Movies you PRAY they never remake

No. What I said was, the studios don't have the balls to make a proper Exorcist remake. Hell, The Fly '86 is one of my favorite films, and that's a fantastic remake. And in my thread about Blum, I'm referring to one guy/company who seems to be making more and more remakes. That thread was sparked by something I read about him wanting to do a Frankenstein movie. He/they should be focusing on movies like Get Out, and not regurgitating the classic stuff. Seems like a huge waste, and a disservice to the genre.

I am not against remakes, or PG-13 horror. Not at all. My beef is with a hypothetical idea, and that idea is that if The Exorcist were ever to be remade, it would not be as sexually suggestive as the original film, and that is a really important aspect to the film. That aspect made it feel authentic, because why wouldn't a demon speak and act like that?




Dude, did you even read what I wrote? I kinda feel like you didn't. It's very obvious that It was R-rated and that it was beyond successful. Maybe I wasn't clear. Yes, remakes can work sometimes, and yes, they can be successful. Even monkeys fall out of trees.



I was coming up with ideas about why I thought it was successful, and how it differs from The Exorcist and other films. The two films aren't comparable, and your example wasn't a very good one.



"Practically." I'm referring to the fact that more and more tweens are getting in to see R-rated movies in the theater like there isn't even a rating. And as you said yourself, Game of Thrones is the most popular show after all. In America, it's still more acceptable to show violence than it is to show sex (HBO/other skin channels aside) I don't remember there being any sex in the It remake. Which brings me back to my main point.

The Exorcist can't be remade, because the sexual themes are way too strong. Imagine if Gus Van Sant did a shot-for-shot remake of The Exorcist like he did with Psycho, but he just modernized it a little. He kept all the same beats, and cast Jeté Laurence as Regan. You're telling me, that the whole crowd that you watched It with in the theater would be totally fine with seeing Jeté Laurence playing Regan down to a T? Something tells me that in this day and age, there would be a whole lot of people that would have a problem with that, and that's even before the movie gets off the ground.



Have you seen the Halloween '78? Rob Zombie didn't remake it, he made his own Halloween. And if you insist on calling it a remake, that's fine. He screwed that remake up because he filled in the gaps. He added a back story, and gore, which it did not need. The only reason that movie got greenlit was because of the original being so popular. Nobody took a risk with that idea.



That's just it, people aren't watching The Exorcist, they're watching other people's interpretation of The Exorcist. This is exactly what I dislike about remakes. You water somebody else's work down and make a joke out of it long enough, people become comfortable with the subject matter and lose all respect for the original film/idea, much like you have.

Sit down and watch The Exorcist. Hell, then sit down and read the book. I bet your respect for the film would increase tenfold if you actually spent some time with it. Watch it when you're alone at night, and try to imagine what the audience must have felt like when it first came out. Don't put on Scary Movie 2 in the middle of the day and stick your nose up in the air and wonder to yourself why everybody holds that movie in such high regard.

On the other hand, he produced Leigh Whannell's remake of The Invisible Man and that drew considerable acclaim for actually coming up with a fresh angle for the character while being a solid R-rated horror in its own right so I could see him finding similar potential in a Frankenstein remake.

Probably because I thought your whole point was that any horror remake was going to end up PG-13 by default and anything else was secondary.

I'm trying to remember the last time a King adaptation was anywhere near as successful as It, though.

This does make me question just how essential these sexual themes are to the film in the first place, though (especially if you're going to argue that they're the main/only reason the film couldn't be remade today). Here I was thinking it was a film about losing and/or finding one's faith, especially in the increasingly agnostic/atheistic world of a post-counterculture America (in a way that arguably makes the film kinda conservative at its core despite its more graphic moments) and also in the wake of personal trauma.

Still following on from the stated presumption that horror remakes end up being PG-13 so the quality isn't relevant, just the fact that it exists is enough.

I've seen it at least three times and one of those times was in a theatre, so these comments aren't coming from a place of disrespect for the film itself. Any film that seeps into the cultural consciousness as much as that one did is capable of becoming a source of humour after enough time has passed, even (especially?) horror movies. I shouldn't have to explain that to the person whose avatar is a zombie version of Captain America.

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I hate to sound like a Debbie Downer here, but nobody should ever bring up The Invisible Man (2020) to use as a positive example of what's coming out of Blum House. That thing is flawed beyond belief, and quite frankly, a complete bore. As far as its R rating goes, you probably could have gotten away with a PG-13. That thing was weak as hell. You wanna see the Invisible Man with some nuts? Watch the Director's cut of a Hollow Man. That is a badass horror movie right there. Whannell's Invisible Man feels more like a Marvel origin story.

Again, I'm fine with somebody wanting to do a remake of The Invisible Man, or Frankenstein, it's just that I hate the fact that this neo horror figurehead of a production company is wasting its time with the basics, the stuff we have plenty of. I'd like to put on a new horror movie and be able to discover new monsters, and lasting worlds.

Well, I just think there are varying degrees of an R rating. A perfect example of this (forgive me for taking it here) is the romcom It's Complicated. That thing has an R rating, and that movie has got to be one of the most gentle R rated comedies I have ever seen. I don't think they swear once, and there's certainly no violence or nudity (then again, a clothed Lake Bell could still be considered too racy and possibly earn it some nudity).

The only thing I can think of is that it got an R rating for more or less being entirely about sex. They were talking about sex, planning sex, yet no nudity or real sex was ever shown or really even implied all that well. It was made to be a joke. Also, you have some glorification of pot usage and perhaps that was still a little taboo in 2009 for the ratings board. Anyway, R doesn't always mean the good stuff.

Nothing like what It did, but The Green Mile made 290 all said and done. Looks like it struggle straight out the gate, though. Struggled at the Oscars too, picking up nothing but some noms. That's probably the next biggest King moneymaker.

No, no, no. You're absolutely right! It's about all of that and probably more (I haven't spent as much time with it as I have with something like Kubrick's The Shining). I'm just shining a light on what I think would halt the go-ahead for this thing to be remade. But, just like a lover of a book who goes to see the movie, I would hate it if any detail small or big were omitted from the film, and omitted on behalf of what I believe to be the systems prudish nature and lack of reverence. And need to make money.

You describing in detail what you think The Exorcist is about shows me that you do respect it. So my apologies for assuming otherwise.

Forgive me typos, and for cutting this short. I was just mind****ed by the film The Golden Glove (2019) and I need a shower, and possibly some therapy.

What if they remade Earth Girls Are Easy, but made it better? Bad idea?

Bad idea, you can't improve on perfection...

I'm not about to call the 2020 film perfect by any means (definitely feels too long), but I think it's a valid variation on the character to have him be this paranoia-inducing presence that torments the real protagonist. I don't think its restraint should be construed as weakness either - certain scenes in it stand out as scarier than anything in Hollow Man by virtue of that balance whereas Hollow Man is operating in a heightened mode at all times that may be appreciable in a pulpy slasher kind of way but doesn't make for an overly effective horror experience. That's why I don't think that horror should necessarily aspire to being "badass" because you have to compromise the fun of scary movies for the fun of badass movies (they are two different flavours that are hard to mix right). Just look at a few years ago when Universal was trying to jump-start their own Marvel-style shared universe with films like Dracula Untold and The Mummy (2017) that tried to use these horror icons as the basis for generic tentpole action blockbusters - when those predictably failed, that's when they decided to go through Blumhouse and redo the characters using actual horror movies (and The Invisible Man works well enough to validate this approach).

In any case, Blumhouse originals outnumber their remakes anyway now and in the foreseeable future so I daresay people are more likely to remember them for the likes of Sinister or Get Out than for their remakes (however good they may be, though so far it looks like The Invisible Man is the only genuinely good one).

Won't argue that. I live in a different country where the rating system goes M (the equivalent of a PG-13 or light R e.g. Breakfast Club), then MA15+ (equivalent of R), and finally R18+ (hard R and NC-17) so the classification boards are at once a little more lenient in some regards and also harsher in others.

Probably helps that it's not a horror movie and stars Tom Hanks, but it's still a three-hour prison movie so that would limit its widespread appeal a bit.

I can accept some flexibility when it comes to new adaptations - you could definitely argue that an adaptation that doesn't change a single detail is as inessential as an adaptation that changes too much, plus it's fair to at least question which details are worth keeping from an original. Then again, you can go too far in the opposite direction and get filmmakers who add more extreme content to films in order to make them more horrifying by modern standards but which actually ruin the spirit of the original (case in point - the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween are both comparatively light on actual gore whereas the remakes go overboard with it and the latter even gets a rape scene added to it that is definitely an unpleasant and unnecessary addition to the proceedings). All these scenarios are plausible in the case of an Exorcist remake, I suppose.

Understandable, it's easy to jump to conclusions based on an initial disagreement.

Oh really, that's not good because I didn't like Hollow Man, so if this new one is even worse than that, than that's not good.

I would love a proper adaptation of Frankenstein, though, as there hasn't yet been a truly great adaptation yet in my opinion.

I think the 2020 film is better than Hollow Man, but I guess it depends what exactly you didn't like about Hollow Man.

Which adaptations of Frankenstein have you seen?

My personal vote:

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Understand this last part, and you'll get them all.

Mulan but too late for that.

Honestly there are very few movies that need remakes. I have never got the obsession with remaking movies. Remakes of 1930s movies they came out in the 50s were worse than the originals. One would think 70 years would be enough to learn .

Black Christmas (2019)

The one with Kenneth Branagh & Robert DeNiro (1994) was one of the most faithful adaptations to the book.
Only one problem... the book isn't very good (at least, not by today's standards).

Is it the mother of science fiction? Yeah, it has that honor, but as a read it's pretty dull despite the cool topic of reanimating dead tissue and creating a patchwork man out of corpses.

It's "science fiction" yet there's very little science in it. Before reading the book I anticipated in-depth chapters about Victor's experiments, his assembling the creature and bringing it to life - but all that interesting stuff is mostly glossed over.

Another drawback is there is no real protaganist in the story - no one to root for. Unlike the movies, the creature is not a tragic yet sympathetic figure - rather, he's a wanton killer of innocents. And his creator is no prize either (no wonder they hate each other).

The only part of the book that really grabbed me was the part where the creature learns language from a family he's spying on while hiding out in their shed.

Somnium was written in 1608 (published later that century). So there's probably an argument among purists in there somewhere.


Guessing, but maybe that's because there was nothing she could have added at the time? The concept of Zombies had been around forever, but this was a new idea, and getting parts working without some kind of magic involved might have been beyond any scientist to even spitball and theorize in 1818.

Surely it was due to limitations on scientific knowledge at the time, but it also suggested to me that perhaps Shelley wasn't all that up on medicine and science even for the time. Not blaming Shelley - she didn't set out to become a science fiction writer, but wrote the story on a whim.

Found a short article on some of the science that may have influenced Shelley's fiction...
https://www.insidescience.org/news/s...e-frankenstein

I guess I was a bit misled by movies that have gone to great length to depict Dr. Frankensteins lab, and have delved into how the creature is assembled and given life (the science-fictiony aspects of the story) which are mostly absent from the original book.

For an interesting few minutes, read up on Johann Conrad Dippel, the actual Frankenstein. A German alchemist from the 17th century, he was born in an actual place called "Castle Frankenstein". He attempted to reanimate dead animals and also invented a noxious substance called Dippel's Oil, which he thought could confer a life span of 135 years but mainly ended up being used to poison wells and denature alcohol. Poor Conrad only reached 61, in spite of his magic oil. He also invented the dye color known as Prussian Blue and spent some years in prison for his attempts at reanimation. Facts on Dippel are slim, legends many, but it appears that Mary Shelley travelled in his part of Germany and probably heard about Dippel. Her use of the castle name strongly suggests that she knew something about him. I reanimated my interest in Dippel when I found out that I might be a distant relative, like he might be my 8th uncle, 8 times removed or something like that.

This could be the starting point for yet another revisionist version of Mary Shelley's story. I've seen a bunch of them, but have been always disappointed in how much they missed about what a smart book the original IS. Dippel would provide yet another variation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Conrad_Dippel

I've seen Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Frankenstein (1992), and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994). I've seen Young Frakenstein as well, but I wasn't counting that one since it's a spoof, which is also good, but not a proper adaptation I feel.

Are there any better ones that I missed?

The one that Captain Steel mentioned is my favorite: The one with Kenneth Branagh & Robert DeNiro (1994).

@skizzerflake, You're a potential relative? That's insanely cool!
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Frau Blucher!

(Neigh....)