10 Foreign Language Horror Films Hollywood Doesn't Have The Balls To Remake

Earlier this year, US horror juggernaut Blumhouse Productions brought us an English language remake of Pascal Laugier's 2008 film Martyrs. A new-era French horror that was immediately considered a benchmark against which all extreme genre movies ought to be measured.

Critically, Martyrs was divisive, though those opposed to it were so chiefly on the grounds of decency rather than the quality of the film, which has predictably been the case with the reboot.

The English version of the film currently holds an embarrassing 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, joining a long list of Hollywood remakes of foreign horrors that have resoundingly failed to live up to the original in both execution and ambition. The film made the same mistake many have made before it, watering down the violence and taking away the element of endurance that made the ending in the original seem earned rather than shocking for the sake of it.

That, in a nutshell, is Hollywood's problem when it comes to trying to imitate the best examples of Euro-gore, J-horror and anything that western audiences on the whole would find too much - the will is there, but they are afraid to take it all the way. The result is often a half-cooked effort that cuts corners and softens blows, losing the impact that made the original worth copying in the first place.

For studios who are constantly afraid of straying outside of the established guidelines, the following films are absolutely terrifying, containing enough ultra-violence and depravity to give Hollywood nightmares for weeks.

Language: Chinese

Dumplings was actually adapted from a short film that Chinese director Fruit Chan made as part of a collaboration with South Korea's Park Chan-Wook and Japan's Takashi Miike entitled Three... Extremes. Park's film Cut involves a film director being tortured by a sadistic extra, and Miike chose to base his short on a pair of conjoined circus workers, though Chan's film outshone the two better-known directors with its bizarre concept.

The film follows an ageing soap actress named Qing as she attempts to rekindle her relationship with her distant husband, whom she knows has taken a younger mistress behind her back. In an attempt to recapture her lost youth, Qing visits a backstreet merchant who claims to have a remedy - her special dumplings.

Qing soon discovers that the special dumplings are in fact made from aborted fetuses, though in her desperation she eats them anyway. With her glow returned and her libido increased beyond measure, Qing gets what she wants from her husband, though when her dumpling dealer is arrested and she falls pregnant, she has to choose between giving birth and using her own unborn fetus to make more dumplings.

This is where Hollywood would say no thanks. Qing opts for the latter, ingesting her unborn child in a truly unsettling finale. Chan's queasy but brilliant take on vanity and the lengths it drives us to is no easy watch (especially if you're eating and/or pregnant) and falls well beyond what Hollywood considers extreme.