Inside

A few days ago, I received my new Netflix DVD in the mail.  Yeah, I still have my DVD-through-the-mail subscription.  This time ’round, it was the American remake of Apartment 1303, a Japanese horror movie I had watched earlier.  I hesitated, though.  I mean, the original Apartment 1303 wasn’t all that great, to be honest, and I really only watched it as part of my quest to go through the entirety of Tartan Video’s Asia Extreme line from a little while ago.  The interest in the remake was more of a morbid curiosity, considering I had never heard of the original, I thought it funny that it was remade, and I immediately assumed it would be trash.

Can you blame me, though?  I’ve seen more than my fair share of quality Asian horror flicks get absolutely butchered by American adapters: Pulse, Shutter, One Missed Call, and even (and especially) the not-really-horror Oldboy.  It’s been a bloodbath, appropriately enough.  And it hasn’t been limited to the Asian market, sad to say:  You name a good foreign flick, and I can likely point you toward a sub-par American remake of it.  [Rec] got watered-down into Quarantine, District 13 was ludicrously morphed into Brick Mansions, and Martyrs was completely neutered of all its substance minus the title.

And it’s that last one that brings us to our subject at hand.  Y’see, Martyrs was part of an apparent movement in French cinema called the “New French Extremity” (or other similar variants) that focused on brutally harsh and decidedly bloody visuals.  Standouts include the aforementioned Martyrs, Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, and, from directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, Inside.

À l’intérieur, as it’s known in its original Amphibian, follows the pregnant Sarah as she readies for the impending birth of her child.  She’s scarred, inside and out, due to a car accident a few months prior that claimed the life of her husband.  She heads home from the obstetrician to settle in for Christmas Eve.  But then she’s visited by an apparently crazed unknown woman.  This woman (she goes unnamed throughout and in the credits) wants the baby and is more than willing to go through Sarah to get it.  Literally.  What results is a night-long cat-and-mouse situation punctuated with murder, tension, and lots o’ blood.

And the blood is tied to the emotional core of the film’s style.  The whole NFE aesthetic, to me, is a sort of operatic style of filmmaking, where dialogue and character aren’t as central as emotion and feeling.  Think Argento’s use of color and music made manifest as buckets of blood and tense, frenetic pacing.  As such, the violence is as much of a part of the narrative as the dialogue is in a Tarantino flick, and these films do not flinch from this idea’s results.

Suffice it to say, if you’re squeamish, these ain’t the films for you.  Martyrs features plenty of torture (both psychological and physical) and some straight-up flaying; High Tension makes abundant use of chainsaws and blades; and Inside opts for (mostly) the latter of those two, with a focus on some nice, big shears.  The cuts, stabs, shots, burns, and whatnot come quickly and often, leading to rivers and lakes of the krovvy all over Sarah’s house.  There’s obviously a body count, including that of Sarah’s cat, as well as lots of harm to her and her attacker.  You feel every hit, every slash, every shot, fairly viscerally, thus bringing you into the story in a way that normal methods might fall short in.  (Assuming you’re not turned off by all the gore, natch.)  The Asian horrors approach their respective situations similarly, and their remakes almost always miss the mark because the adapters either just don’t understand this or decide to go in a different direction.

Which brings us to the new remake of Inside.

Now this thing has been sitting on the sidelines since its initial release at the 2016 Sitges Film Festival in Spain.  Why Spain?  Y’see, this is a joint venture between American and Spanish production companies, helmed by Spanish director Miguel Ángel Vivas (whose prior work I am in no way familiar with) and scripted by the Catalonian Jaume Balagueró (who’s much more well known as the director of the [Rec] series).  After bouncing around other markets like Israel and Turkey, this new Inside is getting a limited release Stateside this weekend.

The basic story is pretty much the same as the original, but this time Sarah is outwardly unscathed by the accident (and doesn’t show too much in the way of mental scarring, either, honestly), save that she’s now partially deaf and requiring a hearing aid.  And there’s a whole helluva lot less blood.

Yeah, they remade an extremely bloody flick only to take out most of the blood.  Yup.  Gotta love it.  As it turns out, Balagueró was originally tapped to direct, and since the idea’s inception, he was out to “accent the terror of the pregnancy situation more than the gore”, as he told Fangoria way back in 2008.  Not quite sure what that means, exactly, save a drop in the blood count.  I find this direction-shift kinda amusing, seeing that Balagueró didn’t take kindly to the makers of Quarantine changing the themes of his own film in adaptation, as he told Fangoria.

And, yeah, neither Sarah nor her attacker ever really shed much in the way of blood, and the bodies that do pile up are much cleaner than their French forebears.  Even worse, and this is especially egregious given Balagueró’s thoughts on Quarantine‘s ending missing a vital component, the ending is completely changed this time around:  In the original, Sarah’s baby is ready to come out, but hits a snag along the way.  This allows the unnamed woman (we know who she is by this point, and at least the remake didn’t fuck with that aspect…much…) to take the shears, cut Sarah open, and retrieve the infant.  We’re left with Sarah’s bloody body lying on the stairs while the other woman eerily comforts the newborn in another room, shrouded by an ominous shadow of black and garnet.  In the remake, following a tussle in a nearby pool, Sarah is able to break free through the pool cover (partially aided by the other woman, in a slight change in character) and give birth relatively easily in the rain, whilst the other woman sinks to her watery death.  What is even the hell?

Indeed, such tonal changes are present throughout.  The accident at the beginning is depicted more audaciously, including a more vicious attack on physics than anything the NFE could concoct.  Sarah, as noted earlier, is less damaged now, much more open to the world.  Her hearing impairment is included seemingly so that the initial encounter with the police goes the way it needs to without the need for a body count, as well as to justify the change of her pet into a dog.  The attacker is nowhere near as unhinged as her original form, the latter often twitching and pulling her hair in frustration and anxiety, the former a blithely collected menace lacking any character whatsoever.  Though the pacing is similar between both films, there is a distinct lack of tension and emotional resonance in the remake, because the threat is never quite real or visceral enough, and it never seems like things are nearly as dire as we’re supposed to believe.  And, believe you me, this is because of the lack of gory violence.  Sometimes violence has a narrative purpose, rather than just serving as superficial shocks.

This remake, like so many other before it, completely miss the point of the original, and their creations show that the adapters simply don’t care about that.  They seem like they just want a story that has a baked-in audience and are more than willing to just cobble something together to cash in on that audience than to actually make a compelling second take on a tale.  This instance is more galling than usual, given the writer’s prior experience with less-than-stellar remakes of his work, and that shows how deeply-seated the problem truly is.  Perhaps one day remakes will echo the cores of their originals, but it looks as though such a day is quite a ways off.  Skip this tepid thing if you come across it:  It doesn’t deserve to get any positive attention.