The 1982 slasher film Unhinged is set to receive a second remake from the same producer. The original film is a project that owes a great debt to 1960’s Psycho, following three young women who crash their car on their way to a music festival and hole up in a creepy rural home run by a woman named Marion and her handyman Norman, one of whom may be a murderer. The film was first remade in 2017 under the auspices of producer Scott Jeffrey, setting the film in England rather than America and renaming the sinister woman Miss Perkins in another nod to Psycho.
Per Bloody Disgusting, Jeffrey – who is also behind the public domain exploiting slasher film Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, which is coming to theaters on February 13, 2023 – is now mounting another remake of the same project. The film is going to be a modernization of the original story, though Jeffrey promises it will be faithful to the 1982 project. The cast of Unhinged is set to include Demonic Christmas Tree‘s Ella Starbuck, Four Weddings and a Funeral‘s Betsy-Blue English, Croc!‘s Sian Altman, Witches of Amityville Academy‘s Toby Wynn-Davies, and newcomer Chloe Karr.
Unhinged Isn’t the Only Horror Movie to Get Two Remakes
At this point in cinema history, it is highly unusual for a horror film to have multiple feature-length remakes. However, it’s not entirely unheard of. For instance, there have certainly been many iterations of the classic Universal Monsters, particularly Dracula and Frankenstein. However, most films featuring those two characters in particular can be considered re-adaptations of the source novels by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley rather than direct remakes of any previous films.
When it comes to any particular horror film receiving a direct remake two times or more, that narrows the field considerably, though it has still happened from time to time. One of the most prominent would be the giant monster movie King Kong, which has received at least two direct remakes (John Guillermin’s in 1976 and Peter Jackson’s in 2005) and many additional films featuring or reintroducing the character, including the Legendary MonsterVerse’s Kong: Skull Island in 2017. George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead has also been remade at least seven times due to the fact that when it was originally released it didn’t feature the proper copyright information, meaning that it immediately entered the public domain.
However, that doesn’t make this less-than-a-decade gap between Unhinged remakes any less unique. Probably the closest comparison to this project in the slasher horror realm is Black Christmas. The seminal proto-slasher, which was directed by Bob Clark and released in 1974, was first remade as Black Xmas in 2006 by Final Destination duo Glen Morgan and James Wong. Just 13 years later in 2019, Blumhouse mounted its own Black Christmas remake. While this continuous remaking cycle will likely become more common as more time passes, it’s interesting that the relatively obscure 1982 slasher is one of the few films that it has already happened to.
Source: Bloody Disgusting