Horror undead

Mark Burg, who produces the Saw movies, specializes in “red grub.” And in a Maclean’s interview, he underlined the pitfalls of sanitizing horror for a broad audience. “If you’re running Universal, you’re thinking, ‘I’ve got to hit the 10-year-old and the 40-year-old, because I’ve got to worry about that Wolfman [theme park] ride in two years.’ ” Burg’s outfit, Twisted Pictures, doesn’t have that problem. “We’re not here to make movies for everyone,” he says. “Our movies are edgy and hard-core and our fans like that.”

Unlike the big studios, Burg doesn’t gentrify horror. He revels in doing just the opposite—refurbishing old films to make them more grisly for the increasingly jaded young male audience. “If you look at a lot of the movies in the ’70s,” he says, “they didn’t have the edge that ours do. We’re trying to push the envelope.”

Twisted Pictures recently bought the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. Burg isn’t ready to reveal whether he will grind out more sequels or reboot the series with a remake, but he promises the violence won’t lose any of its “edge” (which seems to be his favourite word). He is also producing four horror remakes that are now being scripted: The Body Snatchers, Bedlam, Five Came Back and I Walked With a Zombie. The last three are vintage titles from the ’30s and ’40s. Bedlam featured Boris Karloff and Five Came Back starred Lucille Ball.

“We’re not taking anything away from the original,” Burg stresses. “We’re just putting our own spin on it, trying to make it more current for a generation that never saw the original. I mean, how many people do you know who saw the original I Walked With a Zombie?” Even if they had, by the time Twisted Pictures blows off the cobwebs and lays on the gore, they may not recognize it.

Burg was developing a remake of David Cronenberg’s Scanners with Dimension producer Bob Weinstein and director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw III, IV) before the project collapsed over creative differences. (Not everyone sees exploding heads the same way.) But even Burg believes some movies should never be remade. When asked about talk of remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with George Clooney and Naomi Watts, he says, “Certain directors are untouchable. You don’t remake Hitchcock or Scorsese.”

One might say the same of Canada’s David Cronenberg. But there are three Cronenberg remakes in the works, including The Fly, which Cronenberg has agreed to produce and write for 20th Century Fox, with an option to direct it. The notion of a director remaking his own movie seems perverse. Austrian director Michael Haneke did it with Funny Games, but at least he had the pretext of transplanting his cruel tale of psycho home invaders to U.S. soil. It’s baffling why Cronenberg would remake a classic like The Fly, which itself is the remake of a classic, especially after he’s already turned it into an opera that failed to take off. When I contacted the director, he said he couldn’t discuss it. But The Fly is, after all, a tale of mutation, and perhaps it’s still lodged under Cronenberg’s skin, creating an itch that just has to be scratched. It’s hard to imagine him doing a hack job.

Although most horror remakes and sequels are crassly commercial, some are artistically defensible. Aliens was a better movie than Alien. And as Colin Geddes, Midnight Madness programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, points out, some films are dismissed as remakes when they are simply fresh adaptations of the same literary source—something Francis Ford Coppola emphasized with his productions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “Often remakes are cash grabs,” says Geddes. “But they can serve to further a legacy.” No one gets upset when there’s a new production of Romeo and Juliet, he points out. “You missed the original. Now you can see it with an all-new cast.”

Besides, he adds, remakes update old stories to reflect the times. Citing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he says the first remake in 1978 “was as good as the original and both clued into different paranoias of the era.” Geddes is even tolerant of Hollywood producing inferior remakes of foreign horror films. “I don’t get up in arms,” he says, “because they’re just going to shed more light on the original.” In that sense, horror remakes are like cover versions of rock songs, or in the case of Gothic monsters, like jazz standards. Horror has become so rich with ironic homage that every film is a kind of monster mash-up—especially when the clichés are remixed by a trickster like Wes Craven, who created A Nightmare on Elm St. and Scream. Horror fansites are now abuzz with reports that Craven may direct Scream 4, reuniting the original cast. It would be like a reunion tour by a revered rock band.

Be it trash or art, the horror movie remake is hard-wired in the DNA of the genre, which exploits the fear of something coming back to haunt us—whether from the grave, the asylum, or the basement. What we’re most afraid of, after all, is not the unknown, which we can’t begin to imagine, but a scary new prototype of the monster we’ve already come to know and hate.