10 Horror Movie Remakes Better Than You Remember

Movie remakes in general get a bad rap, but while there have been plenty of high-profile stinkers, there have been a lot of great ones too, especially in the world of horror.

The likes of Evil Dead and The Ring proved that directors can put their own spin on established material, while others such as The Thing and The Fly are now more well known (and more loved) than the original movies they were based on.

Still, for every success that slips through the cracks to be accepted by fans and critics, so many others are written off before they even have a chance to prove themselves. Thankfully, hindsight is a huge part of horror, and in this genre initially-disregarded flops can later be heralded as unmissable classics not appreciated in their time.

Now, that's not to say the following flicks are on the level of, say, The Exorcist, but they do all hold up much better than their initial reception suggests. They all have something going for them, and absolutely deserve to be revisited now that the dust has had time to settle.

Alexandre Aja made a name for himself in the early 2000s, embraced as a member of the New French Extremity movement thanks to his hugely popular slasher film, High Tension.

Unsurprisingly, Hollywood were quick to snap him up, and he was given the chance to remake Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, a fun-going movie about a vacationing family who find themselves under siege by a family of mutated humans.

Now, there's nothing at all about this remake that's subtle. It's absolutely relentless in terms of its violence and Aja goes nuts pushing the gruesome set-pieces as far as they can go.

Hell, the only thing Aja wasn't allowed to do was put a cat in a blender with some milk - a 'kitten shake' he called it - and have one of the mutants drink it. This is the kind of movie and director we're dealing with here.

Still, this first remake is far better crafted than its abysmal sequel, which retroactively gave both of these modern takes a bad name. It's gory, it's thrilling, and more than lives up to the exploitation legacy of its original counterpart.