10 Films That Made Audiences Dumber

Before destroying cinema with his Transformers franchise, Michael Bay established a production company to churn out joyless, oppressive remakes of horror movies. Not content with tearing the guts out of The Hitcher, he later targeted the likes of Friday The 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street and The Amityville Horror.

First out of the gate, however, was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which set the standard for what was to come: soulless, sluggish and determined to get in your face, the movie actually becomes more boring and obnoxious as it goes on. It also helped establish the trend for so-called “torture porn” which gave the world Captivity and Hostel as well as that all-time classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Then there were the remakes of I Spit On Your Grave, The Last House On The Left, The Hills Have Eyes etc.

Which was missing the point of Tobe Hooper’s original movie: even though the title and poster (which posed the question, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”) promised all the gore in the world, the movie eschewed blood and guts in favour of claustrophobia, suspense and a nice line in black humour. All of these are absent from the remake, where lopped-off limbs and false scares become the order of the day, as they would in countless films to come.