The One Potential Way a Monster Squad Remake Might Not Be Totally Unnecessary

?I’m not opposed to all remakes. Seriously. But I am opposed to a Monster Squad remake, and not just because I love the movie — but because I don’t think there’s any chance of a remake being even half as good as the original. This isn’t because the original was some kind of uncopyable masterpiece, but because it somehow fell in this weird area of ’80s Hollywood where it was a kids movie that was genuinely scary and the kids could smoke and cuss and act like actual kids, not just movie kids. Part of it was the time, part of it was because it was a small production, and I just don’t think there’s any way a studio could replicate that today, even if they wanted to. So why bother with a remake?

Shockingly, there’s one possible reason to bother with a remake, one I hadn’t thought of before, and one that’s not guaranteed but is at least being mused over by the producers — having the monsters be new. Like, modern movie monsters — my pal and occasional TR contributor Sean T. Collins suggests a Halloween-esque slasher, an Alien, a J-horror ghost. I think this is amazing. First of all, unfortunately, the Universal Monsters don’t even have the same cultural currency now as they did in the ’80s. A kid might genuinely be scared of Dracula or Frankenstein in 1986; today’s kids would just laugh at you. To modernize the assortment of monsters not only makes the story fresh — and potentially worth telling — but could be genuinely scary, which I think captures the original spirit of The Monster Squad far more than a big studio Van Helsing-for-kids flick would. At the very least, it would be different enough to be its own movie, and thus potentially worth watching, too.

What do you guys think? And more importantly, if this happened, what monsters do you think should make the cut? (Via Shock Til You Drop)