My Bloody Valentine: Make A Double-Date With The Original and Remake

Valentine’s Day is under a week away! Maybe you hate Valentine’s Day on principal. Perhaps you’re single. Maybe you don’t want to be dragged out for an expensive dinner just weeks after Christmas. Or maybe you’re just a rabid horror fan looking for an ‘alternative’ movie to curl up with on the couch. Fortunately, the […]

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Beware of The Blob: Sixty Years Later

Audiences love a good creature feature. Whether it’s just regular sharks, aliens, or over-sized insects, we can’t get enough of big monsters destroying famous landmarks. Sixty years ago, teens crowded drive-in theaters to see one of Hollywood’s best creature-features – The Blob. It’s the perfect midnight movie and a testament to a way of film-making […]

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King of Horror: Picking Past Film Adaptations of Stephen King’s Work to Remake

It’s ‘Master of Horror’ Stephen King’s 71st birthday today. His first novel, Carrie, was published in 1973. His works include Misery, The Shining, The Dark Tower series, and It. To date, King has published over 50 novels and collected works. One could easily make the argument that Stephen King is one of the most influential […]

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Don’t Forget about Stepdads: The Stepfather

This June weekend brings us the opportunity to celebrate all the wonderful fathers who do so much for us. But let’s not forget that stepfathers are ‘dad’s’, too. For this edition of Re-Animated, I give a shout out to all the stepdads out there by taking a look at 1980’s cult classic, The Stepfather, and the […]

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Martyrs Remake Sacrifices The Original’s Power for Watered-Down Version

The ‘New French Extremity” movement of the 2000s produced some of the most controversial and transgressive horror films this century. Not surprisingly then, North American filmmakers who ran out of 1980s slasher films to remake have begun looting these French horror treasures. One of the first Extremity films to get the remake treatment was Martyrs, […]

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Cabin Fever: The Remake You Didn’t Know Existed

While scrolling through Netflix recently for a late-night horror fix I discovered the Cabin Fever (2016) remake. It’s a film that flew completely under my radar. Rather than watching the remake first I decided to pull out my copy of the original Cabin Fever. It’s been sixteen years since Eli Roth emerged on the horror scene. His […]

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Inside Remake Misses the Point of New French Extremity

Two trends characterized horrors films in the 2000s: (1) the cycle of Hollywood remakes of 1980s slasher films and (2) the emergence of the “torture porn” subgenre. Numerous horror scholars have examined the “torture porn” cycle of horror as part of a larger societal response to 9/11 and emergent debates around torture and interrogation (Wetmore, […]

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Remake: How Do You Re-Imagine a Classic?

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Re-Animated, where I compare horror remakes to their original counterparts. In this inaugural post, Ill be looking at a benchmark horror film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper’s 1973 classic is arguably one of the best horror films of all time. Its influence on the genre is immeasurable. More importantly, The Texas […]

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