Horror Movie Director Explains Why He’s Remaking His Own Film

Malum director Anthony DiBlasi explains why the 2023 horror film is a remake of one of his previous films. Malum follows a young police officer named Jessica (Jessica Sula) who is assigned to the final shift of a decommissioned police station, only to be tormented overnight by a supernatural entity. This is the same premise of DiBlasi’s 2015 video-on-demand film Last Shift, which starred Juliana Harkavy as Jessica.

Screen Rant recently sat down with DiBlasi (who also produced the Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train) to discuss Malum ahead of its release on March 31. When asked why he and screenwriter Scott Poiley decided to remake Last Shift instead of creating a sequel when presented with the opportunity, he revealed that they wanted to update their original work with a bigger budget. Even though they are proud of their original project, DiBlasi “was confident about it playing with an audience in the theater” and wanted to finally give their film that opportunity. Read his full quote below:

I think when we made the first film, we did it on a very shoestring budget, and inherently because of that, we had to leave stuff on the table. When… I talked to [executive producer Luke LaBeau] about projects, he was like, “What do you think about revisiting the world again?” We thought that was interesting, mainly because when we first started, we talked about, “Is this going to be a sequel in a way, how are we going to approach it?” We ended up kind of doing this reimagining. The first film definitely found a following, but when it first came out, I thought that movie was a crowd pleaser, I was confident about it playing with an audience in the theater, and it never got to do that in the States, it went to streaming and went to Blu-ray and DVD.

So this movie, early on, we talked about giving it a good theatrical run, nationwide run, so people can actually see it in a theater with a crowd and just be scared and go on this ride with the character, and that was a big part of it for me, about exploring it again and deepening the mythologies of the things we didn’t get to do, and deepening characters and changing their motivation to help people come to see this. If you’re fans of the first, come see this and they’re immediately like, “Oh, this is gonna be a different movie from the very beginning,” hopefully they’ll feel that.

Malum Isn’t The First Time a Horror Filmmaker Has Remade Their Own Work

Malum‘s remake status is rare in quite a few ways. This includes the fact that the original film only came out less than a decade ago, as most remakes come out a decade or more after the original. However, the truly unusual aspect is that DiBlasi is reimagining his own work.

This isn’t a phenomenon that’s entirely unknown in the horror world. However, it is most common when a foreign film is being remade for an American audience. For instance, Takashi Shimizu remade his 2002 film Ju-On as The Grudge in 2004 and Michael Haneke remade his 1997 outing Funny Games a full decade later with the same title and Naomi Watts in the lead role in 2007.

Related: Every American Japanese Horror Remake, Ranked Worst To Best

The closest historical precedent for Malum is likely Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. Both his 1934 and 1956 versions of the film were in English, which provides a slight different. However, one was made for a British audience and the other for an American audience, so the remake still falls somewhat more on the side of The Grudge and Funny Games, leaving Malum to stand as a much more interesting curio.