(Photo by Brooke Palmer/Warner Bros.)

The 25 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).

Over the next year, audiences are about to be hit with a slew of horror remakes: April’s Pet Sematary (trending Fresh at 80%); Child’s Play, which opens June 19; and then next year, Grudge, which was moved from 2019 to January 2020, and is a remake of a an American remake of a Japanese hit. Will these movies make it to Fresh – or even Certified Fresh? Time will tell. If they do, they will join the ranks of the below 25 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.