem to have been developed with either the Terminator, Predator or Alien in mind.  All the weakness for these monsters have been laid out in the game’s guts and when the children can’t beat them, they go onto their computers and find a cheat to get them through that level.

Come on people we were given brains, challenge them and use your imagination, you never know where it may take you.....

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UPDATE:

Unbelievable, I don't know about you guys but I am getting fed up with all the movie remakes coming out at the moment.  They've really angered me now remaking Nightmare on Elm Street and Drop Dead Fred and the worst thing about this is bloody Russell Brand is going to play Fred.  Sorry to swear but the man is a complete idiot and can never come close to Rik Mayall (Original Fred for all those that never saw this film).

I can't understand how they feel they can improve on either of these films.  Both of them are classic and cult movies of their time.  I have decided to boycott film remakes, unless the original film was in black and white like King Kong where you can see a definite improvement.

I'm sorry to go on but I still think computer games are to blame for all these remakes – Kids play on these anti-social toys all day long, never read or use that special thing called ‘the imagination’ and so therefore, when they grow up, can only come up with remakes for movies as they haven’t the ability to dream up something new.  When I was a kid we used to build dens, hang around in groups of all ages where everyone was equal and had respect for grown ups.  We used to pretend we were adventurers like Indiana Jones and a simple tree house turned into gang head-quarters with imaginary protection against grown-ups.

It may be that the adults are to blame for all this by buying the child a Playstation just to keep it quiet.

Anyway, I shall not be going to see the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street or Drop Dead Fred.  I will not be spending my money to revisit a storyline that's already be told perfectly well.

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 Readers Views:

The remake and re-release thang I totally agree with, I mean why o why do they re-edit the film, does this mean that it was rubbish to begin with.

Lee from Nottinghamshire