Hollywood! Mining Fright Flicks for Fun, Profit & Soggy White Tops

Hollywood overtly recycling storylines and reworking them to fit a new money mould is about as old as the film industry itself. The fact of the matter is that the Golden Age of Hollywood was just as painfully proficient at “re-imagining” as the modern incarnation; it’s just that the new conglomerate has a broader scope of medium from which to cull its ideas, so it seems worse. It’s not hard to see why or how they do it, movie moguls raid the studio archives for a property they already own, spend inordinate amounts of cash to determine its financial fit with today’s market and then green light the project anyway. I mean, Alfred Hitchcock remade movies, quite frequently in fact, so why not blow the dust off of “Bewitched”? Remakes are killing cinema as much as the incessant need to release misguided movies based on second rate television shows.

I’m a hardnosed horror movie meatball, so modern remakes of the horror persuasion are aimed squarely in my direction (or that of my wallet) and at teeny boppers ignorant of the originals. Horror fans will appear en masse to support their genre, mostly on opening weekend and then in retail stores once available on DVD. We incessantly complain when classics from the creepy cannon are polished up and pimped back to us, but we see them anyway and love to be proved wrong. When not busy snatching up foreign features to remake (Ringu, Ju-on, Dark Water and future release of The Eye), the studio system is currently fixed on the films most of us grew up with. You may have noticed the recent rash of fright flicks hitting theaters after having been revised and refreshed over the past few years – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, The Amityville Horror, House of Wax and the upcoming retreads of The Fog, The Omen and there’s even talk of an Evil Dead and Creature from the Black Lagoon“update”. Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News recently noted that;

“American studios, like most successful companies, take notice of anything that brings in profit. Today's horror movies may not be the smartest knives in the drawer, and they usually don't please the critics. But as long as blood red and money green keep mixing, you can expect the scary fare to keep flowing.”

Sadly, horror movies have always been an easy way to pad studio coffers, Paramount Pictures basically released one Friday the 13th film a year from 1980-89 and used the films to fund more mainstream projects. It was wholeheartedly obvious that the studio didn’t care for the movies (not to say that the production staff didn’t) and when the profits began to decrease domestically, the property was disowned and subsequently sold to New Line Cinema. Paramount quietly made a profit from the series though it truly didn’t give a rabbits red rectum about it. It was like a church group selling pornography to raise funds for a new steeple, they didn’t really believe in what they were selling but they knew we’d buy it so they made with the filthy.

Paramount Pictures aren’t the only pee-pee holes in the pie crust though, with remakes coming off the assembly line like prostitutes and trailer parks, the studios are once more going to over saturate the horror market and either drive it back to the independents (where it may rightly belong) or beat it down for another decade. High profile motion pictures that should pleasantly profit are tanking theatrically and opening weakly, meaning that even horror fans are beginning to tire of the constant genre abuse at the hands of the studios.

Horror will always come back from the dead and hopefully the next cyclical resurrection of the genre will be less about rehashing old features and more about keeping the genre fresh, freaky and full of flesh - if not to keep fresh fleshed young hotties in soggy white tops.

iPod played "Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party" while posting