Given the number of new horror movies that cross our screens on a yearly basis, it’s really quite remarkable to consider that the twin titans of ’80s slashers, once renowned for their near-annual multiplex appearances, have long been missing in action. That’s right: No movies featuring Nightmare on Elm Street emcee Freddy Krueger have been released since 2010, and Jason Voorhees hasn’t been seen since February 2009. (You can probably guess the precise release date.) Granted, legal snares have screwed up plans to revive Jason – the original Friday the 13th title, its characters, and its sequels are somehow not all under the same ownership. But some of those legal problems existed in the late 2000s, and were dutifully worked out on the remix, er, remake, at the behest of the man who produced would-be comebacks for Jason, Freddy, and also Texas Chainsaw’s Leatherface: the other boogeyman himself, Michael Bay.
Bay’s Platinum Dunes shingle churned out a number of slick horror remakes throughout the 2000s; the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre redo was its first title, and the steady stream of remakes didn’t really let up until the company found some franchises of its own via the Purge and Quiet Place series. The remakes earned a reputation as being soullessly Bayified cash grabs, visually slick but thematically empty, and apart from a Texas Chainsaw prequel that underperformed, none of them succeeded in reviving these characters. In retrospect, though, this is shocking, especially considering that his unofficial big-three trilogy were all pretty big hits, albeit of the open-big-and-crash variety. How did three profitable and well-attended ventures starring horror icons drive two-thirds of said icons into a ditch? (Though Leatherface hasn’t really starred in a hit movie since, there’s been no shortage of attempts. At this point, more than half of the films in that series have come out in the past 20 years.)
You could argue that these movies were so poorly-received by critics and especially fans that any prospect for more was doomed anyway. But while it’s true that Platinum Dunes showed welcome restraint by not automatically ordering a fleet of sequels to remakes no one seemed to particularly like, it’s also not as if the Friday the 13th movies or even the Nightmare sequels were especially beloved in their day. The Friday the 13th remake from 2009 made roughly the equivalent of the more popular sequels. The 2010 Nightmare made a similar sum.
Moreover, in the years since those movies were tagged as failures, the predictable arc of horror-movie fandom has taken over, and some – not widespread, but some – reclamation has begun to take place. The excellent critic A.A. Dowd, not exactly a constant champion of the lowbrow, wrote a thoughtful, detailed defense of the Nightmare remake for its tenth anniversary. Specifically, he praises the movie’s discomfiting decision to make Krueger a child molester, rather than a murderer: “I’d argue that this queasy element activates an undercurrent of dread that’s always been percolating under the surface of the franchise. The scene where the teens finally unearth photographic evidence of what happened to them as children is haunting in a way none of Freddy’s eight other Nightmares were. Maybe it’s not the most tasteful subject matter for a multiplex slasher reboot to tackle. But horror isn’t always tasteful—it risks crossing lines in violating our comfort zones.” He’s not wrong.
There isn’t as much to unpack about the 2009 Friday the 13th, which goes out of its way to supply young people as reckless, stupid, and prone to smarmy antics as any of the old movies. But surf your Letterboxd feed for reactions to that movie, especially if you follow some horror-heads, and you may be surprised to find some appreciation, or, at very least, acknowledgment that the remake is not doing things so wildly different than most of the misbegotten Friday sequels, with perhaps more coherent storytelling and higher-level filmmaking.
It’s that slickness that turned off plenty of critics at the time – understandably. The kickoff Platinum Dunes remake, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tries to replicate the gritty wrongness of the ’70s original, even going so far as to hire the original cinematographer Daniel Pearl. The movie certainly has a distinct aesthetic, and it does sometimes look art-directed within an inch of its life, every shade of grime as calibrated as the music videos or ads where Bay got his start (and where Pearl also worked, with Bay). Pearl replicates that look in the 2009 Friday the 13th, which reteams him with Texas Chainsaw ’03 director Marcus Nispel. Nightmare on Elm Street has music-video roots, too; it’s the only feature from director Samuel Bayer, who made Nirvana’s seminal “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, among many others.
These music-video versions of horror classics can’t compete with their sources, obviously. Even the original Friday the 13th, a clunky Halloween knockoff, feels more legitimately verdant and grounded, especially in retrospect. Yet viewed with 15 years or so of hindsight, there is something appealing about how the remakes attempt to sell their own bespoke darkness without turning in something as drab as, say, that recent Hellraiser redo. All three of these biggest Platinum Dunes remakes are shot on film, with vivid saturation and shadows – they’re stylish in a way that plenty of gray, digitally-made “better” horror movies are not. They’re not substantial or collectively interesting enough to qualify as a genuine movement in horror, but it’s hard not to think that if any of them came out now, they’d be much better-received, at very least as a shift in visual emphasis.
These movies also have the advantage of their perceived failures – namely, that they mostly didn’t inspire sequels (save the one Texas Chainsaw prequel) or knockoffs, besides each other. Though they don’t monster-mash their slashers together like Freddy vs. Jason, the Platinum Dunes horrors do feel of a piece as a horror series accidentally reckoning with our fond memories of some horrifying cinema mascots. It’s there in the Nightmare teens sorting through their hidden past, in Nispel’s fastidious recreation of Texas Chainsaw squalor, and in the Friday the 13th re-envisioning of Jason as a lonely survivalist, tending to his surprisingly elaborate lair in the woods, nursing his grudges. (The “real” Jason could never! He’s the type of slasher who had to be made supernatural because it’s the only way to explain how he can live on his own for longer than a few days.) Bay may not have aimed to reinvent the slasher-movie wheel, and he sure didn’t succeed. But it turns out that in whatever form, these movies are pleasingly impossible to kill.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
