It took me a moment to understand the recently reinvigorated hype around Tim Burton that I’ve been seeing in movie theatre retrospectives and online discourse. At first I thought it must be the anniversary of one of his films, or maybe he’s kicked the bucket – no, surely not. Finally I bothered to dig a little and there it was, a Beetlejuice cast reunion (appropriately double-dubbed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). A revisit of the late-80s classic, one of Burton’s early zany horror-comedies; a film that put him on the map and created one of Winona Ryder’s quintessential personifications in moody gothic teen Lydia Deetz. The sequel premiered at Venice in August and is out now in Berlin, ready to pull in punters for scary season. Why! My eyes rolled.
Halloween this year sees the remakes and franchise reboots coming in thick and fast. There’s Alien: Romulus, the seventh in the Alien cinematic universe. There’s Hellboy: The Crooked Man, another spin on the popular comic book, and Terrifier 3, the latest in Damien Leone’s Art the Clown saga. And then there’s yet another remake of horror master and adaptation favourite Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. This time, The Conjuring universe’s Gary Dauberman (also the screenwriter for the 2017 and 2019 adaptations of King’s infamous clown tale IT) takes the reins as writer and director. Robert Eggers is also taking on the 1922 German occult classic Nosferatu, remaking it with Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Holt and Willem Dafoe (who is proving unstoppable at this point, given that he’s also in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice).
How lazy, unoriginal and embarrassing to even try to walk in the footsteps of one of the 20th century’s cinema masters.
There’s even a new version of The Crow, a comic book story that became the stuff of cult cinema in Alex Proyas’ 1994 adaptation. During the filming, star Brandon Lee tragically died when a prop gun was mishandled, setting off all sorts of rumours about a cursed set. The film was still released, the remaining scenes rewritten or shot with a stunt double, and the movie was a box office hit. Proyas leaned into the material’s comic and dark gothic elements, with great casting and a perfect soundtrack; it’s of its time but still holds up today. So why on earth has it been rebooted now by Rupert Sanders? The new film, starring Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs, is empty, awfully written and unaware of its own incompetence at the craft of filmmaking. It’s an insult to what came before.
With many more revivals and IP-takeover remakes, it’s proving to be an incredibly healthy year for horror at the box office. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with using previous material – a lot of cinema’s finest moments come from literature – but I can’t help but roll my eyes (again) at films like the upcoming Apartment 7A, a chintzy-looking prequel to Roman Polanski’s seminal masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby. This film’s premise is to explore the happenings in the apartment before Rosemary moved in. How lazy, unoriginal and embarrassing to even try to walk in the footsteps of one of the 20th century’s cinema masters. Instead, how about elevating the genre?
Take Dasha Nekrosova’s 2021 The Scary of Sixty-First, a great Italian giallo meets Eyes Wide Shut meets mumblecore-infused indie in which two friends rent an alarmingly cheap flat on the Upper East Side that turns out to be haunted by Jeffery Epstein’s misdeeds. Instead of rehashing and romanticising, Nekrosova leans into genre to comment on something totally current and transgressive. Likewise, Coralie Fargeat’s just-released Cannes-winning The Substance follows in the vein of Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool from last year, elevating the body horror genre made iconic by Brandon’s father, David, to something interesting and original. Instead of harking down vintage memory lane, these directors remind us that horror has always been a fresh way to summon the psychological, political and taboo.
In contrast, these reboot projects take themselves too seriously, believing in their own self-righteousness and ability to handle beloved material, and yet they come up with nothing new, riffing off past icons and ending up vacant and irritating. The studios are greedy; the culture has largely stagnated to childish unoriginality. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice fails to take the original material any further, imitating Burton set pieces with not much else to show. So, this Halloween season, long live the originals, long live the directors who are proving that it’s possible to be original using the tropes the genre has to offer, and long live horror-heads who appreciate both.
