By
Phil Owen
on January 5, 2024 at 3:51PM PST
Horror is a particularly interesting genre of film, rarely getting much respect from the mainstream despite the obvious passion and skill of the filmmakers involved. That’s the history of Hollywood horror remakes in a nutshell, really–a big studio wants to exploit an IP from its vault purely for monetary reasons without much concern for quality, but sometimes they do care–or at least they hire the right people and accidentally end up with a great end result..
When things come together just right and a horror remake goes well, it’s a beautiful thing. Fortunately for us, it’s happened more often than one might reasonably expect. Let’s take a look at the best horror remakes we’ve gotten so far.
16. The Crazies (2010)
This remake of George Romero’s not-quite-zombie film doesn’t really elevate the source material or anything like that. But this movie about a bunch of people becoming violent murderers due to a mysterious virus takes the premise with the right level of seriousness, and Timothy Olyphant gives one of his better performances here.
15. Quarantine (2008)
So many found-footage horror movies just don’t hold up these days–this is the only one on this list–but both Quarantine and the Spanish film it’s based on, Rec, are two exceptions. Quarantine follows a TV reporter who is trapped in an apartment building that’s under quarantine by the CDC because of a mysterious virus, but it doesn’t take long before she discovers the upsetting truth: That virus is spreading through the building and it is turning people into violent monsters. This is a rare case where the original and remake are both of a similar–and good–quality.
14. My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009)
There probably won’t be all that many more 3D viewings of this Valentine’s Day-themed slasher movie starring Jensen Ackles and Jaime King, and that’s unfortunate because that extra dimension was part of the fun when this one was originally released in theaters in 2009–10 months before Avatar would kick off the short-lived 3D era in earnest. My Bloody Valentine certainly loses something without the 3D, but it’s still a very solid slasher in its own right, and the would-be 3D gimmicks are actually pretty fun even in two dimensions.
13. House of Wax (2006)
Before director Jaume Collet-Sera was drafted into making ugly, big-budget, CGI-heavy blockbusters like Black Adam and Jungle Cruise, he was best known for his wonderfully trashy thrillers with Liam Neeson (Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night, and The Commuter), not to mention his incredible horror movie Orphan. But before all of that, his movie career began with the remake of House of Wax starring Paris Hilton. On its face this is a pretty standard slasher, but as with all of Collet-Sera’s movies before Jungle Cruise, House of Wax has that extra…something…that makes it compelling viewing.
12. Dawn of the Dead (2004)
A small group of survivors hide out in a mall during a zombie apocalypse in Zack Snyder’s first movie–which was written, amusingly, by James Gunn, who runs the post-Snyder era at DC. The Dawn of the Dead remake lacks the substance and social commentary of the original movie, since the zombies themselves aren’t in the mall at all for most of it and having zombies in a mall was literally the whole theme of the original. But it’s still a quite enjoyable zombie story, and having zombies that run is still kinda novel since that trend faded out a long time ago. And it’s just so slick, as you’d expect from a pre-Justice League Zack Snyder movie.
10-11. Black Christmas (2006 and 2019)
The 1974 slasher, in which a bunch of sorority girls are attacked and murdered at their sorority house just before Christmas, has been remade twice, and both of the redos are awesome in their own ways. The 2006 remake from X-Files writer/producer Glen Morgan (who also wrote Final Destination) is a really fun and well made R-rated slasher, and the 2019 remake (rated PG-13) is more tame with the gore but makes up for it with a Me Too-inspired storyline that hits pretty hard for those who are familiar with the ins and outs of major university greek life.
9. Willard (2003)
Best known for playing Marty McFly’s dad in Back to the Future, the quirky Crispin Glover had a career resurgence after playing the villain in the Charlie’s Angels movie in 2000. One of our favorite results of that resurgence is Willard, about a creepy loner who is able to communicate with rats so well that he actually becomes friends with them, not unlike Rat Catcher 2 from The Suicide Squad. Except Willard isn’t a good guy–this is a villain origin movie! And an influential one. Joker, for example, draws a lot of its DNA from Willard.
8. The Invisible Man (2020)
The Elisabeth Moss-starring remake of The Invisible Man is a slow burner, but that just makes the payoffs all the more impactful–a certain memorable scene in a restaurant comes to mind. But the real power of this remake is how it builds a whole story essentially around the “everybody treats the protagonist as paranoid or worse for seeing ghosts” horror trope in order to make a point about women trapped in abusive relationships with toxic men.
7. The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Director Alexandre Aja was one of those directors who made a name for themselves in the aughts by delivering horror films that were visceral experiences unto themselves–movies where the violence depicted is enhanced by in-your-face camera work, very loud audio design, and relentless self-seriousness. In that sense Aja’s remake of the cannibal flick The Hills Have Eyes, about a family on a road trip who gets attacked and eaten by mutants, is kinda sorta prestige horror before most of the rest of you knew that was allowed.
6. Sorority Row (2009)
The original movie, about a group of sorority girls who accidentally commit a murder during a prank gone wrong and then are themselves murdered one by one a year later, is a classic deservedly beloved by horror nerds and genre-focused cinephiles. The remake isn’t quite as good overall, but refocusing the plot to give it a more modern social bent is nice, and the cast–Briana Evigan, Jamie Chung, Margo Harshman, Leah Pipes and Rumer Willis as the core group of young women, with Carrie Fisher as their delightful no-nonsense house mother–has great chemistry.
5. Evil Dead (2013)
Remaking something like The Evil Dead–about five college kids who are tortured and possessed and killed by evil spirits in a cabin in the woods–in the modern day is a complicated task, especially if you aren’t Sam Raimi, whose aesthetic and way of doing things is unique to him. But director Fede Alvarez managed to put his own stamp on this IP with an incredibly earnest–and also incredibly disturbing and f—ed up–new version of the story. I sometimes wish it were a little less effective, because it can be hard to watch when I’m not in the right state of mind. But that’s not a criticism. The fact that I get a little queasy just thinking about this movie is actually high praise.
4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
There have been several Body Snatchers remakes over the decades, including the awful Nicole Kidman flick The Invasion. But the 1978 edition, starring Jeff Godblum, Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy, and from The Outlaw Josey Wales director Philip Kaufman, is easily the best version of the story of alien pod people surreptitiously replacing everyone on Earth with drone-like doppelgangers.
3. The Fly (1986)
David Cronenberg is the reigning king of body horror for a reason, and this movie, in which Jeff Goldblum performs an experiment on himself that accidentally gradually begins to turn him into a gigantic house fly, is a large part of that reason. It’s gross, it’s existentially upsetting, and it’s also just awesome.
2. The Ring (2002)
Most American attempts to remake Asian horror movies haven’t been particularly memorable, but Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, starring Naomi Watts, has been a horror benchmark for two decades because it was an improvement over its source material, and because it had a really effective noir thriller sort of vibe and a mystery plot that was compelling in its own right. Credit to the original for the dope idea–you watch this messed up bootleg video tape, and then seven days later a dead girl crawls out of your TV and murders you–but this remake is a classic, while the original is just a good movie.
1. The Thing (1982)
It’s your classic whodunnit sort of story, but with a twist: the who that dunnit is an alien creature pretending to be one of the crew of an Antarctic research base. That wrinkle–which was left out of The Thing From Another World, the 1950s adaptation of the novella on which The Thing is based–is harnessed so effectively by director John Carpenter and the cast that was led by a spectacular Kurt Russell that this horror mystery has come to define the genre in some ways because it works both as a disgusting and awesome creature feature and a really compelling character-focused story–a very rare combination.
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