The “brutal and uncompromising” horror movie Stephen King called the second coming of ‘Psycho’
Thanks to its impact, innovation, and the thousands of imitators that came in its wake, it’s safe to say that there’ll never be another horror movie quite like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, although Stephen King suggested that one 21st-century terror came closer than the rest.
However, whereas the ‘Master of Suspense’ turned the conventions of cinema upside down with his 1960 masterpiece, the picture King mentioned in the same breath as the seminal godfather of the slasher subgenre was a mediocre remake that turned Psycho’s most fascinating selling point upside down.
While Hitchcock created one of cinema’s most unforgettable scenes, and perfected the early rug-pull by bumping marquee star Janet Leigh off a third of the way into the story, all while convincing the audience they’d seen something exponentially more graphic and violent than he’d actually committed to the screen, King’s anointed spiritual successor went heavy on the gratuitous gore.
In a bizarrely ironic turnaround, considering he hated Wes Craven’s original, King dubbed Dennis Iliadis’ 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left as “the best horror movie of the new century” in his updated edition of Danse Macabre, doubling down by calling it “the best horror redux in modern times.”
Is it, though? In a word, no, although anyone is happy to disagree, and since the author is one of horror’s most formidable and experienced figures, who’s forgotten more about scaring the shit out of people than most will ever know, few have the qualifications necessary to laugh and say he’s talking utter bollocks.
The love-fest continued, with Hollywood’s favourite pipeline for page-to-screen stories also deeming Last House V2.0 to be “the most brutal and uncompromising film to play American movie theatres since Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer,” finding them to be two blood-splattered peas in a hard-to-watch pod.
“The engine driving this movie is the most powerful the genre has to offer: fear of the Homicidal Other,” he explained. “There have been hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of these in the long history of the fright film, and most have the same underlying premise. You meet the Homicidal Other either as karmic retribution for doing something wrong, or, this is worse, because you just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
King placed Psycho into the former camp, since Marion Crane wouldn’t have been at the Bates Motel in the first place were it not for her embezzlement scheme, and Iladis’ do-over in the latter. Defending it from critical scorn, he opined that reviewers “have a tendency to react with anger and outrage to the ones that operate successfully in the deep fathoms of primal fear,” which is why he thought it wasn’t unanimously praised.
“Last House, like Hitchcock’s great film about the Homicidal Other, does exactly that,” he concluded. “And, like the Iliadis film, Psycho was originally greeted with a chorus of largely negative reviews.” Yes, but one of them is an inarguable masterpiece and an influential classic, while the other is not. Some people got a kick out of it, sure, but King is firmly in the minority of folks who’d directly compare The Last House on the Left remake to one of the all-time greats.
