Blog Posts

Complaining about remakes is a lazy, fish-in-the-barrel sport. Any scribe can and has done it, especially, one suspects, when ideas are otherwise running low. But remakes are on my mind thanks to a recent encounter with a particularly bad one, so screw it, I'm ruminating.

Received wisdom posits that remakes are inherently a bad thing, on a par with sequels (but even more morally suspect, depending on the quality of the original film), and a sign of creative stagnation in the film industry. This is true as f...r as it goes, but there are a couple of factors we should bear in mind. Remakes of a kind have been around almost as long as there have been movies. There were, for example, multiple versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the beginning of the 20th Century. And remakes do not have to be artistically bankrupt exercises. The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Fly are perfect examples of films where their directors have taken good (or classic) films and gone in an entirely new, fresh direction, creating works that are, in point of fact, new originals in their own right.

The horror film’s energy seems to move in cyclical patterns from country to country. At different points of the genre’s history, the best work tends to cluster geographically. I admit that my evidence for this is rather anecdotal, but let’s look at the patterns.

France is where it all begins, with Georges Méliès creating the first horror movies in 1896. The genre is, admittedly, in very embryonic form at this stage, but in the early years of the 20th Century, this is where the action is. The American film i...dustry, in its infancy, produces its fair share of early horrors (most notably the Thomas Edison-produced Frankenstein in 1910), but its day in the sun had not yet come. The real nexus of creativity for the first feature-length horror films would be Germany, beginning in 1913 with The Student of Prague, and hitting full steam with the Expressionist movement and the likes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem, Nosferatu and so on.

Before anything else, some housecleaning. In my piece on BluRay and HD-DVD some time ago, I quoted Video Watchdog as saying the BluRay machines would not be backwards compatible. This has turned out, of course, to be inaccurate. Video Watchdog printed its correction, and I now follow suit.

Right, then. So, after a disappointing opening at the box office, the first reports about how Grindhouse will appear on DVD have surfaced, and that’s all the excuse I need to talk about the film again... now with the advantage of having seen it.