'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'

I have mixed feelings about Tim Burton coming within 20 yards of a "Willy Wonka" remake. For starters, his remake of "Planet of the Apes" was awful, lifeless, uninspired and incomprehensible. And it wasn't any good either.

For a second, I enjoyed the original "Willy Wonka." I disagree with you that it was Disneyesque and the book darker; as I recall, it was the exact opposite. Think about all things that happened to the kids in the movie, that Wonka was completely dispassionate about. His cries for them to stop were so disinterested they were hilarious. "No, please, stop."

From what I've read of the remake, they're hoping to make Wonka and his factory brighter and less threatening than in the original movie.

Bleah. Hollywood needs to get over its remake fever.

As an aside, how's this for a thought: "Willy Wonka" was a horror movie. I contend that this is so because horror isn't gross-out, however much the purveyors of Hollywood flicks want you to think otherwise. It's the imposition of the unreal upon the real, the supernatural with the mundane, the extraordinary with the dull.

"Willy WOnka" is comedic horror, but it's horror nonetheless. The horror we're familiar with today, popularized by too many "Friday the 13th" sequels and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is not classic horror, but a vulgar imitation that settles for cheap scares and gross-outs.

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" isn't scary in the sense we usually associate with horror today, but it is disturbing or disquieting in what it reveals about the human condition and the insatiable hubris that drives us to bring ruin to ourselves and all those around us. (It's only because of the Boris Karloff flicks that we think of Frankenstein as being about Victor's creation and forget who the real monster is.)

And anyway, genres like fantasy and science fiction technically have their roots in horror, although they've become vast enough bodies of work that we now classify them separately.

Willy Wonka's not pure horror, of course, and I'm not claiming that it is. Doing so would be like comparing Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" with Shelley's book. It's got too many comedic elements to be classified solely horror. My point at the beginning, which I've probably overstated in my zeal, is just that it can be considered a horror movie in the proper sense of the term, and there were enough disturbing elements in the movie -- particularly the way each of the children is done in through their defining flaw -- that the classification is appropriate.