Fear, Cultural Anxiety, and Transformation

If horror is really about the return of the repressed, then the thought of infinite repetition is the most frightening of all: the stifling security in the knowledge that nothing will ever change. This book, thanks to the insight and intelligence of Lukas and Marmysz, shows how one additional repetition—the remake—can have the power to break the spell and carve out a space for genuine innovation in a world of perpetual sameness. This is a crucial text for anyone interest in popular culture and genre film, but it is, even more importantly, a perspicacious anatomy of what terrifies us the most. -- Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University, and editor, Telos
Scott Lukas and John Marmysz have assembled a series of reflections on the multiplied meanings that films accrue when they are remade, and how science fiction and horror remakes in particular disclose shifts in the objects of cultural dread. These essays explore questions of originality, imitation, appropriation, and irony. This collection will be illuminating for students of video, film, and popular culture, and also for those interested in some of the oldest questions posed by philosophy about appearance, reality, and the artistic exploration of strong emotions. -- Carolyn Korsmeyer, State University of New York-Buffalo
As enlightening as it is eclectic, this collection puts a fresh spin on the idea of the movie re-make, viewing it as much more than an act of derivative imitation or formulaic repetition. Focusing on horror, sci fi, and fantasy films ranging from Rollerball and Solaris to Insomnia and King Kong, the authors highlight the ways in which original movie contents are narratively as well as stylistically re-envisioned. And if we do live nowadays as if in a cave of images upon images, this book teaches us that representations which point directly to other representations may indeed tell us something about our world. -- Kevin L. Stoehr, Boston University
The phenomenon of the remake gets the intellectual attention it deserves, in a series of essays that mobilize everything from the compulsion to repeat in Freud to the impact of nihilism on a subsequent version of the same story. A thoughtful collection that helps us appreciate the importance of noting the differences between an original and its remake in understanding the meaning of both. -- Daniel Shaw, Lock Haven University, managing editor of Film and Philosophy