The horror, the horror … scary remakes on film

Filming started last week on Let Me In, the Hollywood remake of beguiling 2007 Swedish horror Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson's icy tale of a lonely young boy who falls in love with a prepubescent vampire. In place of the original's Lina Leandersson, a strikingly gothic 12-year-old with a weirdly adult demeanour, Cloverfield director Matt Reeves has cast the rather more conventional looking Chloe Moretz. Still, there's always make-up Photograph: PR

Robert Englund made the role of crater-faced killer Freddy Krueger his own over umpteen sequels to Wes Craven's 1984 chiller, A Nightmare on Elm Street, so much so that it was impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. At least, that was until Oscar-nominated actor Jackie Earle Haley blew everyone else off screen as Watchmen's misanthropic crime fighter Rorschach earlier this year. Fans clamoured for him to be in Samuel Bayer's remake, which arrives in cinemas in 2010 Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive/PR

How do you recast the iconic role of Dr Samuel Loomis, the original wise commentator on the evil of masked killer Michael Myers in John Carpenter's seminal 1978 slasher, Halloween? Malcolm McDowell did an able job doubling for Donald Pleasance on Rob Zombie's gory 2007 remake, but the critics were unimpressed by the movie itself Photograph: Public Domain/PR

Ditto for John Moore's 2006 remake of The Omen, the classic 70s horror about a diplomat who comes to realise that the child he thought was his son is in fact the Antichrist. Harvey Stephens played the original Damien Thorn in Richard Donner's 1976 film, with Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick taking the role in the remake. The latter won a Fangoriachainsaw award for creepiest kid based on his performance, one of the few plaudits the movie did get Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive/PR

Nicolas Cage took the Edward Woodward role of the doomed policemen who arrives on a remote island where rumours persist of the disappearance of a young girl in Neil LaBute's 2006 Hollywood remake of the 1973 British cult favourite The Wicker Man. Many critics felt those responsible for the later film ought to suffer the same fate as its lead character Photograph: PR/Ronald Grant Archive

David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly is a rare example of a horror remake which arguably surpassed the original. Jeff Goldblum played the scientist experimenting with matter transportation who accidentally fuses himself with a tiny insect. David Hedison took a similar role in Kurt Neumann's 1958 original Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The producers of this year's remake of Friday the 13th had just one thing going for them. Unlike its slasher peers, the original 1980 movie was never a critical hit, so the reboot could hardly suffer by way of comparison. Adrienne King played the female lead in the first film, with Amanda Righetti taking over for the later movie Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive/PR

Gus Van Sant seems to have followed a simple code while reimagining Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1998: why make one highly spurious decision when two will do just as well? Not only did the Oscar-winner plump for a shot-for-shot remake of the original, he cast Vince Vaughn, an actor not known previously (or since) for delivering the chills, in Anthony Perkins' role as weirdo hotel owner Norman Bates. Film critic Roger Ebert said the film demonstrated "that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted". Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive/PR