15 Underrated Movie Remakes That Deserve Another Look

Gus Van Sant drew the ire of everyone when he made a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchock’s horror classic Psycho, starring Vince Vaughn no less. The arthouse experiment put Vaughn in place as the monstrous Norman Bates, and crafted around him a film that challenges the source with new bursts of colour and consciously different direction. 

But audiences weren’t ready for it in 1998, and even if it had enjoyed a wide release it would have been ignored and dismissed all the same. And, sure, there’s an argument to be made for why one would want to remake a film most people consider perfect, but if Gus Van Sant ever asked why he might never have filmed a frame of anything.  

Using the original material, each actor in a killer cast featuring William H Macy, Viggo Mortensen and Julianne Moore manages to put their own spin on the parts, although Vaughn’s is the most interesting. Indubitably encouraged to do so by Van Sant, he gives Bates a campness that gives another dimension to his cross-dressing, while also driving into his performance a neuroticism that suggests an unsound mind. This effectively splits the fact of his oedipal complex and psychopathy into separate areas - one is sexuality, the other mental illness, running against the original’s problematic conflation of the two.

In all, Psycho ’98 is for those who love and hate the original alike.