The Re-make as (Dis)avowal: The Ambivalent Stances of the Hollywood Blockbuster Horror Remakes of the 2000s

David Roche (1)

1 CAS - Cultures anglo-saxonnes

The 2000s have seen a number of remakes in the horror genre. If critics have generally argued that Hollywood aims at erasing the original movie when it is foreign, the marketing strategy of domestic remakes relies on the audience’s awareness of the existence of the original film. As the prefix “re-” suggests, producing a remake generally rests on the belief that a profit can be made by improving on the original in terms of technique and technology. This article attempts to foreground some of the contradictions immanent to the remake by arguing that what Thomas Leitch calls its “stance” is, in effect, a disavowal of the very terms contained in the prefix. The remakes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) and Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)—are examined as paradigmatic examples of this disavowal through a study of both pragmatic and formal levels.

Mots clés: remake; horror; stance; disavowal; improvement; technique; technology; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974); The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003); Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013); Tobe Hooper; Thomas Leitch; Marcus Nispel; John Luessenhop

Domaines: Littératures; Art et histoire de l'art

David Roche. The Re-make as (Dis)avowal: The Ambivalent Stances of the Hollywood Blockbuster Horror Remakes of the 2000s. Représentations : la revue électronique du CEMRA, 2015, Bis repetita placent ? Remake et technologie dans le cinéma et les séries télévisées anglophones, pp.7-19. ⟨hal-01253866⟩