As classic '70s
horror gets the remake treatment beauty still meets the beast
but some of the subtexts may have been lost in the mix, writes
Dave Hall
 Recent years have surely made fans '70s
horror dizzy with déjà vu. Last year's remake
of Wes Craven's 1977 shocker The Hills
Have Eyes is now followed
by The Hills
Have Eyes 2, a perhaps unwelcome reminder that
Craven followed up his own original Hills with a lame-brained
sequel, The Hills Have Eyes Part 2. And these are just the
latest in a recent slew of horror remakes: 30 years on, the
phones in Black Christmas and When
a Stranger Calls may be
more streamlined, but the threat they carry is just as potent;
Leatherface and the zombie hordes are still on the rampage
in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn
of the Dead; and
the supernatural is still making life hell for the unfortunates
in The Omen and The
Amityville Horror. Even the unclassifiable
The Wicker Man and Willard have spawned unlikely remakes,
and still in the pipeline are Rob Zombie's stab at Halloween,
a Wes Craven-produced revisit to the Last
House on the Left and another appointment with Friday
the 13th.
So why the sudden ghoulish smash'n'grab of stalk'n'slash?
If '70s horror reflected the return to realism of cinema
generally at the time, are these remakes an attempt to return
to an era when the genre was more sweat on brow than tongue
in cheek? Or perhaps it's simply that today's filmmakers,
traumatised in their youth, are out to inflict these same
horrors on a new generation…?
 Certainly Michael Bay, Hollywood's 40-something king of the
over-burnished image, seems to have taken it on himself to
spend his spare time disinterring the lurid past. To date,
he has produced new versions of The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre and The
Amityville Horror, and is behind the proposed Friday
the 13th remake. He has even gone beyond the call (or perhaps,
beyond the pale) in providing Leatherface with a back story
in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Unfortunately,
the skin-crawling, nerve-shredding Grand Guignol terror of
Tobe Hooper's original Massacre hasn't benefited from the Bay
makeover; the remake and prequel have an art-directed, filter-rich
gloss that succeeds only in sanitising the horror. When you
see Leatherface pursuing an intended victim through half an
acre of sheets hung out to dry, you might start to identify
with the sheets. These highly polished visuals hint at studio-bound,
post-production control freakery, the effect being to lose
the immediacy and rawness of the scuzzy look and feel favoured
by the likes of Tobe Hooper.
Original
At least Wes Craven, another of the original purveyors of
straight-ahead, gut-twisting gore, is still in the mix. Alexandre
Aja's version of The Hills Have Eyes (produced by Craven) is
one of the more successful of recent remakes, with elements
of visionary sci-fi spliced onto a bloody, extra helping of
horror. The deserted mining town, for example, with its sand-blasted
tailor's dummies standing guard, is genuinely surreal, even
if it does little more than provide a backdrop to some action-man
heroics and spiky mutilations. And if the remake loses much
of the original's anthropological subtext by making the mutants
less a stone-age shadow of their victims and more a showcase
for advances in prosthetic make-up, the remake still retains
much of the cathartic power of the original.
However, whilst another '70s horror guru, George A.Romero
is still pursuing the zombies-as-satire thread in Land
of the Dead, Zack Snyder has no other thought in mind but to act as
Dr Frankenstein to the genre, zapping his exhilarating Dawn
of the Dead remake with so much kinetic energy it's no wonder
the zombies are sprinting after their victims (and giving new
meaning to the term fast food). If '70s directors such as Romero,
Craven and Hooper emerged from the '60s counterculture, their
'00s counterparts belong to the over-the-counter culture, picking
their favourite '70s horror off the shelf along with their
Leatherface action figures, but mostly neglecting to splice
in the subtext that sets apart the best of the genre.
 Characteristically, new versions of films such as Black
Christmas and When
a Stranger Calls focus unerringly on the least interesting
aspects of their source material. Bob Clark's original Black
Christmas had stalk' n'slash trappings, but also worked
at bringing a little more depth to the genre than became usual,
with attempts to humanise both victims and police. Glen Morgan's
remake simply opts for more Christmas-related slayings. And
the remake of When a Stranger Calls completely ditches the
offbeam vigilante-cop-tracks-psycho-killer plot strand that
forms the bulk of the original, and instead stretches the babysitter-in-peril
sequence from an intense 20-minute nerve-shredder to a slack
full length feature, losing tension and credibility in the
process.
The new version of When
the Stranger Calls is set in an enormous
lakeside house whose fixtures and fittings director Simon West
relentlessly fetishises, as if auditioning for a home makeover
show. This showy, art-directed look favoured by many of these
remakes reaches some sort of nadir in the remake of The
Omen,
in which even the exteriors look like interiors, and both are
lit to look like a church during a funeral. No doubt a post-millennial
gravitas is the aim (David Seltzer has updated his original
script to include 9/11 and the Asian tsunami as portents of
doom), but the effect is to cast a pall over this bloodless
production, and make the actors look constipated into the bargain.
The original The Omen came from the
cabinet marked occult, a strand of horror that went mainstream
in the '70s. In films like The Exorcist, The
Omen and The
Amityville Horror, organised religion was always where you
turned when trouble struck (admittedly with varying degrees
of success). Not any more: Rod Steiger's pulpit-chewing turn
as the priest in the original Amityville is all but exorcised
in favour of a few subdued scenes with Philip Baker Hall.
And the remake even ditches the original's cursory “old Indian burial ground” McGuffin,
and goes out of its way to prove the house's squalid past
as a maniac reverend's torture dungeon. The
Omen still half-heartedly
uses biblical prophecy to warn us of impending doom, but the
outcome is a foregone conclusion. Even Nicolas Cage in Neil
LaBute's out-there but underrated remake of The
Wicker Man is neither Christian nor a virgin; he represents the law pure
and simple, and even then an ineffectual, emasculated version
of it.
Explanations
 Most low-budget '70s horror didn't do
explanations – these
things just are, deal with it. Now, even with religion and
the law largely dismissed, there's a perceived need to reassure
the audience, to rationalise the gruesome goings-on. In Craven's
original The Hills Have Eyes, for example, we learn that the
lead cannibal was born “20lbs and hairy as a monkey” and
that's it for back story. But Aja's Hills feels the need to
provide some sort of explanation for these mutations – the
genetic effects of radioactive fallout from government nuclear
testing, apparently. Meanwhile, in hillbilly central, The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning makes it clear that genetic
defects and school bullies are behind Leatherface's love affair
with the chainsaw.
Moreover, the beauty and the beast theme hinted at in the
''70s is explicit in these films, with actors in grotesque
prosthetic make-up set against their perfectly-formed victims,
who in turn face the destruction of their own beauty. The obsession
with image is very much a theme for our times, and when Leatherface
dons the skinned facade of one of his airbrushed victims, in
a direct lift from Silence of the Lambs, he gives new meaning
to the term facelift.
The new “splat pack” directors
have further redefined the genre, of course, to include the
kind of gratuitous torture sequences favoured by films like
the Saw series or Eli Roth's Hostel, where grisly make-up effects
and aggressive sound design combine to send the nerves into
trauma. Elements of this trend have found their way into the
recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, and the two Hills Have
Eyes remakes. Amid all this carnage though the subtext is as
conservative as it gets; that everyone who isn't like us is
out to harm us. Extreme as they are, these films provide 18-certificate
support to the mainstream media's tendency to demonise the “other”, homegrown or
otherwise. What price a film in which American teens are terrorised
by a merchant banker or find themselves persecuted in an “extraordinary
rendition” camp…?
 The dismemberments and dissections that now routinely feature
in recent horror films are perhaps the perfect metaphor for
the contemporary need to deconstruct. In these remakes, edifices
that were once reassuring are now shaky: religion is downplayed,
the law is largely ineffective (or, in the case of the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre remake, completely demented), and even science
and technology is pretty much written off (a mobile phone won't
help you in the radioactive New Mexican desert of The
Hills Have Eyes). So, what's left? The original Hills
Have Eyes and
Texas Chainsaw Massacre suggested all we have ultimately is
the instinct for survival; this is now a theme in many remakes
of '70s horror, as well as the recent spate of torture films.
The slick, art-directed packaging in which many of these films
are delivered serves the media's need to sanitise, even if
it does play against the realism of the best 70s horror. But
the fear of otherness and unreason that the '70s originals
tapped into still lie under the surface of their post-millennial
updates.
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