I spit on your horror movie remakes, sequels

When the shoddy, pointless, not-scary remake of John Carpenter’s 1980 horror film “The Fog” opened recently, I made sure my Friday morning schedule was clear so I could catch the first matinee screening. I had to; I review movies for a living and “The Fog” wasn’t made available to critics beforehand. Not that I blame Columbia Pictures for that. They had to know they had a limp one on their hands and critics are usually irrationally unkind to the horror genre anyway. Why should we be allowed to see it before it opens? 

Columbia Pictures Maggie Grace looks like she'd rather be back on the "Lost" island in this scene from "The Fog."

So I bought a ticket and watched “The Fog” in my own personal fog — of boredom. I tried to fall asleep a few times but the loud boom-boom-boom sound design of the film made sure that wasn’t going to happen. (Yes, the big secret is that sometimes movies put critics to sleep; they just never admit that that happens in their reviews. My own personal best was three nice cat-naps during that really cool golf movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance”.)

“The Fog” kept trying to conjure ooga-booga scares out of incredibly thunderous door-knocking by these sad-ass ghosts with leprosy, the kind that jump out at you from behind doors in your town’s lame annual Spooky House. Ghosts don’t knock on your door and announce their visit. They come straight for you through the wall. Everyone knows that.  And if you’re re-writing a movie that has already been made once 25 years ago, and badly even then, and all you can think up this time around to make the audience’s popcorn fly is really loud door-knocking, you should stop writing scripts and go to work for Amnesty International instead. They could use your help in shaking up some global human rights violators.

Here’s one terrible thing you can count on: cheap remakes of old horror films are here to stay because they don’t cost much to make and even if they fail at the domestic box office they clean up in “ancillary” sales like DVD and cable. They can flat-out suck it — and with the exception of last year’s “Dawn of The Dead” they’ve all done just that — and horror audiences are easily lured into theaters to see them.

I know because I’m the horror audience. I love to be made afraid. I love to leave the theater breathless from all the prolonged tension and the third act release. I love the irrational dumb need, after coming home from seeing one, to turn on all the lights and check all the closets. And, failing being terrified out of my wits, I just love to watch people get their heads chopped off. Not real people in real life or anything. I’m not one of those “Faces of Death” goons. I want to see fake people get fake killed — big difference. If possible I want to see it done with imaginative, evil glee.

New Line Jessica Biel looks terrified -- maybe it was the script that scared her -- in the remake of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

I wasn’t even bugged by the start up of the recent remake trend. I welcomed the possibility of being scared by any means necessary. So I hoped that they’d get the new “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” done up right. But they didn’t. Then I hoped that I’d experience a cleansing celebrity-hatred catharsis when Paris Hilton got impaled in “House of Wax.” Instead I just felt let down. And I wondered if “Cry_Wolf” would be more than the “From Justin to Kelly” of tween fear. And it wasn’t. So I’m to blame. And you are too if you bought a ticket. We voted with our money. But what we voted for was comfort food.

It’s because you know how “Chainsaw Massacre” ends already. You know going in what those wax figures are really made of. You know who lives in the fog. You know the zombies win, that Jason will never die and that Chucky, who’s more drag queen than anything else these days, will be back too. In the disillusioned late 1960s and 1970s, horror films, even grindhouse weirdness like the groovy satanic-hippie-cannibals-on-LSD classic “I Drink Your Blood,” did more than gross-out the burnouts. They commented on the world outside. But in this genuinely frightening decade when you can watch the real people get their real heads really cut off online, the narratives have retreated into a now-comparatively safe past. Leatherface is as warm and familiar a presence as Rosemary Clooney singing a lullaby to Bing Crosby in “White Christmas.” And we will pay to see him again and again. We are suckers for doing this, cool fake killings or not.

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