The filmography
Alexandre Aja has directed 10 feature films between 1999 and 2024, and at least 6 of them were made from existing material: 3 remakes of earlier films, 2 novels and 1 short story. That ratio is the most useful fact about his filmography. A director whose reputation rests on original horror imagery has in practice spent most of his career translating, which makes his credit list a compact case study in how far a film moves from the thing it was made from.
The features in order
The features in order, with what each one was adapting or remaking, are as follows. This list covers feature films Aja directed. Short films, and the films he wrote or produced without directing, are treated separately below.
| Film | Year | Made from |
|---|---|---|
| Furia | 1999 | A short story by Julio Cortázar. A French-language debut, with Marion Cotillard among the cast. |
| Haute Tension | 2003 | Original screenplay, written with Grégory Levasseur. Released as Switchblade Romance in the United Kingdom and High Tension in North America. |
| The Hills Have Eyes | 2006 | Remake of Wes Craven's 1977 film. |
| Mirrors | 2008 | Remake of the South Korean film Into the Mirror (2003). |
| Piranha 3D | 2010 | Reworking of Joe Dante's Piranha (1978). |
| Horns | 2013 | Novel by Joe Hill, published 2010. Starring Daniel Radcliffe. |
| The 9th Life of Louis Drax | 2016 | Novel by Liz Jensen, published 2004. Screenplay credited to Max Minghella. |
| Crawl | 2019 | Original screenplay by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen. |
| Oxygen | 2021 | Original screenplay. French-language, made for Netflix, starring Mélanie Laurent. |
| Never Let Go | 2024 | Original screenplay. Starring Halle Berry. |
The Hills Have Eyes, and what a remake actually changes
The Hills Have Eyes (2006) is the film that moved Aja from a French horror director to an American studio one, and it is the clearest example in the filmography of a remake that keeps the plot and replaces the texture. Wes Craven's 1977 original is a low-budget picture whose force comes from how cheap and unprotected it looks. Aja's version has resources, and it uses them on landscape, on the sense of a family exposed in open desert, and on a specific historical explanation for the people in the hills.
Film-to-film remakes travel a short distance almost by definition, because the source was already made of shots. Nothing has to be converted from one medium into another. That is worth holding onto, because it is exactly what makes the 2 novel adaptations in this filmography behave differently.
The 2 novels, and how far each film travelled
The 2 novels Aja has filmed, Joe Hill's Horns and Liz Jensen's The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, sit at opposite ends of the difficulty range for this kind of source. Both are first-person books. One has a plot that survives the loss of its narration and one does not.
| Work | Source | Film | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Hills Have Eyes | 1977 | 2006 | |
| Mirrors | 2003 | 2008 | |
| Piranha 3D | 1978 | 2010 | |
| Horns | 2010 | 2013 | |
| The 9th Life of Louis Drax | 2004 | 2016 |
Jensen's 2004 novel is set in France and alternates 2 first-person voices, a comatose 9 year old and his doctor, so that the reader is inside 2 partial accounts and outside the truth of what happened on the cliff.
The 2016 film relocates to the North American Pacific coast, keeps the boy in voice-over, and rebuilds the story around the doctor, played by Jamie Dornan, as the character the audience follows and doubts.
The cast of the 2016 film also includes Aaron Paul and Sarah Gadon as Louis's parents, Oliver Platt as a psychologist, and Aiden Longworth in the title role. Longworth's part is the structural problem of the adaptation in one job description: the character narrates almost the whole novel and spends most of the film unconscious.
Never Let Go and the return to original material
Never Let Go (2024), starring Halle Berry, is the third original screenplay Aja has directed in a row, after Crawl in 2019 and Oxygen in 2021, and the run marks a real change in how he is working. All 3 are confinement pictures with small casts: a flooded house, a cryogenic pod, an isolated home in the woods. None of them arrives with a readership that already knows how it should end.
What the filmography shows about him as an adapter
The filmography shows an adapter whose distance travelled is set by the medium of the source rather than by his own preferences. The 3 film remakes stay close, because a shot can be reshot. The short story expands, because a short story is mostly space. The 2 novels lose their narration, because narration is the one thing that has no camera equivalent, and the novel that was built almost entirely out of narration lost the most. Aja is the constant across all 10 films. What varies is what he was handed.