Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s

AN EXPANSIVE TREATMENT OF THEMEANINGS AND QUALITIES OF ORIGINALAND REMADE AMERICAN HORROR MOVIESIn Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000sauthor David Roche takes up the assumption shared bymany fans and scholars that original horror movies aremore 'disturbing,' and thus better than the remakes. Heassesses the qualities of movies, old and recast, accordingto criteria that include subtext, originality, and cohesion.With a methodology that combines a formalist and culturalstudies approach, Roche sifts aspects of the Americanhorror movie that have been widely addressed (class, thepatriarchal family, gender, and the opposition between terror and horror) and those thathave been somewhat neglected (race, the Gothic, style, and verisimilitude). Containingseventy-eight black and white illustrations, the book is grounded in a close comparativeanalysis of the politics and aesthetics of four of the most significant independent Americanhorror movies of the 1970s-The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of theDead, and Halloween-and their twenty-first-century remakes.To what extent can the politics of these films be described as 'disturbing' insomuch asthey promote subversive subtexts that undermine essentialist perspectives? Do the politicsof the film lie on the surface or are they wedded to the film’s aesthetics? Early in the book,Roche explores historical contexts, aspects of identity (race, ethnicity, and class), and thestructuring role played by the motif of the American nuclear family. He then asks to whatextent these films disrupt genre expectations and attempt to provoke emotions of dread,terror, and horror through their representations of the monstrous and the formal strategiesemployed? In this inquiry, he examines definitions of the genre and its metafictionalnature. Roche ends with a meditation on the extent to which the technical limitations of thehorror films of the 1970s actually contribute to this 'disturbing' quality. Moving far beyondthe genre itself, Making and Remaking Horror studies the redux as a form of adaptation andenables a more complete discussion of the evolution of horror in contemporary Americancinema.DAVID ROCHE, Toulouse, France, is professor at the Université Le Mirail. He is the editorof Conversations with Russell Banks (published by University Press of Mississippi), coeditorof Approaches to Film and Reception Theories, and author of L’Imagination malsaine: RussellBanks, Raymond Carver, David Cronenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, David Lynch.