But in the 15 years since they've practically become a genre to themselves, with upwards of 35 remakes of horror classics (depending on how you define "classics"), including new versions of Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, The Evil Dead, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Omen, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, to name a few. In the 15 years before Van Sant's Psycho, I count around eight remakes of beloved horror movies, including David Cronenberg's The Fly, Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead, and Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers. This is an independent, outsider director, based in Portland, finding unexpected Hollywood success and using that window of opportunity to perform an experiment that 1) nobody else would be likely to do and 2) could only really be done with studio resources. This is not Michael Bay's production company, Platinum Dunes, buying up Friday the 13th and The Amityville Horror as brand names to repackage for today's youth. People look at it as a normal commercial movie with normal commercial motives. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Van Sant's Psycho works, but it absolutely is misunderstood. As recently as this year, Entertainment Weekly readers named it the No. I know from conversations with friends and movie fans on the Internet that the topic brings forth a violent bitterness normally reserved for discussion of Star Wars prequels. While that fiasco has been largely forgotten, the Psycho remake's infamy continues to grow. Psycho '98 opened to poor reviews, though not as harsh as those of Van Sant's five-years-earlier Tom Robbins adaptation, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Instead, he cashed in all his mainstream chips to not only put his hands all over an untouchable classic, but to do it in the strangest way: He used the original script with only minor modifications, he re-recorded the same score, and, in many scenes, he even mimicked Hitchcock's compositions and camera moves, causing his Psycho to be labeled a "shot-for-shot remake," though that's an exaggeration. Fresh off the critical and commercial success of Good Will Hunting, Van Sant could've tried for another feel-good hit or a high-profile for-hire gig. Fifteen years ago (December 4, 1998) an unusual movie was released, and roundly rejected: director Gus Van Sant's off-puttingly faithful remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
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