17 horror movie remakes that you should actually watch
Sony Pictures
As summer turns to fall, bombastic blockbusters are giving way to a barrage of horror-movie legacy properties.
Leatherface and Jigsaw will arrive in October, and there’s It, the second screen adaptation of Stephen King’s classic novel about a group of friends tormented by a malevolent force inhabiting their hometown of Derry, Maine. But there are so many try-hard reboots and hollow sequels in horror that it can be hard to remember that some legacy properties can (and should) be properly dusted off.
In that spirit, Vulture has compiled a list of scary-movie remakes that are truly worth your time: thrill rides that either improved upon their source material, matched wits with the classics that came before them, or, in a few cases, nobly committed to turning bad first movies into highly entertaining second efforts.
From alien parasites lurking in Antarctic research facilities to girls getting picked off on sorority row, here are the horror remakes that are definitely worth your time.
"The Crazies" (2010)
Anyone who’s seen even one episode of Justified knows that Timothy Olyphant was born to play a small-town lawman. And just before he put on the signature Raylan Givens hat in 2010, he was local sheriff David Dutten of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, a small town on the brink of oblivion after the inhabitants contract a virus through the water supply that turns them into savage killers. The 1973 version of Crazies is a just-okay movie from legendary director George A. Romero, but the 2010 take is a perfectly gory white-knuckler that’s got Olyphant’s likability as an X-factor that raises its game. Romero executive-produced this updated take on his work, and it did right by his legacy.
"The Thing" (1982)
While Howard Hawks’s 1951 film The Thing From Another World is a great movie, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is arguably the definitive adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.’s novella, Who Goes There? Kurt Russell stars as R.J. MacReady, a helicopter pilot at an Antarctic research station that’s about to be laid to waste by an extraterrestrial parasite that infiltrates host bodies and imitates their traits. The slowly building paranoia that turns the Antarctic group against one another still holds up, and the groundbreaking VFX continue to provoke a sort of visceral terror.
"The Fly" (1986)
How do you top one of the great science-fiction horror films of all time, especially one starring the incomparable Vincent Price? You tap David Cronenberg to direct your remake and cast the just-as-incomparable Jeff Goldblum. The 1986 Fly focuses on a brilliant scientist who slowly morphs into a man-fly hybrid after a teleportation experiment goes terribly awry, and it showcases one of the most truly disturbing feats of practical effects in all of movie history. That part is no surprise, considering Cronenberg is the undisputed king of gruesome screen transformations (see: Videodrome, Scanners, Naked Lunch, The Brood, and so on), but the emotional weight that Goldblum and his co-star Geena Davis bring to the relationship between Seth Brundle and Veronica Quaife sets the physical horror up to be so very devastating in the end. “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
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