The Horror, the Horror!

A remake of a remake of an adaptation. Oy.

An admission: I am not a fan of the modern horror film. I find most of them to be any combination of the following bad qualities: banal, badly made, bloody, and bloody boring.

And so I suspect that I am not the target audience for this spring’s coming remake of The Last House on the Left. But really, I ask: does anybody need an update of Wes Craven’s 1972 original – a film that in and of itself was essentially a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring? To give voice to an old complaint: why can’t the studios spend their money making films that contain some spark of originality? There is no pressing need to remake Craven or Bergman.

Bergman's The Virgin Spring – which was adaptated from an old Russian folktale – is a stark film, occasionally brutal, and serves as a grim meditation on the issues of faith and human nature. Its plot centers on the murder of an innocent girl in Medieval Sweden, on the vengeance wrought by the girl’s parents, and on the crisis of faith that these events inspire in the girl's father.

It is a horrifying film, certainly – as horrifying as anything you will see today - but not pointless, not boring, and not at all banal. Quite unlike many modern horror films.