"Good horror fun."
My first encounter with this remake was when I first saw the trailer in a theater. The entire style, from the record-skip heartbeat to the visuals to the screaming in the dark, made me question whether or not this remake would be terrible as all remakes are wont to do. However, since the preview was one of the best I have seen this year, I felt obligated to at least give this movie the benefit of the doubt and see it. I am glad to say this turned out to be a wise decision.
This remake follows the basic structure of the original with the five teenagers stumbling across a family home that turns into a house of blood and torture. However, unlike the original where the teens are staying in a house nearby, these teens stumble across it in search of the sheriff in order to report the fate of a young girl they find by the side of the road. It is this point that shows the effectiveness of this new remake.
In the original, it was teenagers having fun who are hunted and punished. In the case of the remake, these are teenagers who are punished merely for stopping at the wrong home. In this day and age, where the slasher genre frequently is stale and hackneyed, this film finds a way for you to sympathize with the characters and genuinely gets under your skin. All of the actors do an excellent job of being frightened for their lives and terrified of their fate. This is not just a running and screaming film, though there is plenty of that as the film goes on.
Another highlight of this film is the use of the visuals, particularly the lighting. The house has this eerie glow to it sitting alone in the field, and the forest in the day even has the shafts of light everywhere. All the darkness has its own texture, from the grimy basement to the shadows in the house. Also, the camerawork has a way of maintaining its distance to allow the whole scene to play while being intimate enough that the audience connects with the characters, making their fate that much worse.
In the end, this is a film that returns to the 70s and early 80s ideal of a horror movie being horrifying. The suffering is never more than very unsettling, rather than just blood and guts to make the audience queasy, and there are only really two moments designed to make you jump rather than make you squirm. The audience doesn't fear that Leatherface is hiding under our beds or in our homes. We fear that people like Leatherface and his family exists, and that is what makes this movie a great edition to the horror genre.
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