At the time of writing, the remake of The Evil Dead has made about $40 million against a budget of just $17 million. This means that producers everywhere are going to be looking for what was a success once and could be once again. Usually this means a look at what popular (or even not so popular but notorious or noteworthy in some way) 80s horror movies that could be re-packaged for modern day audiences. Of course, it isn't that movie remakes are automatically going to artistically fail. The Thing, The Fly and Let Me In, found new approaches to their material and their remakes were well-received. The problems emerge when writers and directors just repeat what has already been done but lack understanding of why they were successful in the first place. In choosing this list, I tried to pick films that have their fans but are not regarded as sacrosanct and have the potential within their premise to be expanded on. Films that even the most untalented of modern day Hollywood hacks couldn't screw up...
10. Ghost Story (1981)
This falls into the category of adaptations of novels that miss the point. Eva Galli / Alma Mobley goes from being a mind twisting, immortal shape-shifter with recruited minions given similar powers, to somebody who died in an accident. The hallucination scenes and allusions to other ghost stories are abandoned. In adaptation, it goes from a novel about ghost stories to just another standard one. For a remake to be successful, all it would have to do is be more faithful to Peter Straubs original novel than this film was. It is still in print, so it still has an audience. This is as well as recent successes such as The Woman in Black showing how popular supernatural ghost stories are. There cant be any difficulties with effects now either. A lot of them could even be created just through editing if a director didn't want to use CGI.