The classic horror remakes actually worth watching

At this point, horror franchises are nearly as old as cinema itself. By the release of 1931’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — the first with sound — there was already a history of terrifying films in the silent era, especially among the geniuses working within the German Expressionism movement.

The roots of horror films draw heavily from folklore, religion, and literature, which has meant many of the most enduring horror franchises are ones that existed far before film became a mainstream art form — Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man. The Universal Monster franchise is a big part of this (and its many attempts at rekindling that magic), but horror’s history is so present in human culture that it feels only natural the genre would develop this way in cinema.

That’s not to say there haven’t been new entries to the canon of classic horror monsters — the Alien franchise’s Xenomorphs, the Predator, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface. But there’s something special about returning to the well of classic horror monsters, as we’ve seen recently with the success of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and the presence of Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man.

Inspired by those two recent releases, we thought it was a good time to run through some of the best remakes of classic horror movies. We’re stretching the definition of classic a bit to include some of the latter additions to the horror monster canon, but we promise: All of these are a scary good time.

Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Kurt Russell, A. Wilford Brimley, Keith David
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Where to watch the original: The Roku Channel

Any list of the best horror remakes is incomplete without The Thing. John Carpenter’s remake of 1951’s The Thing from Another World eclipses the original in all respects, thanks to a terrific lead performance by Kurt Russell as a hardened helicopter pilot and practical creature effects by the legendary makeup effects artist Rob Bottin. The film landed with a thud at the box office, due in no small part to its proximity to the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but has since been vindicated as not only one of Carpenter’s best, but one of the best sci-fi horror movies of its era. —Toussaint Egan

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Director: Philip Kaufman
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy
Where to watch: AMC, MGM Plus
Where to watch the original: MGM Plus, The Roku Channel

Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers transplants the film’s premise from the outskirts of rural California to San Francisco, following a small, unsuspecting group of scientists as they attempt to resist a mysterious extraterrestrial invasion that has abducted countless humans and replaced them with malicious duplicates. Starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, and Jeff Goldblum, the film is an eerie and unsettling drama with taut tension, captivating twists, and a chillingly memorable finale. As much a paranoid treatise on the perils of groupthink as it is a chilling sci-fi horror story, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a rich and layered movie that sticks with you from start to finish. —TE

Director: Leigh Whannell
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Where to watch the original: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Wolf Man wasn’t director Leigh Whannell’s first effort at remaking a classic Universal Monster movie. That honor goes to The Invisible Man, a tense reboot of the 1933 movie led by an unsurprisingly powerful performance from Elisabeth Moss, playing a woman stuck in a nightmare of a relationship with a tech CEO. The adaptation uses new technology in very interesting ways to amp up the scares, aided by Whannell’s tight direction — as a writer of the first three Saw movies, all five Insidious movies, and the director of Upgrade, he certainly has the bona fides for this kind of project. —Pete Volk

Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Where to watch the original: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

In the 1980s, David Cronenberg dared to ask one brave question: What if a man was a fly who could fuck? The 1986 remake of Kurt Neumann’s 1958 original casts future Jurassic Park star Jeff Goldblum in the role of Seth Brundle, a brilliant scientist on the verge of perfecting teleportation technology. After accidently splicing his DNA with an errant fly that gets caught in the middle of one of his experiments, Seth becomes increasingly more violent and erratic in his behavior. The practical makeup and special effects that go into depicting Seth’s gradual transmogrification into a grotesque human-fly hybrid are extraordinary and worth watching the film alone. —TE

Director: Gore Verbinski
Cast: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Where to watch the original: AMC Plus, Criterion Channel

The early 2000s were a fascinating time when studios were spending tens of millions of dollars on horror blockbusters. Among the best of these is the American remake of Ring, a Japanese movie about a haunted videotape that kills the viewer seven days after they watch its strange montage of images. While the remake lacks the empathy and scares of the original, The Ring is a wholly unique and worthwhile experience on its own and feels completely different from the horror movies of any other era. With a blockbuster budget and gorgeous direction from Gore Verbinski, this remake is somewhere between a ghost story and a mystery-thriller and relies more on its world’s excellent sense of haunting dread than direct scares. —Austen Goslin

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth
Where to watch: Prime Video
Where to watch the original: Plex

Every remake on this list is transformative to one extent or another, but few of them approach that transformation as thoroughly as director Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria. The original film is a classic of ’70s Italian horror cinema. Directed by the legendary Dario Argento, Suspiria is a bloody, colorful, and absolutely gorgeous film about a young American dancer who moves to Freiberg, Germany, to attend a dance school, only to discover that it’s run by an ancient witch who’s feeding off the youth of the students. Each student slowly falls victim to various horrors inside the school one by one, all set to one of the most incredible and vibey soundtracks of all time.

Guadagnino takes this supernatural slasher-ish premise and turns it into something far darker and more profound. His remake of the film still follows a dancer who moves to Europe from America to attend school, but this time the school is set in divided Berlin immediately after World War II. He uses this setting to engage directly with questions about art’s relation to tragedy, and whether it’s the responsibility of an artist, in a time of tragedy, to create pleasant art that stands against the times or art that reflects the pain of its contemporary moment back at the world.

The Suspiria remake is as thematically ambitious as any movie made so far this century. Guadagnino uses the springboard of Argento’s classic as a shorthand way of establishing this universe of dancing and witches, and turns it into something larger and more complicated that stands beside its predecessor as an equally excellent but very different film. —AG

Director: Craig Gillespie
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Imogen Poots
Where to watch: Prime Video
Where to watch the original: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

The 2011 remake of Fright Night stars Anton Yelchin as Charley, a nerdy teenager living in a suburb on the outskirts of Las Vegas with his single mom, Jane (Toni Collette). When Jerry (Colin Farrell), a handsome and brooding stranger, moves in next door, Charley soon learns that his new neighbor is in fact a vampire on a rampage and killing people all around town. Enlisting the aid of Peter Vincent (David Tennant), a flamboyant Vegas Strip magician with an interest in the occult, and his girlfriend, Amy (Imogen Poots), Charley is forced to face off with Jerry and his sired underlings in a desperate bid to save his town. Farrell delivers a fantastic and unsettling performance as Jerry, and the late Anton Yelchin is charismatic as the film’s leading man. —TE

Director: Zack Snyder
Cast: Sarah Polley, Jake Weber, Ving Rhames
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Where to watch the original: Available to rent on Amazon

This 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s horror masterpiece about a group of people stuck together in a mall during a zombie apocalypse is as straightforward a remake as anything on this list. It borrows the same premise with almost no alterations, and only really adjusts the details of the story to keep the movie feeling thematically fresh 26 years after the original was released.

And that was probably the right call. Romero’s thinly veiled metaphor about the dangers of excess consumerism was no less relevant in 2004 than it was in 1978, all that really needed adjusting was the clothes. Of course, this being the feature film debut of director Zack Snyder also meant that the gore needed an update, too, but even in that regard, Snyder keeps the brutality of the film close to the spirit of Romero in a way that feels both like an homage and an evolution at the same time. And sometimes that’s exactly what a reboot should be. —AG

Director: Robert Eggers
Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Where to watch the original: Prime Video

There’s no shortage of Nosferatu films, and the fact that the original story is just a thinly veiled version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula brings the tally up even higher. But what makes Robert Eggers’ 2024 version of the story so special is actually the way it positions itself in the modern landscape of movies — not just how it relates to the previous versions of Nosferatu. In that context, Eggers’ film feels more like a demake than a remake.

It isn’t an attempt to modernize a classic, but rather to reemphasize that the horrors of yesteryear haven’t left us entirely. Everything about the film, from Eggers’ rigorous commitment to lighting scenes using only candles to his vision of Orlok as a mysterious, unknowable, but thoroughly human-adjacent evil, feels like it comes from another era of filmmaking. The remake resists the urge to distort the Dracula story into something vague and metaphorical, and instead forces us to confront it simply as a story of an ancient evil coming to haunt us. He’s perfectly willing to let you read into that evil however you please, which feels very casually revolutionary given how many horror films today are more metaphor than movie. —AG