10 Horror Movie Remakes That Were TOTALLY Different
For better or worse, these horror remakes went in a completely new direction.
Remakes are a mere inevitability in Hollywood, and there's surely no genre more prone to telling the same story over and over again than horror.
Given the genre's tendency for attention-grabbing stories, catchy titles, and iconic villains, is it little surprise that so many great horror films have been remade for subsequent generations?
And it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, especially if a modern filmmaker can offer a smart, unique spin on the original core premise. Conversely, we all know how Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho remake was received.
These 10 horror remakes, however, all decided to veer in wildly different directions from what came before, whether for better or worse.
In some cases the film was a remake in name only, while in others it did something totally different with the most basic setup.
Some remakes were able to do something radically different due to technological advances of the time or changing social attitudes, while others more lazily used name branding to give their otherwise generic horror movie some extra box office juice.
Whatever the result, these horror remakes bore few hallmarks of what came before...
10. House Of Wax (2005)
You'd be forgiven for assuming that 2005's House of Wax was a straight-up remake of the Vincent Price-starring 1953 horror of the same name, in which Price plays a deranged sculptor who kills people and then coats them in wax to repopulate his destroyed wax museum.
But ultimately this is extremely close to being a remake in name only, as it actually has far more in common with the 1979 slasher Tourist Trap, where a group of youngsters stumble upon a roadside attraction and are consequently stalked by a killer residing there.
In interviews, director Jaume Collet-Serra even admitted himself that the film is about as loose as remakes get, with Warner Bros. simply wanting to mine the brand name for some easy box office moolah.
Though House of Wax was panned alongside the many classic horror remakes released around the same time, if you can accept how minimally it follows in the original's footsteps, it's actually a relatively well-crafted, nasty slice of self-aware horror.