Sometimes the best horror movies are made for very little money, but it doesn't mean these golden low-budget creepshows don't deserve remakes with all the bells and whistles.
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00:00 Sometimes, the best horror movies are made for very little money, but it doesn't mean
00:04 these golden, low-budget creep shows don't deserve remakes with all the bells and whistles.
00:10 Whether Dutch Marich's horror in the high desert gets a remake or not, it remains one
00:14 of the scariest found-footage movies of the century.
00:17 Structured as a faux-documentary, Marich's low-budget shocker uses several talking heads
00:22 to explore the case of Gary Hinge, who disappeared while hiking the Great Basin Desert.
00:27 "The chances of finding him and finding him alive were slim to none."
00:33 For the first hour, Horror in the High Desert speculates on what might have happened, and
00:38 as frightening as some of the suggested theories are, the truth is considerably more horrifying.
00:43 Especially when you consider these events with the additional context provided in Marich's
00:48 equally low-budget sequel, Horror in the High Desert 2, Minerva.
00:52 Marich treats the audience to a genuinely terrifying foray into the darkness, cementing
00:57 himself as a horror auteur.
00:59 But it's in the film's early moments where a remake could spruce things up.
01:03 Horror in the High Desert takes a while to get going, and despite the committed work
01:07 of an unknown cast, it very much feels like an indie production.
01:11 The television graphics, interview staging, and true-crime pantomime feel close to the
01:16 real thing, but are ultimately too uncanny.
01:19 A remake could tighten the early moments, ensuring that the audience is fully invested
01:24 by the time the terror arrives in earnest.
01:27 Alejandro Hidalgo's The House at the End of Time channels a distinct Venezuelan lens
01:32 in his merging of haunted houses and time travel.
01:35 It's unlike any haunted house movie that's come before, no doubt accounting for why it
01:40 remains the highest-grossing horror movie in Venezuelan history.
01:43 However, while New Line Cinema purchased the remake rights in 2016, there's been no update
01:49 on where the project stands or whether it's even going to happen.
01:52 A US remake would no doubt dull some of Hidalgo's cultural touches, though it would expose more
01:57 domestic audiences to the original.
01:59 Horror remakes, especially international horror remakes, are springboards for the original
02:04 release, granting opportunities for new audiences to discover and appreciate horrors beyond
02:09 their own borders.
02:10 A good story is a good story, and The House at the End of Time has a scary good one.
02:16 It's worth giving this gem one more chance to shock audiences everywhere.
02:20 For the casual horror fan, The Dorm That Dripped Blood might simply be that movie that Randy
02:25 rattles off while on the phone with Ghostface in Scream 2.
02:29 The Dorm That Dripped Blood was filmed at the University of California, Los Angeles,
02:33 and is a slasher in the purest form.
02:36 Several students stay behind during the Christmas break to clear out an abandoned building,
02:40 unaware that a killer is stalking the halls.
02:42 The Dorm That Dripped Blood might not innovate, but with a meager $150,000 budget, it spills
02:49 plenty of blood with style.
02:58 Director Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow created a consistent level of tension, especially
03:04 during a protracted chase scene late in the film.
03:07 A remake with a bigger budget would fit well within the current horror landscape.
03:11 Revitalized slashers like Scream and Halloween are making big bucks at the box office, so
03:16 now is a perfect time to drag this overlooked slasher into the new age.
03:22 Ghostwatch is an infamous BBC production that terrified an entire generation, prompting
03:27 thousands of complaints from traumatized viewers, some of whom were reportedly convinced the
03:32 events in the movie were real.
03:34 An early iteration of the found footage format, a genre made popular in the early 2000s by
03:39 horror films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, Ghostwatch splits
03:44 its time between a television studio and an on-location camera crew as host Michael Parkinson
03:50 takes viewers through an investigation into an allegedly haunted house in North Hole,
03:55 England.
03:56 Ghostwatch has a plausibility that's rarely been seen since its release, and while most
04:00 of that is innate to its distribution, a Halloween night television premiere in 1992, The Final
04:05 Moment, suggests a much larger paranormal world.
04:09 Given the links between the antagonistic spirits and technology, a remake could easily springboard
04:14 into a cautionary modern tale.
04:17 Released in 1984, Sole Survivor was Final Destination before Final Destination.
04:22 What it lacks in budget, star power, and scale, it more than makes up for in the sheer savagery
04:27 of its existential terror.
04:30 Director Tom Eberhardt, who also directed the science fiction comedy horror film Night
04:34 of the Comet that same year, accomplishes a lot with an estimated $350,000 budget.
04:40 Anita Skinner stars as Denise, a television advertising executive who survives a deadly
04:45 plane crash as the film opens.
04:48 As the titular Sole Survivor, Denise grapples with survivor's guilt and the appearance of
04:52 several ghosts.
04:53 Something from beyond isn't happy she survived, and it's looking to reclaim her.
04:58 Part slasher, part mood piece in the vein of the psychological horror film Carnival
05:02 of Souls, Sole Survivor is as terrifying as it is mysterious.
05:06 Eberhardt paints a world of miraculous scale, though the budget often constrains some of
05:11 his best ideas.
05:12 While there's power in suggestion, a remake could easily take Sole Survivor to the next
05:17 level.
05:18 Not only is director Neil Marshall responsible for the iconic horror film The Descent, he's
05:22 helmed two of the most lauded episodes of Game of Thrones, including the Emmy-nominated
05:27 episode, The Watchers on the Wall, but Marshall's directorial debut, Dog Soldiers, is long overdue
05:33 for a remake.
05:34 Better still, after a long string of movie duds, it would get Marshall back to his roots
05:39 and remind contemporary audiences why he was once the most exciting voice in horror.
05:52 Dog Soldiers follows a group of military men battling werewolves in the Scottish Highlands.
05:57 Its £2.3 million budget accounted for some of its unfortunate production constraints,
06:02 with the action being obscured at times, the lighting being a bit too dark, and Marshall
06:06 guiding the camera away from the movie's special effects when they aren't quite convincing.
06:11 Regardless, it's still considered a classic werewolf movie, but with the benefit of today's
06:15 technology, Dog Soldiers could be even more.
06:18 With the lack of good werewolf movies released lately, with the last possibly being 2022's
06:23 The Cursed, no film is better poised to bring lycanthropes back than Dog Soldiers.
06:29 Horror fans are more than familiar with the indie-to-franchise pipeline.
06:33 Studios poached new talent, though rather than giving them the funds needed to explore
06:37 their original vision, they saddled them with existing intellectual property.
06:41 After the success of The Taking of Debra Logan, director Adam Robitaille was tapped for Insidious,
06:47 The Last Key.
06:48 Lee Cronin's debut, The Hole in the Ground, was all the executives needed to hand him
06:52 the reins of Evil Dead Rise.
06:54 Corin Hardy's smash at the Sundance Film Festival, The Hollow, got him the gig directing
06:59 The Nun, the highest-grossing entry in the Conjuring movie universe.
07:03 Arguably the most gothic entry in the franchise, The Nun serves the argument that Hardy should
07:08 be given another shot at The Hollow, this time with the budget to match his vision.
07:12 In The Hollow, a conservationist and his family are targeted by fairies in the woods outside
07:17 their rural Irish cottage.
07:19 Like many indie creature features, The Hollow suggests more than it shows, exploiting sound
07:24 design and staging to imply the horror.
07:27 When the action shifts to exteriors, The Hollow is just a little too dark, a purposeful technique
07:32 to hide the low-budget monster effects.
07:35 While the movie is supremely effective, the fairy horror remains mostly untapped.
07:39 If The Hollow were remade with a larger budget, it could be the incentive that studios need
07:44 to unleash more fairy horror into the world.
07:47 When Universal Pictures scrapped the practical effects for 2011's The Thing, effects artists
07:53 Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. took to YouTube to share some of the work they'd done that
07:58 had been replaced with computer-generated effects.
08:00 They'd later leveraged this exposure into 2015's Arbinger Down, a movie meant to celebrate
08:06 the glory of practical movie monster.
08:08 The monsters look great, the rest… well, it's a low-budget horror movie.
08:13 "You throw one more tantrum and I'll bite your goddamn nose off."
08:18 A similar fate befell Steven Kostansky and Jeremy Gillespie's 2016 film The Void.
08:24 When grotesque, Lovecraftian creatures besiege a rural hospital, a ragtag band of survivors
08:30 must endure a hellish, interdimensional nightmare.
08:33 Like Arbinger Down, The Void has some of the best monsters you'll see on screen, but the
08:38 movie doesn't amount to much more than an effects reel.
08:41 While Kostansky and Gillespie raised $82,000 through Indiegogo for The Monsters, a remake
08:46 with more financial backing would not only augment the effects, but also the story itself.
08:52 Like The Void, Banshee Chapter is Lovecraftian horror in its purest form.
08:56 While mainstream audiences have been given bits and nibbles of cosmic horror, the subgenre
09:01 is most often relegated to the indie, video-on-demand sphere.
09:05 In recent years, we've seen the Nicolas Cage vehicles Color Out of Space and Mandy, as
09:10 well as the comedy horror film Gloria.
09:12 All were festival hits that later arrived on streaming.
09:15 Blair Erikson's Banshee Chapter is the perfect low-budget shocker to remake.
09:19 Loosely inspired by H.P.
09:21 Lovecraft's short story From Beyond, the film follows a journalist as she tries to track
09:25 down her missing friend.
09:27 There are government conspiracies, unusual drugs, and entities from another dimension.
09:33 Banshee Chapter manages a lot with a little, though there's no denying its best ideas are
09:38 unfortunately relegated to off-screen moments.
09:41 Nevertheless, if any film deserves a comeback, it's Banshee Chapter.
09:46 The first Grave Encounters film was made on a shoestring budget and grossed $3.6 million
09:51 worldwide.
09:52 The sequel, Grave Encounters 2, reportedly cost $1.4 million, grossing an estimated $8
09:58 million, though these numbers are difficult to verify.
10:01 But there's no doubt Grave Encounters was a cheap little flick that made some dough
10:05 and got a much more expensive sequel.
10:07 It was one of more prominent found-footage horror movies capitalizing on Paranormal Activity's
10:12 success, leveraging the burgeoning availability of streaming to generate considerable word
10:17 of mouth.
10:18 While it hasn't endured like its inspirations, it's one of the last decade's better ghost
10:23 stories.
10:24 If only those ghosts looked good.
10:26 Where Paranormal Activity never shows too much of its, well, paranormal activity, Grave Encounters
10:32 doesn't hide anything.
10:33 The early tension is strong, but the terror dissipates as soon as the unconvincing CGI
10:38 baddies show their faces in the latter half.
10:41 These ghosts are of the YouTube scare prank variety.
10:44 Gray, distorted faces, all digital and blurry.
10:47 However, despite some missteps, Grave Encounters deserves credit.
10:51 Were it to be remade with a bigger budget, the movie could actualize its funhouse feel
10:56 with better design spirits.
10:57 [music]