Any original horror films out there?
SCRIPTLAND
'Prom Night' is a remake. So are a long list of upcoming horror flicks Hollywood keeps throwing back at the screen.
Smell that? It's the decay of original ideas.
Like zombies rising from the dank, maggot-fertile earth, a horde of hungry horror film remakes is now shambling awkwardly toward your local multiplex. Rob Zombie slayed $58 million worth of audiences with his resurrected "Halloween" last fall, and a slew of horror movie redos have risen up and are butchering their way through development.
"Prom Night," in theaters Friday, is the latest remake to stir from its slumber. But right now writers are also working on updated versions of "Friday the 13th," "The Last House on the Left," "The Birds," "Near Dark," "Hellraiser," "Piranha," "My Bloody Valentine" (in 3-D!), "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "The Crazies" and "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!"
"The executive mind-set of most studios is that they feel much more comfortable with pre-defined material," says Joe Cardone, who penned "Prom Night" as well as scripts for upcoming remakes of "The Stepfather" and "See No Evil." "Our approach is that we try to find some really interesting hook that I can play with that's relatively fresh within the confines of the cliché."
These remakes have preexisting brand recognition, relatively low budgets and a reliable youthful audience for the studio to bank on. And even if the work is less than gratifying, the writer-filmmaker benefits from the greater likelihood that these lower-risk scripts will be greenlighted as well as from the income provided by an ever-regenerating genre. (And look at "The Ruins," an original premise that opened to disappointing box office.)
The reheated nature of the material can appeal to the audience as well, according to Stanford University communication professor Clifford Ness. "What we really want when we go to a horror movie is a visceral, emotional experience," says Ness. "And the more you have to think, and figure out what the plot is, the less you can just feel the emotion. So the idea is that when you have a familiar scenario, then you don't have to think so hard and you can just feel the terror."
Terror was certainly the feeling jackknifing through my ribcage when Michael Bay announced his unholy remake of "Rosemary's Baby," which, if there is a God, should finally and definitively lock in his eternal damnation.
All I can say is: No one touches my beloved "Tremors." Except maybe Alexander Payne. I'd like to see what he and Jim Taylor would do with giant prehistoric carnivorous underground worms.
