"Profane Secrets of the 'Sorority Row' Sisterhood" by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Carrie Fisher with a pump-action shotgun.

Your reaction to that image is likely a good indicator of how enthusiastic you’ll be about Stewart Hendler’s 2009 remake of Mark Rosman’s 1982 The House on Sorority Row. It’s also a convenient yardstick for measuring the thematic distance between these flicks.

The original, arriving toward the end of the first slasher wave — usually cited as starting in 1978 with Halloween and crashing around 1983–1984 — is curious. Even as Rosman’s picture flips between intriguing psychological commentary and rote cat-and-mouse balletics, his take is unusually light, often humorous. “I wanna thank you all for helping me become what I am today. Wasted!” declares the final girl Katherine “Katey” Rose (Kathryn McNeil). When the sorority group moves a dumpster containing a dead body, they collide with a cop car in slapstick fashion. And so on. After directing this film, Rosman focused on making comedies, which seem to be more authentically aligned with his sensibilities. There’s another kind of hybridization at work as well: while Rosman’s directorial hand is deep in the slasher-formula cookie jar (e.g., the opening prologue, the killer’s signature weapon), that same hand is wearing a gialloesque glove visibly inspired by the work of Brian De Palma (e.g., the way the killer is silhouetted), for whom Rosman had been an assistant director on Home Movies (1979).

If Rosman’s digits are giallo-sheathed, Hendler’s are tightly gripped around a decked-out, four-pronged tire iron, industrializing the 1982 walking cane into a heavy-duty instrument of percussive cruelty. Suspense in the original’s kill sequences is now forged into shocking splatter-chic.

When it comes to sororities, Black Christmas (1974) wins the lifetime award. The characters in Rosman’s movie, despite essaying some quippy banter, feel less fleshed-out than those in that earlier, more unnerving and hard-hitting slasher. And while the basic plot at the heart of The House on Sorority Row and its remake — young people goofing around accidentally get someone killed and then resolve to cover it up — will for younger viewers probably bring to mind Jim Gillespie’s Kevin Williamson–scripted I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and its sequels, that essential backstory can be traced to Prom Night (1980).

Let’s get back to the gunplay. In Rosman’s movie, the revolver, which Vicki (Eileen Davidson) believes to be loaded with blanks, transforms the sorority’s resentment of the eccentric, mean-spirited house mother Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt) into an irrevocable crime.

In the 2009 film, when house mother Mrs. Crenshaw (Carrie Fisher) says, “Please don’t think I’m afraid of you. I run a house with fifty crazy bitches!” and brandishes the pump-action shotgun, we’ve entered a kind of sorority house drag that inverts the original dynamic. The housemother role has shifted from scolding the girls as “filth” to joking about “five boys in one night,” embodying institutional complicity rather than opposition. Here, instead of being the object of the sorority’s scorn, the house lioness is fiercely protecting her cubs against an external threat.

Which raises the question: who is the real enemy in both movies?

On the surface, the original captures social anxiety around generational conflict. Mrs. Slater, a strict, elderly authority figure, represents outdated moral oversight. “Slater is the last of her breed,” says Diane (Harley Jane Kozak). “When she goes, the species’ll be extinct.”

The sorority sisters’ prank is an act of rebellion against Mrs. Slater’s puritanical attempts to control their behavior. But besides the girls’ deadly mistake with the gun, the prank misfires in a second way. Rosman and Bobby Fine’s screenplay eventually reveals that a separate cover-up, undertaken by Mrs. Slater herself, accounts for the actual killer. The past is dangerous not because it seeks to impose its values on the present but because it will return to avenge long-buried moral lapses and youthful indiscretions.

Conversely, the 2009 remake’s prank drives a slut-shaming revenge plot that channels toxic group loyalty, internalized misogyny within female peer groups, and the fear of exposure in a hyper-connected, reputation-obsessed era. The very social status the girls are so desperate to protect has become weaponized. Sisterhood now entails surveillance, and ruthless brand management demands violence.

Graduation in 1982 promises an escape from house rules, but 2009’s “Theta Pi, we honor thee! From life to death, sorority!” is a compact without an expiration date. That sense of claustrophobic clinging is further underscored by class politics, which move from implied in 1982 to explicit in 2009, as Senator Tyson (Rick Applegate) frames Jessica (Leah Pipes) as either “the one you spend your life with or the one you burn hard with,” reducing her character to an accessory of his campaign optics. Monstrosity shifts from burying secrets to psychotically recoding a massacre in terms of house-cleaning.

And where the 1982 pool was a festering, central wound constantly reminding us of the sorority girls’ transgression, the remake exports guilt offsite, to a remote mineshaft, so the renovated house and sorority image can remain pristine.

Fisher’s line quoted above is far from the only such verbal salvo. The remake leans into performative punchlines. Not only dialogue but characterization and staging are heightened to knowing absurdity. This choice by Stewart Hendler, a distorted echo of Rosman’s overt drollness, likewise made his approach stand out from the competition — but not necessarily in a good way.

For context, recall that following the huge post-Scream teen-slasher cycle from roughly 1996 to 2001, neo-slasher/remakes became hot. Their sheer preponderance from 2003 to 2010 is staggering, and includes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Amityville Horror (2005), The Fog (2005), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), The Omen (2006), When a Stranger Calls (2006), Halloween (2007), April Fool’s Day (2008), Prom Night (2008), and a half-dozen others. In fact, the same year in which Sorority Row hit screens also gave us Friday the 13th (2009), Halloween II (2009), Last House on the Left (2009), and My Bloody Valentine (2009), so it’s fair to say Hendler’s movie arrived during the final, exhausted peak of glossy updates to 1970s/1980s franchises.

Most of these were dour, no-nonsense attempts to revitalize properties by doubling down on the grisliness and eschewing most of the social commentary. Sorority Row is the odd killer duck out.

At the time of its release, reviewer Tom Meek, writing for The Boston Phoenix, observed: “The set-up — a sexting prank leads to an unwitting murder that a septuplet of sorority sisters decide to cover up — begins as innocuous coed melodrama but then veers into inadvertent camp…” Anyone watching the movie today will quickly realize that the camp, which may well have alienated viewers at the time, is most certainly deliberate.

The prank scene, for instance, is written as overtly outrageous black comedy: Garrett’s (Matt O’Leary) behavior is macabrely described in terms of “The Dry Hump Olympics” and we’re told “come on, roofie sex isn’t that bad” because “you get laid and you get a good night’s sleep.” The rhetoric is deliberately over-cranked mean-girl baroque (“Friend me on Facebook, I'll totally confirm,” “I love you, Jessica, because you make being a bitch an art form,” “Ellie, you're being borderline retarded right now,” etc.), and the script repeatedly undercuts horror beats with caustically funny reactions, as when Jessica, after discovering Megan’s (Audrina Patridge) heavily decomposed corpse, exclaims, “She looks terrible!” The ensemble performances, especially by Leah Pipes as Jessica Pierson, Briana Evigan as Cassidy Tappan, and Rumer Willis as Ellie Morris, along with other filmmaking elements, such as Lucian Piane’s antsy string score and Ken Seng’s grandiose cinematography, contribute to the hyperbole.

That same review goes on to opine: “It’s Scream minus the wit and verve.” Again, I think that’s a misunderstanding of what Sorority Row is up to.

Scream is a self-aware but loving tribute to horror films. As such, it’s peopled by sympathetic, generally naive characters who serve to point the satire at the tropes of the genre. Sorority Row instead wastes no time in establishing its leads as canny, cagey, and almost unfailingly unsympathetic. Now it’s the degradation of society itself that’s being lampooned.

Scream mirrors the function of art, while Sorority Row reflects us directly.

As much as I chuckle at Sorority Row’s snark and appreciate its slick, tire-iron gore, it’s the demented, operatic climax that I relish. The original’s elegant strain of Gothic secrecy — cue the creepy attic and music box — here becomes a virulent, flamboyant descent into mania set against a conflagration. What better, more Gothic closure than all-encompassing flames?

“Reputation comes from the company you keep” becomes deeply ironic once we reach this blood-and-fire-drenched finale.

For film fans, that sentiment may apply not only to people, but to the titles comprising their curated collections.

If that’s so, I can imagine reputations far worse than that which comes from keeping company with Sorority Row.