Cinema as a social institution knows what Scheherazade seems to have known all along: to narrate is to triumph over death. Hence, in an ongoing ceremony that occurs in the darkness of the movie theater (and lasts, ultimately, more than 1001 nights), society constantly delivers its encoded messages. The constant repetition of the same tale keeps it alive in social memory, continually transmitting its meaning and relevance. It is in this context that I suggest that the presence of repetitive chains of remakes can be identified as “hidden streams” (Bazin's term, 1955) in the imaginary archive of the cinema.

The tendency of cinema to produce a “remake” that retells a previously successful story has to be accounted for in the light of the medium's unique capacity for reproduction. Given the fact that recorded versions already exist, what is the purpose of re-addressing and re-articulating the same story time and again? The aim of this book is to trace the cultural and aesthetic instrumentalities of the chains of remakes and to locate the remake as part of the cinematic institution that has shaped and reshaped collective imagination through the sites of its pleasures, fears and traumas.

The relationship between original and version encapsulates the dialectic of repetition, the dialectic between old and new, before and after, desire and fulfillment. Using the tales of PSYCHO, Carmen and Joan of Arc as its navigators, Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise explores the phenomenon of multi-versions as one that illuminates the preferences and politics of the cinematic apparatus through its choices of repetition and differentiation.

One of the most popular series that the cinema has produced stems from Alfred Hitchcock's film PSYCHO (1960). Cinema (and culture) embraced PSYCHO and endowed it with a “cult” status, complete with quotations, allusions, homages, and direct and indirect transformations.