Halloween, Black Christmas, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th are just a few of the slasher movie remakes from the 21st Century. But they beg the question - what have these horror movie remakes to offer an audience that has pretty much seen it all?
What’s the Bogeyman in Slasher Movie Remakes?
Though films such as Hitchcock’s Psycho with its infamous shower scene contained elements of the slasher genre, it wasn’t until Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), in which a killer runs amok inside a sorority house and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) featuring a family of cannibalistic sadists, that the mainstream slasher movie was born.
The formula was simple: take a group of pubescent women and men, in an isolated location. Introduce an escaped mental patient with psychopathic tendencies or bullied youth with a score to settle and a full compliment of tools (hammers, saws, knives...) and you have the recipe for a rip-roaring cinematic success.
The Boogeyman is Here
Halloween (1978), triggered a huge interest in slasher cinema, opening the doors for a flood of imitators. Set in the suburbs of Illonois, it focuses on an escaped psychopath who murders his sister as a child and then returns to his home town in order to continue the killing spree. A simplistic story, Halloween was shot largely from the killers perspective, another facet of the slasher movie’s identity. Surprisingly for the subject matter, Halloween was relatively gore free, the murder scenes filmed in shadow and shot for effect rather than voyeurism. Friday the 13th (1980), about a mother’s vengeance on camp counsellors after her son Jason Vorhees drowns while in their care, however upped the ante, with its graphic violence and set a benchmark that continues to be surpassed.
Kill them Mummy…Kill Them!
Today, the slasher film is ultra-violent and ultra-cynical. Halloween, re-shot by cult director Rob Zombie is a dark and depressing tale of an abused child who ends up in a mental institution before being prayed on further by corrupt wardens. Shot in a documentary style, Zombie’s Halloween personifies the slasher movie as it stands today – a real-life nightmare – not a bogeyman and things that go bump in the night.
While Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th have taken the noisy, intense approach to terror, the slasher re-make has also managed to mark its territory with the teenage audience. Re-makes of Prom Night, He Knows You’re Alone and My Bloody Valentine, with their glossed-up production values and considerably less on-screen violence have re-enlivened the teen date movie – a genre that relies on shocks more than graphic violence.
He’s Behind You…
The idea that a horror movie can be just a bit of fun is exactly what made the mainstream slasher a success. The death scenes were set-up to shock and satisfy, not sicken and disturb. Aimed directly at the teen market, Happy Birthday To Me and the original Prom Night, among many others, remain much loved rights of passage movies. The new generation of horror re-makes are for those of us who think we have seen it all: and when we have, where do we go from there?
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