Abstract

The film remake has been theorised and examined since it first appeared during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Today, cinematic horror remakes have clearly cemented themselves as a commercially viable facet of popular cinema through the release of recycled narratives such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and it’s prequel The Beginning , The Hills Have Eyes and The Hills Have Eyes 2 , Halloween , Halloween 2 , Friday the 13 th , My Bloody Valentine 3D and The Last House on the Left . Steffen Hantke, in his article “Academic Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of American Horror Cinema: Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety” states: As many new horror films, directed by up and coming directors fail to make the grade, horror film production is shifting emphasis from innovation to canonisation. Starting with the much-lamented glut of remakes, which entrench the originals even more deeply within the cannon of horror cinema; symptoms of this retrospective orientation are everywhere. Although agreeing with Hantke’s argument that the horror remake appears everywhere within the contemporary cinematic landscape, I would argue that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and prequel are exceptional cases insofar as they invite contemporary audiences to erase any knowledge or memory of what they might know or have seen of the original text. In being reconstituted through a contemporary aesthetic filter, Hooper’s original narrative and its three sequels - which were all unsuccessful both critically and commercial - become fragments of cinematic memory jettisoned into a state of what critics might call B cinema, and equated as bad cinema by contemporary audiences