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    Audience Report: Celebrating 50 Years of ‘Jaws’ on Martha’s Vineyard

    It was Day 3 of “Amity Homecoming Weekend” on Martha’s Vineyard, and like thousands of other “Jaws” superfans celebrating the movie’s 50th anniversary on the island where it was filmed, David Scanlon was living his dream.Scanlon, 30, of Savannah, Ga., has loved “Jaws” since his first viewing, at age 3, from which he somehow emerged more enchanted than petrified. At 10, he begged his mother to take him to Martha’s Vineyard, seven miles off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, for the 30th-anniversary festivities. “Not this time,” she had told him. “We’ll go for the 50th.”People lined up to jump off “Jaws Bridge,” on Martha’s Vineyard, to escape the heat.And so it was that Scanlon and his mother — along with his sister, brother-in-law and 15-month-old nephew, Georgie — sat by the sparkling harbor on Sunday afternoon, steps from a replica of the Orca, the fishing boat where the movie’s terrifying climax unfolds, savoring an experience two decades in the making.“It’s a perfect film,” Scanlon said, “and from a very young age, you understand that — long before you have any technical understanding of why.”The anniversary festivities included V.I.P. meet-and-greets, book signings, film screenings, and lectures about sharks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Jaws’ Is a Masterpiece, but ‘Jaws 2’ Deserves a Legacy, Too

    The sequel had a tough act to follow, but it still delivered a terrifying monster movie with grand sequences, a sweeping score and an indelible tagline.As a child, I collected so many shark jaws that my mom disappeared them all one day while I was at school because my room allegedly smelled “fishy.” I suspect it was my general fixation on the beasts that didn’t pass the sniff test.When I first saw “Jaws” at age 8 — more than a decade after its 1975 release — it exploded my already shark-obsessed young mind. I should have been more scared, but instead I was captivated. When I saw “Jaws 2,” not long after, it spawned another great love of mine: monster movies, with all of their suspense, horror, surrealism and spectacle.The original, which was directed by Steven Spielberg, is of course a monster movie, too — probably the best monster movie ever made — but it was also a masterpiece that changed cinema. But “Jaws 2,” released in 1978, was not trying to be anything but a monster movie. On that score, it’s a horrifying success and a feat in its own right — a sequel that delivers more of everything I want (which explains why I rewatch it every summer): more shark, more shark attacks, more screaming teens.Roy Scheider reprised his role from the original.Universal PicturesThe film takes us back to Amity Island four years after the events of the first movie, with some of the same cast members returning. Roy Scheider is Martin Brody, the beleaguered police chief who once again is fighting to protect the seaside town from another killer great white. Scheider plays him with full-tilt, man-on-a-mission madness. Lorraine Gary is Martin’s wife, Ellen, and is more present in the sequel, offering crucial balance to her frenetic, spiraling husband. And Murray Hamilton is Mayor Larry Vaughn. How the mayor kept his job perhaps requires more suspension of disbelief than the fact that another shark is terrorizing the same community.Unlike the first film, which is known for perfectly executing the slow-burn buildup to its monster reveal, the sequel gives us the creature immediately after the opening credits, when it swoops in on two scuba divers photographing a shipwreck.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    4 Surprising Things We Learned From the John Williams Documentary

    A new Disney+ film about the prolific film composer chronicles his life and career, with a focus on his famous music for movies including “Jaws” and “Star Wars.”The composer John Williams is responsible for some of the most recognizable music in film history: the epic fanfares in “Star Wars,” the two-note dread of “Jaws” and too many other examples to name without sounding like an IMDb tour of popular American cinema.A new documentary, “Music by John Williams” (streaming on Disney+), introduces audiences to the man behind all of that music, featuring extensive interviews with Williams and glowing interviews with filmmakers he has worked with, including Steven Spielberg (also a producer of the movie), George Lucas and J.J. Abrams.Laurent Bouzereau, the documentary’s director, first met Williams while directing making-of features for the home video releases of Spielberg movies, including “Jaws,” “Jurassic Park” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”In a phone interview, he said the project started as part of Williams’s 90th birthday celebration, but it became clear it would be a waste to not do a full documentary combining his interviews with Spielberg’s archival footage of Williams, now 92, scoring his films. “I wanted people to understand his dedication to an art form,” Bouzereau said. “John is an eternal student.”Here are some takeaways from the film.When he first heard the ‘Jaws’ theme, Spielberg thought Williams was joking.Early in the documentary, Williams recounts the first time he played the opening music to “Jaws” for Spielberg.The director thought he was joking. “I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it’s almost like ‘Chopsticks,’” he says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    We Ranked the 25 Jump Scares That Still Make Us Jump

    The floor creaks, the music turns ominous and an uneasy quiet sets in. Then BAM! It’s the classic jump scare. This staple of horror movies, when done well, is instantly memorable. With Times film writers, filmmakers and stars weighing in, we ranked the 25 jump scares that still get us every time. WARNINGThis article contains […] More

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    Wrestling With His Past. And an Animatronic Shark.

    In a rehearsal space near Times Square, Ian Shaw was talking about the strange and solemn task of portraying his own father in a Broadway play that he had co-written.“You spend most of your life running away from the father,” he explained. “Now here I was, running into the jaws of the thing.” He paused, realizing what he’d said. “No pun intended,” he added.Ian Shaw’s father is Robert Shaw, the celebrated British actor, author and Oscar-nominated star of “A Man For All Seasons,” who went on to play steely villains in “The Sting” and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” before his death in 1978.Perhaps his best-known film role is Quint, the seasoned shark hunter of the 1975 blockbuster “Jaws,” whose hardened face hints at a lifetime of harrowing experiences and who delivers a memorable monologue about a shark attack he survived during World War II.Ian Shaw, when clean-shaven, could almost pass unnoticed; he has a gentle manner and friendly eyes. But on this day in early July, with his grown-out mustache and sideburns, Shaw, 53, was a dead ringer for his father in “Jaws.” This is a deliberate choice for his play, “The Shark Is Broken,” which opens Aug. 10 at the Golden Theater.From left, Shaw, Alex Brightman and Colin Donnell in rehearsal for “The Shark Is Broken.” All of the play’s action takes place inside a cramped recreation of the boat from the film.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesFrom left, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss in the film “Jaws.”PhotofestThe one-act comedy-drama, written with Joseph Nixon, casts Shaw as his father in a fictional depiction of a particularly challenging day during the making of “Jaws” in 1974.Confined to a small fishing boat called the Orca while the crew contends with an uncooperative mechanical shark, the elder Shaw wrestles with his misgivings about the film, his history of alcoholism and the waning patience of his co-stars Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman) and Roy Scheider (Colin Donnell).Ian Shaw has worked steadily in theater, TV and film projects while striving not to trade on the renown of his illustrious father. Describing his own career, he said, “It’s modest, but to be at my age and have lived my whole life being an actor is a kind of a triumph.”Now, after several years of work on the play and a lifetime of reckoning with his father’s legacy, he said he was ready for a project that addressed his lineage head-on.“You still have to have the conversation about your validity in comparison to your father,” he said. “As I’ve gotten older and more mature, I feel less burdened about that. The final piece of the puzzle to getting rid of the baggage has, peculiarly, been to walk in his shoes.”Ian Shaw is one of Robert Shaw’s 10 children, and the youngest child he had with his second wife, the actress Mary Ure.Robert Shaw was a celebrated man of letters, a friend of Harold Pinter (whose play “Old Times” he starred in with Ure) and an accomplished playwright himself. He also made no secret of his heavy drinking, in an era when such habits were fundamental to the machismo of a generation of actors.Speaking to a reporter who asked him how he kept himself motivated on “Jaws” during long production delays, Robert Shaw responded with a smile: “Well, Scotch, vodka, gin, whatever,” he said.He was also openly resentful of the film roles that earned him a global fan base (and a lucrative living) but took him away from the stage.In an interview on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971, Shaw said it was no better to be a busy actor than to be out of work: “It’s always paradoxically bad, either way. When you’re working it’s terrible because you’re usually doing rubbish, and when you’re not working it’s worse.”Ian Shaw poses for a portrait on the tugboat W.O. Decker, at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesDespite the rugged reputation that his father cultivated onscreen and off, Ian Shaw said of him, “Privately he was very affectionate and very funny and sort of naughty.”As he recalled, “One time, a quite dignified guest came to stay with us in Ireland, and he was greeted by the sight of Robert opening the door in his wife’s nightie. He thought that sort of thing was tremendously funny.”Even so, “there’s a lot of who he was on the screen,” Shaw said. “You wouldn’t want to confront him directly in an argument.”The actor described boisterous family dinners held at long tables where he would sometimes be clamoring for his father’s attention. “I would be dominating a little bit,” he said. “And he would come over, pick me up and just put me outside the room.”But the family was struck by tragedies. Ure died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and barbiturates in 1975, and Shaw died of a heart attack three years later.Ian Shaw, who is now married with two children of his own, was just 8 years old at the time. But, he said, “I felt I had time with him. Up to that point, I didn’t feel shortchanged.”Guy Masterson, the director of “The Shark Is Broken” and a longtime friend, said Shaw’s family history has presented professional challenges.When they would kick around ideas for possible collaborations, “Ian came to me and said he didn’t want to do anything with his dad, because he looked like him,” said Masterson, who has known the actor for some 25 years. “Every time he walked into an audition, people would expect Robert Shaw, and he was at a disadvantage.”At first, the younger Shaw balked at the notion of a biographical play about his father. “I felt like it would be an impossible thing to pull off,” he said.But over time, and with the encouragement from friends and colleagues like Masterson, he grew more comfortable. As the project germinated, Shaw also noticed the theater becoming more receptive to productions with cinematic origins, such as the plays “The 39 Steps” (adapted from the Hitchcock film) or any number of musicals based on contemporary hit movies.“The Shark Is Broken” dramatizes some of the real-life conflict between the seasoned Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss.Universal Pictures, via Getty ImagesFor research, Shaw read books like “The Jaws Log” by Carl Gottlieb, one of the film’s screenwriters, which chronicled the production’s numerous problems. He also looked at interviews his father gave in this era, trying to channel his unapologetic, forthright voice.“In a world where those types of interviews weren’t stage-managed, Robert would sometimes say things that were quite shocking,” Ian Shaw said. “It didn’t feel like he was trying to get his next job. He was just trying to speak from the heart.”He also reviewed a drinking diary that his father kept in the early 1970s, and which one of his sisters later shared with him. “It gave me a baseline about how he felt about his alcoholism,” Ian Shaw said. “He had tried to quit and couldn’t do it. He wanted to concentrate on his writing and it was interfering with that.”Before the play arrived on Broadway, “The Shark Is Broken” had a brief tryout in Brighton, England, in 2019, and ran later that summer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It also played at the Ambassadors Theater in London’s West End during the 2021-22 season.In the Times Square studio, the play’s whole set fit into a small portion of the room: a cramped recreation of a bench and table inside the Orca. Shaw said he could imagine himself touring the play around in a van, “taking it to every village hall in England and making some money doing that.”The sense of claustrophobia is intended to amplify some of the well-documented conflict that took place behind the scenes of “Jaws,” like the on-set friction between Shaw and Dreyfuss: In the show, as in real life, the seasoned Shaw regards Dreyfuss as inexperienced and entitled, while Dreyfuss worries that Shaw’s drinking has gotten out of control.Within the boat’s confines, fictionalized conversations and monologues show the characters humorously squabbling and wondering if their cinematic efforts will amount to anything. They also explore the characters’ depths, as when Robert Shaw reflects on his own father, who was himself an alcoholic and died by suicide when Shaw was a child.Donnell, a star of television (“Chicago Med”) and musical theater (“Violet”), said he felt a strong obligation to help Shaw realize his goals for the play.“There’s almost a sense of duty to fulfill his vision, and to try to breathe as much life as we can into these roles,” he said.“You’re getting to witness somebody taking a deep dive on some difficult memories,” Donnell said. “I would imagine there is a bit of catharsis in not only having created the piece but getting to embody his father every night. I’m sure there is some dueling going on in his brain.”“It’s modest, but to be at my age and have lived my whole life being an actor is a kind of a triumph,” Shaw, a father of two, said of his career.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesBrightman, who recently played the title character in the Broadway musical “Beetlejuice,” said that Shaw’s involvement gave the play permission to be candid in its depiction of the “Jaws” stars.“Shows like this can be watered down and glorify a person for who they weren’t,” he said. “This play actually goes the other way and shows the three of them without a soft focus at all. I really think that we see three very flawed egomaniacs.”But the emotional draw, Brightman said, is the space it gives Shaw to connect with his father in real time.“I don’t know how many people would ever get an opportunity like this, to both honor his dad and show him with the capital-F flaws of a person,” he said.When he prepares to play his father in “The Shark Is Broken,” Shaw said his rituals include practicing his voice as he puts on his Quint costume. “I believe him to be quite fearless, so when I’m getting into character that’s one of the feelings that I absorb,” he said. “I’m very front-foot and energized, which is quite a liberating feeling.”But that is a sensation that only lasts about as long as the performance. When it’s over, Shaw said, “I do tend to quite quickly revert to who I am, which is probably a healthy thing. I’m not my father. I’m a different man.” More

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    ‘The Shark Is Broken,’ a ‘Jaws’ Comedy, Plans Broadway Run

    The play stars Ian Shaw, whose father, Robert Shaw, played a shark hunter in the movie.“The Shark Is Broken,” a comedy about the making of “Jaws” that stars the son of one of the film’s main actors, will open on Broadway this summer.The play is the brainchild of Ian Shaw, whose father, Robert Shaw, played Quint, the psychotic shark hunter, in the film. Its film set was plagued by problems, some exacerbated by Robert Shaw’s drinking, and the play depicts the fraught relationship between him and his co-stars, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider.In the play, set in 1974, the three men are trapped together on a boat, managing bad weather, (fake) shark troubles and alcohol.The play began its life at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, opened in London’s West End in 2021 after a pandemic-related delay, and had a production in Toronto last fall. The Broadway run is to begin previews on July 25 and to open on Aug. 10 at the Golden Theater.The play received a number of strong reviews in London, including from The Evening Standard, which said Ian Shaw “gives what is undoubtedly one of the best theatrical performances of the year.” (The Guardian was more restrained, saying that “too much of the humor hinges on 21st-century hindsight” but also praising Ian Shaw’s “loving and eerily evocative portrayal of his own father.”)Ian Shaw wrote the play with Joseph Nixon; the production is being directed by Guy Masterson and produced by Sonia Friedman and Scott Landis.The play joins what is shaping up to be an unusually busy summer on Broadway. There is already horror (“Grey House”) and farce (“The Cottage”) represented, along with three big musicals (“Once Upon a One More Time,” “Here Lies Love,” “Back to the Future”) and a solo comedy (Alex Edelman’s “Just for Us”). More

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    Bill Butler, Cinematographer Best Known for ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 101

    He came up with a mechanism that allowed Steven Spielberg to film underwater. His work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” earned him an Oscar nomination.Bill Butler, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer who played a prominent role in the American New Wave movement of the 1970s and whose credits included “Jaws,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and three of the “Rocky” sequels, died on Wednesday. He was 101.His death was announced by the American Society of Cinematographers, which did not say where he died.Mr. Butler worked with a number of directors credited with reimagining American filmmaking in the ’70s, including Steven Spielberg, for whom he was the director of photography on “Jaws,” the 1975 blockbuster about a man-eating great white shark that established Mr. Spielberg’s reputation and changed the way Americans looked at both film and the beach.Open-water shooting posed many challenges on what was a notoriously troubled set.The crew faced problems not only with their malfunctioning mechanical shark but also ‌with seasickness, uncooperative tides‌, random boats sailing into the frame and even sets that sank.From left, Mr. Spielberg, the camera operator Michael Chapman and Mr. Butler on the set of “Jaws.” Mr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface, to convey the viewpoint of a swimmer. The American Society of Cinematographers, which presented Mr. Butler with a lifetime achievement award in 2003, also credited him in 2012 in its magazine, American Cinematographer, with “heroically” saving footage from a camera that went down in the Atlantic Ocean. His calculation: that seawater would be similar to saline-based developing solutions.“We got on an airplane with the film in a bucket of water, took it to New York and developed it,” Mr. Butler recalled in his commentary for a 2012 release of “Jaws” on Blu-ray. “We didn’t lose a foot.”In a statement, Mr. Spielberg praised Mr. Butler’s work on “Jaws.” “Bill’s outlook on life was pragmatic, philosophical and so very patient,” he said, “and I owe him so much for his steadfast and creative contributions to the entire look of ‘Jaws.’”Over his six-decade career, Mr. Butler also shot several noteworthy television dramas, including “Raid on Entebbe” (1976) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1984), both of which won him Emmy Awards for outstanding cinematography; “The Thorn Birds” (1983), which earned him an Emmy nomination; and “The Execution of Private Slovik” (1974).For his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), Mr. Butler received an Oscar nomination that he shared with Haskell Wexler, a colleague with whom he had an unusual association: On two of his more influential and well-regarded films — Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974) was the other — Mr. Butler was brought in as the director of photography only after the mercurial Mr. Wexler had been fired.Mr. Butler with Christopher Walken on the set of the 1988 film “Biloxi Blues.”Universal, via Everett CollectionWilmer Cable Butler was born on April 7, 1921, in Cripple Creek, Colo., and raised in a log cabin. His parents, Wilmer and Verca Butler, were farmers. After graduating from the University of Iowa with a degree in engineering, he started his career in broadcasting at WGN-TV in Chicago, where he was a camera operator for live programs and commercials.His first feature-length film, directed by his WGN colleague William Friedkin, was “The People vs. Paul Crump,” a 1962 documentary about an African American prisoner on death row who claimed his murder confession had been coerced through torture. Though the movie never aired — the contents were deemed too incendiary — it made its way to Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, who commuted Mr. Crump’s sentence to life without parole.“When you see the power a little piece of 16-millimeter film will bring to you, you are inspired to go ahead and pursue a career in the field,” Mr. Butler said in 2005 at a career retrospective at the Victoria Film Festival in British Columbia. “And that’s exactly what I did.”He was already 40 by the time he started shooting motion pictures. (“He reinvented himself multiple times,” said Michael G. Moyer, who worked alongside Mr. Butler as chief electrician on “Child’s Play” and other films.) But he immediately went to work for some of the period’s more promising young talents: Mr. Friedkin on “The Bold Men” (1965), Philip Kaufman on “Fearless Frank” (1967), Mr. Coppola on “The Rain People” (1969), and Jack Nicholson on “Drive, He Said” (1971), one of only three films he directed.“I did some work with director Phil Kaufman on the Universal Studios lot as a writer while I was still trying to get into the Los Angeles camera guild,” Mr. Butler said in a 2005 Moviemaker magazine interview. “That’s when I met Steven Spielberg. He had just finished his ‘Night Gallery’ projects. I shot ‘Savage’ and ‘Something Evil,’ a couple of one-hour TV movies, with him.”When work began on “Jaws,” it was Mr. Butler who convinced Mr. Spielberg that he could shoot in the water.“Panavision had just introduced a lightweight, smaller camera,” he recalled. “It was also quiet, so you could use it to cover dialogue. Steven thought it would be too shaky; I didn’t try to press the issue. If he hired me, I could show him when we got to Martha’s Vineyard.”Mr. Butler’s later credits included “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings” (1976); “The Sting II” (1983);“Graffiti Bridge,” starring and directed by Prince (1990); “Hot Shots!” (1991); and “The Chauffeur” (2008), as well as the TV series “Brooklyn Bridge” (1991). He remained active professionally well into his 80s, working in a variety of genres and often with fledgling directors.“The harder films are usually the big ones that require controlling a lot of people and a lot of cameras, and over a large area or sometimes many locations,” he said at the Victoria Film Festival. “Keeping that organized is something that some cinematographers are not capable of, so they do smaller films.”But smaller films can be just as difficult for them, he added, “because the pressure of a small film means that they may not have the time to properly gather their footage, and that’s another definite pressure that’s equally challenging.”Mr. Butler is survived by his wife, Iris (Schwimmer) Butler, whom he married in 1984, and their daughters, Genevieve and Chelsea Butler, both actresses, as well as three daughters from his marriage to Alma Smith, which ended in divorce: Judy Rawson, Patricia Pekau and Pam Fraser. He is also survived by a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Mr. Butler never attended film school; when he started shooting movies, he said, he bought the manual of the American Society of Cinematographers (“the bible of filmmaking”) and would refer to it whenever he needed. But really, he said in 2005, the way he learned to shoot pictures “was to go directly to the movies and see what somebody else was doing onscreen, and then going out and trying to do it myself. And that was it.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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    ‘Goodnight Mommy’ and More: For the Love (and Hate) of Horror Remakes

    With the American update of the Austrian horror film “Goodnight Mommy” now streaming, a horror fan discusses why remakes for him are a must-see.The 2015 Austrian psychological horror film, “Goodnight Mommy,” is an eerie little gem. I went into the recent remake with apprehension but determined to keep an open mind, primarily because of Naomi Watts. I remembered feeling similarly territorial over my bootleg VHS copy of the 1998 film “Ringu” before seeing Watts in its nightmarish 2002 American remake “The Ring.” Michael Haneke’s 2008 retelling of his own 1998 home invasion film “Funny Games” was just as terrifying the second time around with Watts in the lead.As the end credits rolled on the new “Goodnight Mommy,” I decided the mournful 1970s tune, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” would have made a better title. No fault of Watts; my issues with Matt Sobel’s film stem from a cloying emphasis on the redemptive power of motherhood, a theme extremely at odds with the original, and how this version bafflingly seems determined to spoil its own twist ending from the start.But I don’t regret watching the movie. I’m passionate about horror; if offered a choice between seeing a critically adored drama or a poorly reviewed slasher, I’ll choose the latter almost every time. There’s only so much time in a week, and as I’m constantly reminded, a masked man could behead me at any moment.Susanne Wuest and Lukas Schwarz in the 2015 Austrian film “Goodnight Mommy,” directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.RadiusHorror remakes surged in the 2000s. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “Friday the 13th,” “The Hills Have Eyes” and other seminal 1970s and ’80s classics were dusted off, recast and rewritten. In their podcast “Aughtsterion,” the hosts Sam Wineman and Jordan Crucchiola gleefully cover horror from this era in-depth and point out that many of these remakes were crueler than their originals, both in kills and dialogue, and reflected the decade’s cultural sleaze — everything from TMZ to American Apparel ads to “Girls Gone Wild.”The rise of torture porn films, like the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises, during the same period is now widely seen as an allegoric reaction to Sept. 11 and the American-led invasion in Iraq, but a grim failure at attempting this theme arrived with a remake of the 1976 film “The Omen,” 30 years after the original played to its decade’s fascination with religion and cults. The rehash had no interest in disguising its intent and showed footage of the burning World Trade Center to signal the impending end of days. Stephen Holden’s Times review noted that particular choice “sharpens this remake’s sour tang of exploitation.”And yet, even after reading that review, I was at the theater later that night. I needed to witness the mess myself, a sort of cinematic rubbernecking, so I could talk about it with authority among friends. I’ll even admit that I couldn’t resist the studio’s marketing gimmick of releasing the film on June 6, 2006.Dakota Johnson in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of “Suspiria.”Amazon StudiosIt’s thrilling when my devotion to the genre pays off and a remake works, like Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 take on “Suspiria.” Rather than try to replicate Dario Argento’s 1977 gorgeous, color-soaked tale of a witchy dance academy, Guadagnino went with a muted palette, allowing his character-centric story to shine. Here were real women operating a coven, not just the minions of a villainous asthmatic ghoul.On the flip side of classy, but equally cherished in my eyes, is “Piranha 3D” (2010), which transformed a tame “Jaws” rip-off from 1978 into an over-the-top judgment on sordid topless reality TV content. The director Alexandre Aja served up phallus chomping, a Sapphic underwater ballet set to “The Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’s opera “Lakmé,” even a cameo by Richard Dreyfuss, a.k.a. Hooper from “Jaws.”I find as much value in a horror remake with a large budget for entrails as I do in one that’s a moody meditation on the transformative power of dance. I treasure this genre because it allows me to define horror however I want.Jerry O’Connell in “Piranha 3D,” directed by Alexandre Aja.Gene Page/Dimension FilmsOf course I don’t speak for every horror fan. Despite #horrorcommunity being a popular Instagram and Twitter hashtag, the better term for us is horror crowd, as explained by Phil Nobile Jr., the editor in chief of Fangoria magazine.“Horror — as an interest, passion, or profession — has fandoms and sub-fandoms; it has cliques; it has little fiefdoms,” Nobile Jr. wrote in a newsletter last April. “A community is an idea (or maybe an ideal), a crowd is a mathematical reality.” He made this distinction while ruminating on homophobia and political differences among fans, but the phrasing is comprehensive. Put simply, our opinions are all over the place, and that’s often on display when a remake gets released.The new “Goodnight Mommy” left me cold instead of giving me chills, and I’m OK with that. A horror remake sparks discourse, lights up social media, fuels podcasts, spurs think pieces. When this happens, for a brief and lovely moment, I soak it all in and naïvely do feel part of a horror community before slipping back into the crowd. More