15 Things Horror Remakes Did Better Than The Original
Remakes aren't entirely worthless...
When it comes to horror, few things annoy people more than remakes. After all, they're pointless beyond measure and are usually pretty weak so it's an undeniable relief that there haven't been very many in the past few years, but are horror remakes always a bad thing?
Interestingly, they do have their advantages. They often add interesting new spins on the old material and although a remake surpassing the original is extremely rare, they often do certain elements better.
Yes, there are those remakes which are worse than the original in every single way (looking at you, Wicker Man) but it's arguable that with the majority of horror remakes, even mostly terrible ones, the filmmakers do take advantage of the opportunity to fix or upgrade something from the original film.
It's like they say: every cloud has a silver lining...
15. Black Christmas (2006) - Claire's Relative
This is an interesting one, since Black Christmas (2006) is one of the worst horror remakes ever made and is an unscary, cringe-worthy and completely dire butchering of the excellent 1974 original, yet it does manage to do something better than the original film. It's a small thing, but still.
In both films, Claire (played by Lynne Griffin in the original and Leela Savasta in the remake) is one of the first of the luckless sorority girls being stalked by a killer to bite the dust and in both cases a relative shows up looking for her.
In the original, a fairly uninteresting father character turns up but in the remake, instead it's Leigh (Kristen Cloke, who horror fans might recognise as Val Lewton in Final Destination), Claire's half-sister.
Leigh is a surprisingly entertaining character and Cloke gives a good performance too. Alongside the reasonably solid protagonist Kelli Presley (Katie Cassidy), she's definitely one of the best elements of this otherwise useless train-wreck of a horror film and the inclusion of this character was a very smart move indeed, since it's one of the only things in the movie that's actually fun.