Remakes are complicated creatures. It takes vision, craft, and understanding of the original film to get it right. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. From my Best Horror Remakes of All Time list, it’s a good time to dissect what I consider to be the two best remakes to date. In The Picture Show, I take a scalpel to what works so well in Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, examining the ways they both honor the original film while also doing something so wildly cool and original of their own.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) opens with retrieved footage from a police walkthrough of the Hewitt residence. It’s grainy, and the audio crackles. It feels so real, and it wasn’t until I hit my 20s that I realized it wasn’t real. I was either that gullible as a teenager, or Nispel’s visual choices were that good, but probably both. The filmmaker relies on the audience buying into the footage as authentic. Even the bellowing, menacing voiceover (thanks for your service, John Larroquette!) seems ripped from a true crime docu-series. The film’s first minute or so sets the macabre tone of the deranged series of events Erin (Jessica Biel) and her friends endure over the course of 90 minutes.
While the film certainly has the Hollywood polish of early-2000s filmmaking, there remains a grittiness to the camera work and visual aesthetic (e.g., the shot of the Hewitt house with billowing fog). It’s dissimilar to the rawness of the 1974 original, yet carries its essence for a more modern perspective of early ’70s Texas. Daniel Pearl, director of photography for both films, delivers the visceral friction needed for each story. Tobe Hooper’s classic digs into the bloody, primal response to emotional and physical torture, whereas Nispel’s version fuels the trusty Final Girl narrative—a young woman empowered to fight back and escape on her own.
I’ll just say it: Jessica Biel’s Erin is far superior to Marilyn Burns’ Sally Hardesty in every way. Sally is not only horrible to her brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), and eventually gets him killed, but she also fails to meet the moment when it matters most. In the finale, all she does is literally run around and scream. Well, except for the two times she jumps out of a window to escape. She’s neither what I would call a good (or even decent) Final Girl nor someone even worth rooting for. Erin, on the other hand, feels like a lived-in character, perhaps owed to Biel’s imbuing the character with humanity and strength.
The remake’s remaining characters also feel grounded and real. Erin’s boyfriend Kemper (Eric Balfour) drives the group back from Mexico, where he bought two pounds of weed, on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. He secretly plans to propose to Erin with a tear-cut diamond ring, something she’s always wanted. Pothead Morgan (Jonathan Tucker), sex-crazed Andy (Mike Vogel), and hitchhiker (not that one) Pepper (Erica Leerhsen) pulse with their own wants and needs, inner workings that drive them forward in the story. They aren’t flimsy paper cutouts like those in the original.
Sheriff Winston Hoyt (aka Charlie Hewitt Jr.) is played with terrifying precision by the late, great R. Lee Ermey. Hoyt might be the most horrifying part of the remake. It’s not necessarily Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) you need to be scared of (just don’t go into his house, is all), but it’s the family surrounding him. Ermey taps into the dangerous corruption of cops, needling his way from the failed “protect and serve” mantra to the sheer cruelty with a prickly performance that remains among the most disturbing in horror. The perversion of the character (complementary) stands in stark contrast to the patriarchal character in the original, who possesses mere traces of Ermey’s version. Here, Hoyt transforms into the kind of villain we truly deserve. You just love to hate him. And when Erin runs him over (three times!) at the end, you’re cheering!
The brutality in the remake is far more intense, too. There’s a real urgency to the setpieces, including the two standouts: Andy’s hanging on a meat hook and the hitchhiker (yes, that one) shooting herself in the head with a revolver she hid inside her body. That death scene, shot in one take, zooming from the inside of Kemper’s van, through the woman’s now-hollow skull, and out the busted back window, remains the single best moment in 2000s horror. That’s pure cinema.
It’s impossible to beat Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! comes pretty damn close. I can already hear the groans through the screen. Relax. It’s just a movie! Well, actually, it’s a movie that I found myself wrapped up in—and I wrote a full essay about how and why. From a technical and storytelling perspective, The Bride! reimagines the classic Bride of Frankenstein into a heart-rending, madening romance. Many, I’m sure, take it as a complete betrayal of the original film, in which The Bride shuns Frankenstein’s monster, but it’s far from it. In fact, I discovered a lot of trans rage buried within the story that you just don’t find in the landmark 1935 film.
First things first: The Bride! centers its entire story around The Bride (Jessie Buckley), origin and all. She’s not relegated to the last 15 minutes and a footnote in what’s supposed to be her own story. Maggie Gyllenhaal clears the way for a more profound examination of what The Bride feels on a molecular level. The opening scene recalibrates the story as an absurd piece of surrealism. While The Bride drinks and carouses with friends in a packed restaurant, Mary Shelley (also played by Buckley), author of Frankenstein, pokes through the black, desolate purgatory she’s been trapped in for centuries. Her verbose language slithers from The Bride’s lips, confusing the other partygoers, and quickly escalates to the point where she’s escorted from the room and falls down a flight of stairs.
The peculiar scene stages the film as a van Gogh painting come to life. The visual storytelling (coarse, yet posh, and always off-kilter) clings to the senses in an arresting way, shedding away the simplicity of the original film for a smattering of brain matter. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher, whose credits include Joker (2019) and its musical sequel starring Lady Gaga, brings a vibrancy to the story that punctuates both The Bride’s awakening and her eventual demise.
“Here comes the motherfucking Bride!” Mary Shelley cackles moments before the lightbulb title card. Everything about the story is fresh, new, and exciting. We never got much story with The Bride to begin with, so Gyllenhaal had a world of opportunity to say something and do something truly wicked. And she sure does! The Bride and Frankenstein’s Monster (or “Frank,” as he’s called) (Christian Bale) essentially become Bonnie & Clyde after Frank kills several predatory men in a dark alleyway. On the run, they leave Chicago behind and venture to the bright lights of New York City. But two detectives quickly follow, leading to bloody chaos in a movie theater and later at a lavish party, where The Bride guns down a police officer. Their murderous escapades take them all over the country, opening the story up in substantial ways (i.e., it’s not confined to Frankenstein’s laboratory, thus driving home universal themes about identity, love, and death).
What is most special about The Bride! lies in Jessie Buckley’s magnificent and strange performance. She’s hypnotic onscreen. She not only delivers the vocal eccentricities but also the physical demands of such a role. You have to remember that The Bride is a resurrected body, so the physical choices should inhabit that in-between space of the living and the dead. Buckley is perfectly uneven in the physicality, capturing the lack of control in The Bride’s very existence. That grip on spatial awareness—within the environment and between other people—requires a fine-tuned understanding of one’s own body. Buckley crafts a remarkable performance, one so engulfed in bodily expression. By the soul-rending last scene, during which both The Bride and Frank are killed by a firing squad, Buckley has sold you on every part of the character.
It’s that dedication to the work by the casts of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Bride! that cements the films in horror history. Along with the clearly defined visions of the filmmakers, the films beg for critical analysis for decades to come. The modern lens gives today’s filmmakers permission to scrape far below the surface for fresh eyes, new dead bodies, and thrilling thematic material that you just couldn’t get in the originals. Let’s see what someone has to say 50 years from now, yeah?
sink. your. teeth.
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