The Wicker Man

I just finally saw a trailer for the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man. Creepy supernatural people keep turning into bees and flying away, so obviously this isn't a faithful remake of the original film, which retains a healthy amount of skepticism through Edward Woodward. The thing is, amping up the horror with all this goofy shit with the girl having glowing red eyes on the poster, etc. would actually makes the movie a lot less scary than the original, because it establishes before you even get to the theater that it's all fantastical and not grounded in reality. There can be no dawning sense of horror as Nicholas Cage figures out what's going on, because there's already people turning into clouds of bees (or maybe it was flies) in the trailer.

The very act of casting Nicholas Cage also means the movie has to give him a very different character, because Edward Woodward's devout Protestant virgin from the original just isn't an A-list actor popcorn movie character: Nick Cage has to be much more world-weary, cynical, and imply hot sex with every breath. The characterization in the original allows for the tension and revulsion of Woodward towards the people of the island in the original, and lets him stay a detective fiction character who's stumbled into a ghost story and is having none of it, thank you very much. In my opinion the gut punch of the original film comes from the way detective stories and horror stories begin the same way, before diverging, and people bursting into clouds of bees kinds of blows that.

According to what I've read, the remake apparently decided to make the tension between the policeman and the people of the island not be over Christianity versus paganism. Instead, it's about gender, because being an authority figure as a policeman, Nicholas Cage will represent the patriarchy of the outside world, versus the matriarchy of the island. Unfortunately, female antagonists subjecting men to horror doesn't work too well, because half the audience needs it to be a girl power moment, so they can't follow through, unless she's a cartoonish villain in an action movie. If you think it's just me being paranoid, see Amber Benson talking up the empowerment moment of Kathy Bates crippling a man with a sledgehammer in Misery in that 100 scariest movie moments special. Somebody taking pride in that was the creepiest part of the whole show. That and the numerous times I've heard about peer reviewed studies of matriarchal societies show them to be free of violence and social inequality, without any being named (studies or societies) kind of leads me to believe they'll be toothless in this version as well.

My assumption is once again, we'll get a remake that totally missed what made the original stick in anybody's head for 30 years. With most of these remakes, we already know the story, and where the originals were suffused with the politics and culture of the day, the remakes substitute cartoonish versions of the same issues, which are safe and do nothing to unnerve modern audiences. You don't address today's issues, you look back at the attitude of 30-40 years ago so the audience all agrees and you don't take any chances. (I may have made fun of the hamfistedness of it, but the X-Men movies did actually engage with some of modern society's areas of discomfort.)

But with the commercial remakes, exploiting known properties, you get the remake of the Stepford Wives that had the women better off as robots in the end, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre without meat packers, Dawn of the Dead without Vietnam or race relations, The Hills Have Eyes without nuclear testing, and even though it's not horror The Manchurian Candidate without the original's Cold War paranoia. What stood out as an exception last year was Land of the Dead (a possible parable of Red State America) but that's because it was made by George A. Romero, who was active when these movies were about more than having Michael Berryman jump out and say "Boo!" Even Count Chocula has a fascinating subtext of antisemitism that makes Mel Gibson look open-minded and tolerant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to burst into a cloud of hornets and go build a nest on somebody's balcony.