Audient Zeitgeist and first themed October horror: Psycho

This is the fifth and penultimate entry in my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist, in which I'm watching six movies that had some significance in the zeitgeist but which I had not previously watched.

The latest Audient Zeitgeist movie is doing double duty, just as the one from June did double duty. That viewing of Shoah was my 7,000th movie of all time as well as being an entry in this series, and this one also serves the function of announcing what my horror theme will be for the month of October.

But first, the zeitgeist bit.

The term "shot-by-shot remake" might not have existed before Gus Van Sant made his version of Psycho in 1998. 

Oh, the concept behind it might have been intuitive enough. You restage a piece of filmed material, whatever it may be, using the same camera setups that run the same amount of time as in the original work. So that also implies that the editing is the same. Usually, that would also mean the same dialogue, or at least dialogue that runs for the same amount of time so the shots can be the same length. 

Film people would know what it meant, as many of them spent a lot of time aping their icons in their formative years as filmmakers, even maybe doing their own shot-by-shot remakes of parts of their favorite films. (Certainly no more than parts, in most cases.) 

But in 1998, casual people became familiar with the term. It was impossible not to know that Psycho was not only a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's most iconic film, but, like, an exact remake.

And given the box office and critical response, we also immediately learned that this was a bad idea. 

How exact of a remake?

Well that was a challenge for me as I watched the movie. But I'll get into that in just a moment. 

Now, the tie-in to the films I'll be watching this October in honor of Halloween.

To bring you up to speed, I've done themed October viewings for three previous Octobers now. I skipped 2022, not knowing at that point that I would ultimately intend to make it an annual tradition. But 2021, 2023 and 2024 have all featured these month-long themes.

In 2021, I started with 1970s horror movies. When I got back to it in 2023, it was horror comedies. Then last year, you may remember that I slogged through all the previous Halloween movies that I hadn't seen. And when you consider that I also rewatched the original, that made for 11 total movies, and exhausted me terribly.

I don't think I will be so ambitious this October, but Psycho has given me my first movie in the new theme: horror remakes. In fact, some of the Halloween movies I watched last October would have qualified here as well.

I set out on this task with the foreknowledge that it may not be a great month for being scared. Remakes of horror movies have a pretty checkered cinematic history, and in some cases, even the originals were not that scary.

But, I think I knew the previous two Octobers would not be very scaery when I chose my previous two themes, comedies and a bunch of Halloween movies that I knew were probably bad. If my only goal were to be scared, I don't know what theme I'd choose, because over the years I have already tried to get my hands on as many movies that I thought would scare the shit out of me as I possibly could. If you were to give me one suggestion of such a movie, right now, I'd probably try to watch it by the weekend.

So there have been a lot of horror remakes over the years, and I have already seen many of them. However, aside from Psycho, at least the following others have so far gone unseen by me, and I hope to rectify that this month, pending their availability:

Carrie (2013)
Friday the 13th (2009)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)
I Spit On Your Grave (2010)

And at least one of those will also be doing double duty, giving me a movie to rank for 2025.

There will surely be one or two more, especially if I can't find some of these, but these are the only ones I've thought of already. (I might be able to watch Macon Blair's new version of The Toxic Avenger, but only if it comes down from its current $19.99 rental price on iTunes before the end of October.)

The key is I'm trying to see movies where I've already seen the original (which rules out the Australian film Patrick and its remake, which I really should see because my wife's ex-boyfriend directed it), and I'd like to focus only on movies where there aren't a bunch of other movies in the franchise to muddy the water on what's a remake and what's a reboot and what's a reheat. Friday the 13th does that a little bit, but I believe the 2009 version was conceived as a straight remake of the original, much like Rob Zombie had recently done with Halloween. (Watching all the Friday the 13th movies I haven't watched would be a way to spend an October, but it's too soon after I did that same thing last year.)

Anyway, back to the project at hand: Psycho.

One of the things I of course wanted to know was how much Van Sant et al had stayed true to Hitchcock's original movie. It has been more than 30 years since I've seen Psycho, and though there would have been value to watching it again in order to prep for the Audient Zeitgeist piece, I decided not to. Whether the movie is successful or not is not a matter of whether it exactly copies Hitchcock. A successful execution of the exercise is not the same thing as a successful movie, and I decided that for the purposes of the assessment of Psycho as a legendary bomb that would qualify it for this series, I was more concerned with why it failed as a movie, if it indeed it did fail, than whether it failed as a successful execution of the concept. 

However, it wasn't possible for me to shrug off this curiosity. What I really needed was what my friend did for the first few minutes of the version of Jurassic Park he directed in which I appeared as an extra -- check out this post if you want to learn about that -- in which the real movie plays in a picture-in-picture box down in the lower left-hand corner, just to show you how closely they followed their assignment. The JP filmmakers correctly dropped this after the opening scene, having given us a flavor and proven the standards to which they held themselves. There is likely a side-by-side version out there, somewhere, given the general infinitude of the internet. But Van Sant and company did not see fit to include it in the final film, which of course makes sense. 

After a while I forced myself to give up thinking about it. This was partly made possible by the fact that I could tell there were deviations. For example, you can clearly see that Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates is masturbating while he spies on Anne Heche's Marion Crane, which would not have been possible in 1960. Then, because the film is updated to 1998, the dialogue is not 100% the same, especially during the moment when Julian Moore's character says she needs to go get her Walkman. (Unintentionally funny or just funny? You be the judge.) Then there's the fact that a movie made in 1998 needs to show page after page of end credits, whereas Hitchcock's movie just goes to THE END after you see the car containing Marion's body pulled out of the swamp. To accommodate for this, Van Sant's version pulls out of the scene and lingers on it for another three or four minutes as all the credits dutifully run past. 

I had thought it was possible that Van Sant would try to make a movie set in 1960, and really stick as closely to it as he could. That would have felt like a more worthwhile effort. The changes he does make feel arbitrary, and in some cases, lazy. In reading up on the movie afterward, I found that they couldn't figure out how to recreate all the shots, so in the cases where they couldn't get the blocking right, they just did a different shot. How different? I don't know, but I can tell you that the guys making the Jurassic Park I was in did not settle for such a shoddy standard.

And I think that's really the thing about this Psycho: It feels shoddy. It doesn't necessarily feel poorly acted in any way that bothered me (though I know some howled about Heche's performance at the time). It doesn't necessarily feel like it should have had a better DP. (It had Christopher Doyle, who worked with Wong Kar-Wai and was one of the best going.) The editing doesn't feel off. The settings don't feel off, as they are the same part of the Universal lot used in the original, which is still a highlight of the backlot studio tour. 

It's just the whole thing is a bit ... shoddy. 

And also, pointless, which was the biggest complaint people had at the time.

I think the reason people don't make shot-by-shot remakes very often is that an important thing has changed between when the movie was first made and when you're making it now: Us. The audience. 

What scared us in 1960 when Psycho came out does not scare us 38 years later in the same way. Even with the gestures toward modernism that Van Sant included, whether unintentionally funny or not, he was regrettably married to an old-fashioned form of filmmaking by sticking to Hitchcock's shots. When Hitchcock used those shots, they were the cutting edge, and they feel so fresh in his hands that I think even modern audiences can watch his Psycho and still be scared by it. But I think it does depend on how many horror movies they've already seen, and I think that appreciation comes with a knowledge that it was a different time.

Anyone who had already seen Hitchcock's version -- which likely describes much of the audience for Van Sant's version -- was not going to be scared by Van Sant's version without him giving us something new. Something old worked for Hitchcock, and the fact that it can't work the same way for Van Sant is no shade on what Hitchcock accomplished in 1960.  

And if Van Sant's version was some people's first exposure to horror, well, that was a great shame for them. 

At the very least, I think the movie did make a significant contribution to the zeitgeist, as a cautionary tale (both for studios and audiences), and as a way to acquaint us with something you could do, but probably shouldn't. 

Heck, without this version of Psycho, my version of Jurassic Park might not even exist. 

Like Psycho

It took until October was in double digits, but I've finally started watching horror movies, having now ticked off two in two days. (I watched The Dead Don't Die on October 1st, but that wasn't to feed the Halloween horror beast, rather just to review it, on the first day after its September 26th release I was able to see it. If it had been to feed that beast, it would have left it seriously hungry.)

Today I want to discuss the first, though I could easily see a second post forthcoming to vent the vitriol I feel toward the Pet Sematary remake.

That first movie on Thursday night was Dementia 13, and it's the film that finally made me understand what Roger Corman was all about.

It wasn't Corman's name that attracted me to this 1963 film, though it would have; when I came across it among the horror selections on Kanopy, a cursory review of its details told me that it was among the first films ever made by Francis Ford Coppola, and that got me in the door.

But I noticed Corman's name as producer in the credits, and it whetted my appetite. I familiarized myself with the Corman schlock aesthetic during my 2011 month series Getting Acquainted, in which I singled out a cinematic talent I was unfamiliar with and watched three of his or her works during the month. (You can read my Corman piece here.) And schlock horror is particularly appetizing to me in the month of October, as last year I used Kanopy to watch both The Driller Killer and Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. Corman was not associated with either of those movies, though he should have been.

I knew Corman was all about producing popular genre movies at the lowest possible cost and the highest possible volume. What I didn't realize until Dementia 13 was how much he was trying to capitalize on the specific popularity of an existing property, an understandable third leg in the tripod of his approach that I hadn't considered before now. You know, kind of like The Asylum does today.

Specifically, Dementia 13 is his Psycho, and as nakedly as one could imagine.

Okay, about to go into SPOILERS for this movie. (And for Psycho, though I can't imagine you haven't seen that.)

Both movies start with a female protagonist who is effectively on the run (or who becomes so pretty early on). In Dementia 13 it's in the first scene, as gold digger Louise Haloran (Luana Anders) and her husband, an heir to his family's fortune, are rowing out to the Irish island on which his family lives. Like Janet Leigh's Marion Crane, she's blonde, though that may not be a hugely compelling similarity. More compelling is that she's neck deep in a scheme that endangers her life, here trying to convince the family that her husband, who has died of a heart attack on the boat ride, is not actually dead. (She dumped him and let him sink to the bottom of the bay.) This wasn't just a random occurrence that she reacted to poorly; in his dying breath he tells her that she won't get her share of the fortune if he's dead, indicating that he knows her affections for him are not on the level. She similarly responds to his death throes with a "You're not dying on me you bastard" bedside manner, but it's too little too late.

Where she really shares something in common with Marion is that she'll be dead before the movie is even halfway over. In a way that is a mirror image of the Psycho shower scene except by the banks of the water rather than in a shower stall, Louise is hacked to death by a man (we assume it's a man, though we can't really see the person's face) wielding an axe. And as in Psycho, we see only flashes of the crime, letting the audience imagination do the rest. (Which, of course, was also a convenience for someone with Corman's low budget.) The most recurring image is her bloody hands vainly clutching at the grass on the banks as she slips into her watery tomb.

Unlike in Psycho, we don't actually know who the killer is for the lion's share of the movie. Coppola and Corman retain that as a mystery. I can't remember if there was ever a time when I didn't know Norman Bates was the killer, though maybe that's just because I knew so much about the movie before I saw it. Anyway, there are about five candidates who it could be. When the killer is ultimately revealed, he has Norman's same type of overt placidity, which masks his darker urges.

Finally there is the dead female character who functions as supernatural red herring. In Psycho it's obviously Mrs. Bates, but here it's Louise's husband's sister, Kathleen, who drowned when she was a child. That's the reason Louise and John were headed out to the island, to participate in a bizarre annual ritual marking the girl's death. Although she has been dead for decades, we see her body on a couple occasions, almost as if it were freshly deceased, or in some state of suspended animation. The reveal at the end that it was a wax recreation of the girl is similar to the reveal of the skeletal remains of Mrs. Bates in her rocking chair.

Perhaps if I had known that Dementia 13 was conceived as a ripoff of Psycho -- Wikipedia says flatly "The producer wanted a cheap Psycho copy, complete with gothic atmosphere and brutal killings" -- I might have judged Dementia 13 more harshly as I was watching it. Perhaps also if it had been some anonymous hack who directed it, rather than the eventual director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, I would have seen it more clearly as a hack job and not the creative seeds of a future master of the form. But the truth is that those creative seeds are there, and I do think you can appreciate a movie more as emblematic of the style -- either the early style (Coppola) or the trademark style (Corman) -- of a particular cinematic voice. Dementia 13 looks a bit different as the product of auteurs other than Coppola and Corman, but it isn't the product of those hypothetical other auteurs.

Besides, the general contours of Psycho are effective in Psycho, and they are effective in a "cheap copy" as well.

Twice the Vertigo ... still not much fun

I've always struggled with Vertigo -- the movie, not the affliction -- but the crowning of it as the best movie of all time in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll made the condition all the more acute.

Whereas others -- specifically, the plurality of critics who responded to the poll -- have hailed it as one of the best movies of all time, I have never even considered it among my five favorite Hitchcock movies. Possibly not even among my ten favorite.

What can I say. This movie has always left me cold. Which it's supposed to do, I think, but cold in a way that you find stimulating and thought provoking. Not cold in a way that just makes you not want to watch it again.

But true enough, I have not wanted to watch it again, and have been stuck on just that single viewing, which probably occurred sometime in the 1990s. Just that single viewing of what is now reasonably considered The Greatest Movie of All Time. (Being a huge fan of Citizen Kane, which is one of my ten favorite movies of all time, and which got bumped from Sight & Sound's top spot by Vertigo, has intensified my Vertigo resentment since 2012.)

But the opportunity to reckon with Vertigo a second time arose when the other two guys on my podcast got enthusiastic about making this the next repertory pick for us to discuss, to balance out the new releases that usually comprise the podcast's discussion format. Because I have not been entirely comfortable with my minority feelings on Vertigo, I embraced this suggestion as my own opportunity to revisit it. We record on Sunday, and I watched it again last night.

Before I tell you how I felt about it on second viewing, I should tell you about the secondary meaning to the title of this post. As is quite appropriate for Vertigo -- a movie in which doubling is such a major theme, it's almost inescapable -- this was not only my second viewing of Vertigo, but I watched parts of two different Vertigos. Let me take a moment to explain.

As is always my preference when I need to get a hold of a specific movie to watch, I checked the library to see if it was available. It was, but it was being held in offsite storage and needed to be transported to one of the branches for me to pick up. A week passed, and when I checked on Tuesday -- cognizant of the approaching viewing deadline for the podcast -- its status was still that generic purgatory of "Offsite Storage."

So I cut my losses and just spent the $2.99 to download a rental from iTunes. As it turns out, I should have waited just one more day, because the next time I checked the library's website, my reservation of a Hitchock DVD four pack (including also Psycho, The Trouble With Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much) was "Awaiting Collection." I had to go to the library anyway, so I did collect it -- even though I had a copy on the computer at home. My reasoning had something to do with not wanting to annoy the library by reserving something and then never collecting it, especially on the heels of reserving two copies of Star Wars earlier in the month and then leaving one of them uncollected. I didn't want to get my name put on some list, or my picture hung behind the counter with a note that reads "Do not reserve to this guy."

I'd say it's a good thing I had both copies, but really, I only would have needed the iTunes copy. (The reverse, however, was not true.) I started watching Vertigo on DVD because it requires less setup (I don't need to connect my computer to the TV), but when the performance started suffering from the imperfections on the disc's surface, I didn't fight it for long before just switching to iTunes.

The funny thematic parallel notwithstanding, it wasn't a particularly successful second viewing of the movie. I wouldn't say I like Vertigo any less, but neither do I like it any more. And my suspicion of why I didn't like it very much in the first place seems to have been confirmed by this viewing: It's just not very much fun.

Whether a movie is fun or not does not typically play a huge role in how much I like it. If I graded movies only on how fun they were, I wouldn't have selected 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or United 93 as parts of my top 25 movies of the 2000s. But when it comes to Hitchcock, fun does really seem to matter to me.

In looking at my two favorite Hitchcocks, they are both exceedingly fun. These would be Rear Window (which is in my top 30 of all time) and North by Northwest (which is just outside my top 100). My three and four Hitchcock -- Rebecca and Psycho, though I'm not sure the order -- are not as fun, but they are both a laugh a minute compared to the somber Vertigo.

And perhaps the inclusion of Rebecca and Psycho in this discussion allows me to expand upon my definition of "fun" in this context. Certainly, both of those are very dark movies when compared to Rear Window and North by Northwest, which have dark moments but are overall more like popcorn thrillers. And in ways, both Rebecca and Psycho are far darker than Vertigo.

But just because a movie is dark doesn't mean it can't be fun. Speaking of Psycho, American Psycho is incredibly dark but also incredibly fun -- in fact, it is as fun as it is dark, if not more so. Psycho is like that in that it contains these cathartic releases of fear and tension, and has its own twisted sense of humor. I remember Rebecca less well because I haven't seen it since we watched it in my film class my senior year in high school, either 1990 or 1991, but what strikes me as fun in that movie is the gothic melodrama milieu of Daphne du Maurier's novels (another of which, Jamaica Inn, I read earlier this year, leaving it fresh in my mind. Jamaica Inn is a Hitchcock du Maurier adaptation that I have yet to see).

Vertigo doesn't meet either a traditional or a non-traditional definition of fun, and it has no sense of humor. Simply put, it's a drag. It's a deep dive into the sad psyches of scarred individuals who are manipulating each other. These manipulations take on interesting forms, and the "mystery" of Vertigo is fairly satisfying (if revealed too early in the narrative, and with too little fanfare, in that scene where Judy writes out her confession). But entirely too much time is spent on what amounts to stalking behavior, and a type of madness that I have seen explored in more engrossing ways elsewhere. Vertigo is neither fun nor "fun."

There's a lot more I can and will say about this movie, but I'll say it on the podcast this weekend. And speaking of the podcast, here's a link to our most recent one on Trainwreck if you would like to check it out.

On versions

During a recent piece comparing Let the Right One In and Let Me In, in which I stated that the two films were of comparable quality, I also stated that this seemed like one of those situations where whichever one you saw first, you'd probably like better.

I went on to describe my belief that this is a widespread phenomenon in general -- the first of anything you consume is the one you like better. Assuming you like it at all, that is. If you happened to watch Gus Van Sant's Psycho first, and then followed it up with Alfred Hitchcock's, I'd have to assume you'd find Hitchcock to be the superior version.

But not necessarily if you actually liked Van Sant's movie, even though I use it as an example because so few people did. If you liked Van Sant's Psycho, you might think, "What is this old, grainy version of the story that steals all of Van Sant's camera setups?" Ha ha.

But I have a kind of serious point here. I contend that, especially in the case of songs you like, you might attach to one definitive version of it, and not like the other versions quite as much. That might be true whether you were first exposed to the original, or a remix, or a cover.

So I thought today I would put to the test my "first seen, best seen" theory by examining a bunch of movies I've seen, where I've also seen a remake of the same film. Will I like whichever version I saw first, best? I actually don't know, because all I've done so far is identified the pairings. I'm saving the actual judgment for real-time, as I write.

I have to say, right from the start, that it's a pretty inexact science. I'm sure somewhere there will be an example of a pairing where I saw the vastly inferior version of the film first, and will recognize that as such. But will this really blow my theory out of the water? I'm going to say "no," because we're talking about situations where you like the first version you saw. Is that cheating? I don't think so.

I also should mention that my theory does, by its very nature, have the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And by that I mean, a vast majority of us see the better version of a film first, simply because remade films were often classics in their original form, and most film buffs watch the original before they watch the remake. But there are a number of films among the following pairings where I definitely saw the newer version first, and then went back to see the older one. And besides, remakes are not necessarily only of good films, or of films that fully lived up to their potential. In fact, in the piece about the two "Let" vampire movies, I quoted Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson, who thought that only bad films should be remade.

Okay, just a little more bookkeeping to take care of before we get started. Which films don't qualify in this discussion?

1) Multiple reinterpretations of the same famous character. I'm not going to consider Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to be a remake of Disney's Robin Hood, any more than I would consider The New World to be a remake of Disney's Pocahontas. We all know that there are characters in our popular consciousness who get regularly revisited in forms that don't constitute remakes of the other films dealing with these characters. (See also: Dracula, Ebenezer Scrooge, The Three Musketeers.)

2) Genre shifts. I don't think I'm going to consider Adam Shankman's Hairspray to be a remake of John Waters' Hairspray, because there was an intervening step in which the story became a Broadway musical, and Shankman's film is based on that. (See also: The two versions of The Producers.)

3) Taking the essential plot and updating it. Courage Under Fire uses the same essential plot dynamics as Roshomon, but I don't consider the former to be a remake of the latter. (See also: O vs. Othello, A Fistful of Dollars vs. Yojimbo.)

4) Multiple versions of the same source material. No new versions of movies based on Shakespeare's plays can be considered remakes of the other versions. There were three Hamlets made within a 10-year period -- Franco Zefferelli's (1990), Kenneth Branagh's (1996) and Michael Almereyda's (2000). None are remakes of each other.

Well, let's not get bogged down in rules. It basically comes down to, I'm choosing the ones I'm including for reasons that make sense to me, and that's that.

Ready? I'll list the film I saw first in each pair. In more or less alphabetical order by one of the two titles:

1) Vanilla Sky (2001, Cameron Crowe) vs. Abre Los Ojos (1997, Alejandro Amenabar)

Winner: Vanilla Sky. Amenabar's film probably didn't stand a chance, because of how passionately I feel about Crowe's film. The visual bombast and great soundtrack are two of the things I love about Vanilla Sky, so Abre Los Ojos felt comparatively quiet on its lower budget.

2) Can't Buy Me Love (1987, Steve Rash) vs. Love Don't Cost a Thing (2003, Troy Beyer)

Winner: Can't Buy Me Love. It was a childhood favorite, and I still think fondly of it. Beyer's modern urban update is actually pretty good, but Ronald Miller (Patrick Dempsey) on his riding lawnmower wins out any day.

3) Chaos (2005, David DeFalco) vs. Last House on the Left (1972, Wes Craven)

Winner: Last House on the Left. Then again, Chaos is one of the most loathsome films I have ever seen, so this violates the rule that states I had to like the first version I saw. (I have not seen the movie Last House is based on, Ingmar Bergman's 1959 The Virgin Spring, nor Dennis Iliadis' 2009 remake of Last House.)

4) Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971, Mel Stuart) vs. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005, Tim Burton)

Winner: Willy Wonka, hands down. It's arguable whether Burton's terrible film is a remake of the original or just another version of the book, but I'll include it just so I can shit on Burton's film in a public forum.

5) City of Angels (1998, Brad Silberling) vs. Wings of Desire (1987, Wim Wenders)

Winner: Wings of Desire, but with a big asterisk that kind of proves my point anyway. City of Angels is a very flawed film -- I don't even know that I necessarily give it a thumbs up. But what I couldn't help noticing when I finally saw Wings of Desire last year was that I felt the plot was much more focused in its Hollywood remake. I know intellectually that Wenders' film is obviously the better film, but I did find myself impatient with it because I was expecting the more straightforward narrative structure of Silberling's film.

6) Dawn of the Dead (2004, Zack Snyder) vs. Dawn of the Dead (1978, George A. Romero)

Winner: Snyder's version. I really wish I had seen them in the reverse order, because Romero's movie seemed soooo slooooow to me -- both in terms of the speed of the plot, and the speed of the zombies. So instead of getting to appreciate one of history's seminal zombie films, I was laughing at its corniness compared to Snyder's kinetic and bloody remake.

7) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Robert Wise) vs. The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008, Scott Derrickson)

Winner: Wise's version. This one is really easy, as the remake is absolutely terrible. Even a good version wouldn't have stood much of a chance, though, because I've always appreciated the original -- it was my dad's favorite movie growing up.

8) The Dinner Game (1998, Francis Veber) vs. Dinner for Schmucks (2010, Jay Roach)

Winner: The Dinner Game. This one actually had the potential to upset the applecart, because although we liked the French original, my wife and I were marveling over how little of it we could remember, even though we saw it within the last couple years. When we both hated Dinner for Schmucks, it was no contest in favor of the original.

9) Point of No Return (1993, John Badham) vs. La Femme Nikita (1990, Luc Besson)

Winner: La Femme Nikita. But again, I hated Badham's film -- hated it -- so this hardly counts in this discussion. Am a bit ashamed that I actually saw the remake before the original, but I was still only in the beginning stages of my film geekdom back then.

10) The Flight of the Phoenix (1965, Robert Aldrich) vs. Flight of the Phoenix (2004, John Moore)

Winner: Aldrich's version. I watched them weeks apart so I could review both for my site, and so the original could inform my review of the remake. I have a slight preference for the original, though the remake has its strengths as well.

11) The Hitcher (2007, Dave Meyers) vs. The Hitcher (1986, Robert Harmon)

Winner: Meyers' version. This was a bit like with Dawn of the Dead, where I thought the newer, radder version was surprisingly enjoyable and had a more streamlined plot, while the original was boring and poorly constructed by comparison. So sue me.

12) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Don Segel) vs. The Invasion (2007, Oliver Hirschbeigel)

Winner: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's a classic, so of course this wins. I should see the 1970s version as well. Though I should say, I didn't hate The Invasion as much as most critics seemed to. I thought it was okay.

13) Lolita (1997, Adrian Lyne) vs. Lolita (1962, Stanley Kubrick)

Winner: Lyne's version. I know, heresy. But here's my theory working again -- I really liked the version with Dominique Swain and Jeremy Irons, and had this as my standard for the definitive version of Nabokov's novel. Even if the original version was directed by the great Stanley Kubrick.

14) The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer) vs. The Manchurian Candidate (2004, Jonathan Demme)

Winner: Frankenheimer's, though I do like Demme's.

15) Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner) vs. Planet of the Apes (2001, Tim Burton)

Winner: Schaffner's. I don't actually think Burton's is terrible, but it's not good. Besides, how could Mark Wahlberg ever duplicate the inimitable Charlton Heston?

16) The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot) vs. Sorcerer (1977, William Friedkin)

Winner: The Wages of Fear. Sorcerer is actually a pretty good attempt, but it has a lot of excess plot stuff from before the real action begins, which really gets in the way.

17) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) vs. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003, Marcus Nispel)

Winner: Hooper's. Again the original is of course superior, but I thought the remake was a worthwhile enough effort.

18) Three Men and a Baby (1987, Leonard Nimoy) vs. Trois Hommes et un Coffin (1985, Coline Serreau)

Winner: Three Men and a Baby. At the time I saw both, I would have preferred the former just because it had actors I recognized and was in English. So, not a great example maybe.

19) The Time Machine (2002, Simon Wells) vs. The Time Machine (1960, George Pal)

Winner: Wells' version. Though I may be remembering it that way primarily because I really enjoyed the turn-of-the-century period design on display at the start of the 2002 version, as well as some of its later special effects. Pal's original may be the better version, but I'd probably rather re-watch the Wells version.

20) The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming) vs. The Wiz (1978, Sidney Lumet)

Winner: The Wizard of Oz, of course. It's questionable whether this actually qualifies because The Wiz is based on an urban, Broadway version of The Wizard of Oz rather than on Fleming's movie. But 20 seemed like a good round number, so why not.

And 20 is definitely a good place to stop.

So, prophecy self-fulfilled? I guess so. There definitely wasn't any movie on this list where I felt strongly about both versions, and liked the one I saw second better. Does that prove anything? I don't know, maybe not. Would I write this post again, if I had it to do over again? I don't know, maybe not.

Also, there were some pairings I could have discussed but didn't. Are Last Man Standing and A Fistful of Dollars clearly both remakes of Yojimbo, or are they just the dynamics of Yojimbo reimagined? Same question for The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. Do you consider Red Dragon to be a remake of Manhunter, or are they just two competing versions of Thomas Harris' novel? And what about the only sequel I can think of that might also be considered a remake of the original, Evil Dead 2 and Evil Dead?

Well, one thing I determined during the course of accruing this information from my movie lists is that there are a lot of movies where I've seen one version but not the other. In fact, I identified 61 other movies I've seen that either have an original version, a remake, a competing version or some other film that's sort of the same.

Maybe one of these other versions will finally buck the trend of my apparently iron-clad rule.