Dad, he didn’t force himself on me you know. I know you’d like to think that he did…

Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake is in many ways a sustained attack on the original. First, various changes make Sam Bowden a dim shadow of his predecessor. Unfaithful to his wife, he’s also (let’s say) a much more realistic lawyer – the casting of Nick Nolte is significant even on a visual level. De Niro’s Cady, meanwhile, is given stronger motivation against him. Like Straw Dogs or Christopher Nolan’s remake of Insomnia, the central duel is significantly more ambiguous. And where Cape Fear ’62 was accidentally fantastical, Scorsese pounces on the potential reading of Cady as imaginary. Through ‘chance’ and cinematography, their early meetings are now more mysterious than malicious. The enemy is no less sadistic, mind, but Scorsese’s fascination with psychoanalysis zeroes in on the duality: Cady as the return of the repressed, Bowden (aka the original filmmakers aka the audience) as the true originator of the violent fantasy against his wife and… wait for it… his teenage daughter.

One of the chief failings which inspire the irrational hatred of remakes is in thinking of films as fixed objects. But Scorsese’s ideological intervention, elaborating rather than inventing, lifts the lid on the dark material bubbling under the first film’s surface – the unsaid, the deleted, that which is overcompensated for – a process which takes place in every film production. His Cape Fear must be viewed alongside the original.