In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

103 TrauMaTic childhood now included Todorov’s Fantastic and the Uncanny Slasher Remake —Andrew Patrick Nelson “loved The oriGinal, haTed The reMake” Long before and quite apart from the self-referential “rules” expounded in Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy or the lesson-instilling “games” orchestrated by the Jigsaw killer in the Saw franchise, horror movies in general—and slasher movies in particular—have been in the business of helping viewers reconcile themselves to some of life’s cold, hard facts. To cite a personal example: as I am not a virginal teenage girl, I know that the odds of my surviving an encounter with a masked, knife-, axe-, or chainsaw-wielding maniac are slim to none. Furthermore, I know that a willingness on my part to make self-conscious, self-deprecating references to popular culture and cinematic conventions—regardless of how such references may both thwart my chances of coital success and endear me to the audience—will do little to improve those odds. Another important and rather more academic lesson I have learned in the school of slash-and-gash is how difficult it can be to appraise a remake on“its own merits” if you have seen the original. As a result, a critical tendency when dealing with remakes in general is to establish a pretense of objectivity, often by declaring an admiration for the original at outset. This tendency comes out most clearly— and, perhaps, honestly—in user comments and reviews found on Web sites like the Internet Movie Database and Ain’t It Cool News, which manage to claim an outright distaste for the trend of remaking major horror movies while maintaining that each new remake has been given the benefit of the doubt and been viewed with an open mind.Yet in spite of such disclaimers, many reviews both professional and amateur proceed nonetheless—and usually unintentionally—to judge the new film in relation to the original. andrew PaTrick nelSon 104 It must be said that there are many other genres from which one could arrive at similar conclusions. Horror certainly has no monopoly on remakes, and thus no monopoly on the ways in which remakes are appraised.I would,however,argue that the tendency to judge remakes in relation to originals is part of a natural, cognitive process. We appraise all movies to some degree based on our experiences, be they from our everyday lives—“it just wasn’t realistic” being a common criticism—or from other movies we have seen.A remake simply provides us with a more concrete background against which to measure a film. What is more, one could certainly argue that, in the case of the horror genre, this tendency is fed not only by a propensity for remakes but also a preponderance of sequels and, more generally, sets of expectations based on familiarity with the genre and its conventions. All genres have conventions, certainly, but there is a fair amount of truth to the old cliché that there is always an audience for horror—the notion that there exists a particular audience that frequents horror movies on a consistent basis. None of this is particularly groundbreaking, of course, and so a more interesting question is how to productively examine and articulate the similarities and differences between remakes and originals while maintaining a degree of generic specificity. To that end, what I first propose to do in this piece is to carry out a comparative analysis of a recent horror remake and its original by adapting the critical approach employed by the literary philosopher Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal 1970 study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Following this, I shall expand my inquiry to consider the role of the fantastic in the broader cyclical contexts of both the original and the remake. Making use of Todorov’s articulation of the fantastic in the context of an examination of the horror movie is by no means an original conceit. Many syllabi for film courses on the horror genre feature Todorov’s text, and several writers, including Noël Carroll and Dudley Andrew, have discussed the fantastic in relation to cinema .But what is at least halfway original—for reasons I shall detail in due course— is my choice of which films to examine. Two HALLOWEENS Perhaps the most notorious, polarizing horror remake of recent years—in terms of both the very idea of attempting a remake and the realization of that notion— is heavy-metal-musician-turned...

Share