Horror movies have always pushed boundaries and reflected societal fears and anxieties, but horror movie remakes just may send a shiver up your spine for completely different reasons. For ages now, Hollywood has revisited some of the best in the genre for modernized remakes to varying levels of success. Movies like The Fly and Nosferatu are among the few that succeeded, but others have cemented the belief that you shouldn’t touch the classics. As streamers began to stock their libraries with dozens of horror titles, two horror remakes from 2006 landed on the same platform, and viewers absolutely need to watch one of them.
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As of October 10th, both The Omen and The Hills Have Eyes remakes are available to stream on Hulu. Both movies were released in 2006 and revisited iconic horror films from the ‘70s – Richard Donner’s 1976 supernatural horror classic that centers on the rebirth of the anti-Chris and Wes Craven’s 1977 horror film of the same name about a suburban family targeted by a family of cannibal savages in the Nevada desert.
The Hills Have Eyes Remake Is Criminally Underrated
The Omen and The Hills Have Eyes are far from the first horror movie remakes, and they certainly won’t be the last, but the two films exemplify two very different approaches to revisiting horror classics and ultimately beg the question if one approach is better than the other.
Director John Moore and writer David Seltzer approached their remake of The Omen as a faithful retelling of the original, and in doing so created a film that is a near carbon copy of the 1976 classic. Although not an exact shot-for-shot remake, the movie is a beat-for-beat reproduction that copies much of the original, even down to the script, also penned by Steltzer, which includes line-for-line dialogue lifted straight from the original film, key plot points, and an identical narrative structure. The film only ventures away from its source material on a handful of instances, such as the more contemporary setting in an effort to modernize the story. What resulted was a film that, while not bad, became just another unnecessary recreation.
Alexandre Aja took a much different, and arguably more successful, approach to his remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Rather than a scene-by-scene remake, the movie kept the core elements of the original while expanding on the classic’s mythology and tone. Although Aja kept the fundamental story of a family fighting for survival against cannibals at the core of the story, he expanded the backstory of the villains, establishing them as products of Cold War-era radiation, a decision that not only tapped into the anxieties of post-9/11 America but also added another layer to the horror. The film, also unapologetically brutal in the way it featured more gruesome deaths and gore than the first, was better received than The Omen remake and was an incredibly successful horror remake that improved upon the original.
Other Horror Movies Now on Hulu
The Omen and The Hills Have Eyes remakes joined Hulu’s growing library of horror titles. The streamer is now currently streaming Barbarian, Halloween (2018), Sinister, and The Sixth Sense, as well as the first three Scream films and eight Saw movies.
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