They really dropped the ball...
I’ll say right off the bat I usually don’t care for remakes. They have to floor me to get any respect, so they’re already behind the eight ball. This one started out pretty well actually, and was decently creepy and did a good job building the atmosphere, but my god did they botch the last half hour.
The 1989 original film has always scared the living hell out me, especially Zelda. She was frightening to me, and still is. They didn’t do very well with Zelda in the remake.
And the one thing I was really looking forward to improving over the original film was a slightly more faithful adaptation of the novel, which is truly terrifying and brilliant, but in the end, the remake went so far off course with the novel that it pissed me off.
**Spoilers ahead**
The killing of Ellie instead of Gage was the first big mistake. Why do it? Just so people can say, “oh, it’s different.”?
Secondly, the death of Rachel in the original film and the ending was unbelievably scary to me, with Louis waiting for Rachel to come home, and knowing she was sliced up with the scalpel and waiting to see her face...that scene when she arrives is terrifying to me. In the remake, she gets stabbed in the stomach a few times, and Louis doesn’t even put Rachel in the burial ground...and then dies himself??? So in the span of 15 minutes the entire family is killed and brought back? It was rushed, and I thought it sucked.
The novel had an unbelievably unsettling ending, with a character who never was in either of the movies saw Louis walking into the woods, who now has white hair, carrying his dead wife to the burial ground, and then of course she shows up at the end, and says “Darling”.
Like I said, the remake started off well, but ultimately they really dropped the ball. I think the only thing they improved upon was Jud’s death scene with Ellie turning into Jud’s wife...that was creepy and well done.
Maybe in another 20 years someone will do a fully faithful adaptation of the novel, because there is a brilliant horror story in there, and it could easily be one of the scariest movies of all time.
So, final verdict, the original 1989 film is miles better than this remake. Way scarier.