The Worst American Remakes of Foreign Horror Movies

If a country that’s not America ever makes a horror movie that breaks into the mainstream, you can bet a million dollars that there will be an American remake of it within the next ten years. We’re constantly remaking and franchising our own horror movies, so why shouldn’t we do the same for international ones?

Some remakes have become iconic in their own right: The Ring, based on the Japanese Ringu, boosted J-horror into the American spotlight and spawned a massive franchise of sequels. Others, like Let Me In, a remake of the Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, proved itself worthy of its predecessor as soon as it was released. Horror is by nature a collaborative genre, and filmmakers are constantly remixing and borrowing ideas from other places, putting a new spin on something already well-known.

Sometimes, though, the audience’s skepticism has a basis in reality. When an American remake of a particularly well known scary movie is announced, many people’s first reaction is to cringe. There are few things worse than getting secondhand embarrassment from a lousy Americanized version of something another country did so much better. (Getting your head locked in a cage full of angry bees is worse, but just barely.) Since we love to cringe, we’ve put together a list of the worst of the worst, the international horror remakes that make us wish Hollywood never discovered horror movies at all.

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