TL;DR or afraid of spoilers: The remake is a fine movie, but nothing special

After this I’m going to be spoiler-ific on both versions of the movie. You have been warned.

So, the basic idea is the same in each movie: Two families meet while on vacation and because they live relatively close to each other, one of the families invites the other to join them at their house in the countryside. Things are fine on the surface, but there is also something going on.

After that the differences arise: In the original, the parents of the visiting family are murdered in an especially cruel and demeaning way. In the remake, the family fights back and survives. The problem here is that the movie that has stayed with me for the two years since I saw it because of the way it handled the topics it was trying to raise, while I’ll remember the remake as an example of how remakes can easily ruin a movie.

It’s not strictly ruined, but it just felt like instant gratification. Something to make you feel good instead of something to make you think.

The remake is by Blumhouse and Jason Blum has stated that he is not interested in making art. He just wants to make money and has found a way to do that with low-budget horror movies. So, it is in his interest to make it more audience friendly. At the same time, this approach does deprive the audience of more interesting stories and experiences. A horror story, where you can easily see how you could be similarly manipulated into that kind of a situation, turns into a a weird subversion of a home invasion movie for about 20 minutes or so.

So, what was the message of the original?

Ben Dalton: Why are you doing this to us?
Paddy: Because you let us!

Paddy (Patrick in the original) believes himself to be a superior hunter, an alpha, who can do what he likes with other people. His supposed wife or partner is his accomplice, but is also a victim herself. This is actually interesting in the remake. She has learned to play the role to kepe Paddy happy, so she has also learned to manipulate other people as well. Her victimhood was not mentioned in the original, but it is hinted at. Again, one of those things where the filmmakers of the remake just don’t trust the audience in the same way as in the original, but the new take has it’s strengths as well in this particular case. There have been real life serial killers, who have had similar helpers who have been forced to into the role and are just too far gone to fight back.

Anyhow, Paddy has mastered this. He likes to play with his prey. He doesn’t kill the people coming over immediately, but keeps them around for a few days before killing them. He has a network of people to help him, although there’s a weird disconnect here with one of the characters as at one point the parents go out for dinner and Paddy has arranged a man to look after the children. In the original this man is actually there to assess the daughter of the visiting family for the purposes of selling her later. In the remake, he seems forboding in the way he acts, but is never spoken of after that.

Paddy is very comfortable in his role. He knows how to use the various instincts of the people around him to their detriment. He knows the parents want to keep their children calm, so Paddy pushes them because they can’t do anything about without letting their children know of the danger they are in.

The visitors, on the other hand, are seen by Paddy as weak and basically just domesticated animals. They are too docile to put up much in the way of resistance.

Also, in the remake, everyone is weirdly competent. Paddy and his partner, Ciara, have a kidnapped “son” they call Ant, but since “Ant” is Danish, I doubt that is his real name. Anyhow, his tongue has been cut off in an attempt to keep him quiet and since he deosn’t really know English, he can’t communicate with the visitors anyhow. In the original, he shows off the cut tongue and kind of tries to hint at the visiting father to look into certain things, but it isn’t really helpful. In the remake, he shows the daughter a bunch of mementos from the people Paddy has killed and in order to do that, he steals fom and later returns to Paddy his set of keys. The daughter takes pics of that and fakes menstruating to get her parents away from the other set of parents to show them the pics. The visiting mother manages to kill two of the attackers. In the original, the visiting father does try something, but it doesn’t really get anywhere and that’s it.

I understand how the remake can feel more compelling due to the family surviving the situation, but again: instant gratification. There is nothing to learn or to think about here. The original makes you think deeply about your real, not fantasized, chances of surviving such a situation. Since the movie is shot in much more naturalistic way with much more realistic looking actors, it also makes the danger seem much more realistic. Also, in the original, the killers are still just out there, continuing their trade (even though realistically their method is very risky).

Here’s one final difference: In the remake, the visiting father’s manhood is constantly attacked and he also takes it very personally, when his wife jokes about him getting sex maybe once a month. In the original, the pair does have a sex life as they have sex in the house and Patrick is spying on them at various intimate moments, such as just walking into the bathroom when the mother is showering. Is that too much for American audiences?

Okay, one final note I’m not sure about, but I thought I’d bring up: In the remake, there’s a fox that Paddy is trying to kill. At one point he takes the other father to hunt for it, but while the other father has the fox in his sights and could take the shot, he just decides against it. Later in the movie, the same fox distracts the father.

There seems to be a message here: You should wantonly kill wildlife, or otherwise it will randomly fuck up your life. At first, I was thinking that maybe the fox should have had a karmic role and should have distracted Paddy instead, but then I thought that would have added a magical realism element to the movie that would have taken away from the horrific realism of the movie. I guess you can read the fox as just a message the nature doesn’t care or know about you. In the end, you might want to control it, but you are still at it’s mercy and there is no justice there. Still, with the different take on the ending in the remake, it just felt as if it didn’t quite fit the new direction of the story.