(Photo by Universal. SPEAK NO EVIL.)

27 Best Horror Movie Remakes

The idea of a horror movie remake probably terrifies you. Not because you think of horror remakes as particularly scary, but because so often they can be scarily bad – think 0%-ers like Day of the Dead from 2018 and 2016’s Cabin Fever, or 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (you’ve wiped it from your memory, but it starred Rooney Mara – ! – and earned 15% on the Tomatometer, a 79% drop from the Certified Fresh original).

But not all horror remakes are terrible; some, in fact, are genre standouts in their own right. They can be smart translations of foreign horror hits, movies that take a scarily effective premise and seamlessly apply it to American society (The Ring, Let Me In, We Are What We Are). They can be clever updates of classics that find new and relevant terrors in old story beats (The Thing, Dawn of the Dead). They can be wildly different new takes (Suspiria). Or they can be simply brilliant, and top their source material (Evil Dead 2, which, despite its title, is considered by many to be a remake of Evil Dead 1).

In the past few years, we got a Hellraiser (the first one to be pinned Fresh since the 1987 original), and many were skeptical of a Speak No Evil remake coming so soon after the original, but that one managed to talk up a Certified Fresh badge. They join the ranks of the below Fresh horror remakes – all Fresh, and ranked by Tomatometer – the rare scary retreads and reinventions that connected with critics and scared the s–t out of audiences.