20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History

And then there’s Gus Van Sant’s remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, one of the most celebrated slasher horror movies in cinematic history. However, there’s no attempt made here to tell the story differently - recreating it for a modern audience by adopting the ironic filter of two decades of potboiler slashers, for example.

Instead, Van Sant’s Psycho is an experiment in lensing a shot-for-shot remake of the original, using the same script (of the few changes made, most are merely to update references to money and popular culture) and the same score.

It’s still unclear what Van Sant hoped to accomplish here, but if part of the objective was to duplicate the quality of the original film, he’s screwed the pooch on multiple levels here. The casting was probably the single greatest divergence from Hitchcock’s classic: Vince Vaughn, a Chevy Chase for the new millennium, was no Anthony Perkins.

Whatever the case, the remake was a critical and commercial failure. More than that, it’s a film that no one wanted or needed - the original Psycho, stabbings and scare-strings in the shower and all, is still embedded in the psyche of Western cinema like a knife in the sternum. All Van Sant’s version did is run dangerously close to parody, without any of the amusement factor that should have come along with that definition.