Horror buffs are not a monolith. Broach the topic of Rob Zombie or A24 with a group of them and you’ll see how widely opinions can vary.
But in the early 2000s, there was something on which every card-carrying fright fan seemed to agree — a new trend that united the whole genre against a common enemy, like the monster of The Architects of Fear. If you fancied yourself a true horror fan back then, there was a very good chance that you despised Platinum Dunes and its line of slick, profitable horror remakes with every fiber of your being.
Right from the start, these movies were reviled, critically and in fan circles. Their reputation has not improved. The Chain Saw remake, which just turned 20, remains the easiest target, thanks to what it precipitated: Much of the larger 2000s horror remake trend — a decade of regurgitated scares, a ruthless raiding of the genre vaults — can be traced back to that movie’s robust box-office performance. Likewise, the new Chain Saw set the template for the Platinum Dunes do-overs to come.
You could call it the Bayification of horror, except with very little of the abstract, kinetic, frankly lunatic kaleidoscope qualities of his headache-inducing work — the stuff that’s earned the director a following among connoisseurs of mainstream trash-art. Most of the films’ directors, like Nispel and David Meyers and Samuel Bayer, cut their teeth on commercials and music videos, just as Bay had.
By contrast, the generic Amityville Horror — starring an unconvincingly serious Ryan Reynolds — benefits from rehashing a movie that was no classic to begin with. And though the Friday the 13th remake lacks some of the flavor of the more endearingly dopey installments, it really isn’t much better, worse, or even different than what came before. The F13 movies have always been unabashedly lizard-brained.
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