In Chapter 3, I argued that the reboots of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were not only connected through their producers, but featured similar aesthetics, the same approaches to updating their iconic antagonists and shared specific promotional strategies that invoked nostalgia for the original films. This chapter moves away from connections and similarities between remakes and instead considers their inconsistencies. Elm Street, Friday and Chain Saw often feature in academic and critical studies of the slasher film, a horror cycle turned subgenre that originated in the late 1970s. Alongside these films, a number of other slashers were remade in the 2000s, among them Black Christmas (twice, 2006 and 2019), Halloween, Prom Night, April Fool's Day, My Bloody Valentine, The House on Sorority Row (Mark Rosman, 1983) remade as Sorority Row (Stewart Hendler, 2009), Silent Night, Deadly Night remade as Silent Night, and Maniac. This is a disparate and diverse selection of films, which are only identifiable as a cycle in so far as their originals were connected via the ‘slasher’ label. Most would also be considered less successful than the Platinum Dunes films, although ‘success’ is difficult to define. There are variations in the films’ production and distribution contexts – major differences between budgets and studios, and releases that vary from wide to limited theatrical, direct-to-video and video-on-demand – apart from no reliable measure of DVD sales, alongside factors that distort box office takings (for example, 3D surcharges for My Bloody Valentine). This makes comparisons of financial success near impossible. Furthermore, the differences between the major release of a familiar title such as Halloween and the straight-to-DVD remake of a cult film such as Silent Night, Deadly Night mean that comparable analyses of critical reactions are difficult, due to variable numbers of reviews in differing publications.

This chapter takes for granted the disparity between these films and their varying production and reception contexts. Rather than pushing their associations with original versions, as per the Platinum Dunes reboots, most of these remakes instead emphasise aspects other than adaptation and are marked by attempts to differentiate them not only from their sources, but also each other.