10 Horror Movie Reboots (And Scoring How Successful They Were)

Every year seems to bring a new raft of horror movie reboots, with 2021 giving the reboot treatment to Candyman and Resident Evil.

Maybe superhero films have superseded horror as the most rebooted genre; Robert Pattinson is set to become the latest in a long line of actors to portray Batman on the big screen later this year.

The films of the horror genre face a different challenge, though. Some of the more enduring horror franchises have entries numbering into the double digits, and once audiences become overly familiar with a film’s tropes or monster, it’s inevitable these properties lose some of their bite, occasionally becoming parodies of themselves.

Horror movie reboots can tackle this problem in several ways. Some attempt to shock audiences anew, upping the body count and explicit violence from the originals, hoping a shock-and-gore effect will leave the viewers reeling. Other properties embrace their inherent silliness, nudging and winking at the audience that they’ve seen it all before and are about to see it all again.

Either way it seems someone is reluctant to let these monsters die, trotting them out again and again, as you’ll discover in the following list.

As a film franchise, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre might be in with a shout of having the most precipitous drop in quality from the original movie across its various sequels, prequels and reboots.

The 2003 Chainsaw Massacre reboot was produced by Platinum Dunes, who also produced three other films on this list. Having carved out a niche for themselves making bad horror movie remakes, Platinum Dunes has recently achieved far greater success with A Quiet Place.

Tobe Hooper’s 1974 movie was a terrifying slow-burn horror which ended with a crescendo of gore. Many of the other films in the subsequent Texas Chainsaw Massacre series have missed that picture’s element of subtlety, which served to make the violence in the latter part of the film all the more shocking.

The 2003 film suffers from that very problem: it’s more concerned with grossing out the audience rather than crafting the original’s oppressive atmosphere.

Esteemed film critic, Roger Ebert rated the remake zero stars, stating, “The new version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a contemptable film: Vile, ugly and brutal”.

However, this film was the highest grossing in the franchise, even when adjusting for inflation, so it’s clear The Texas Chainsaw Massacre still has some notoriety - particularly as it's been followed by a further three outings for the franchise.

Reboot rating: 2/10