Once you become a horror icon, it's pretty tough to find work outside the genre. Case in point: Longtime character actor Tobin Bell hit the jackpot when he appeared as the villain of the Saw series, and now he's just signed on to portray Satan himself in an indie flick called Highway 61. We're not entirely sure if this is a full-bore horror movie, or simply a dramatic piece with an occult twist -- but if you need someone to play The King of Darkness, you could do a lot worse than Tobin Bell. (Like many horror icons, Mr. Bell was a well-established and recognized character actor long before the horror genre suck him in.)

Written and directed by Luke & Jeremy Jackson, Highway 61 is about a floundering rock band that decides to sell its collective soul to you-know-who. According to Variety, Nick Thune is also on board as the band's lead singer. As far as Mr. Bell is concerned, here's what he's appeared in since the first Saw movie: Buried Alive, Decoys 2 and the upcoming Boogeyman 2. Someone please get this guy and Robert Englund in the same movie already. (Oh wait, they already were.) Here's hoping Highway 61 is a solid flick. It's not like Mr. Bell needs the money these days.

Friends have asked me why Hollywood would remake The Omen, a film remembered fleetingly, if at all, for a few images of terror, Gregory Peck, and the pulsing, moody Carmina Burana-like score, an Oscar-winner for composer Jerry Goldsmith. Their concern is a slightly embarrassed mix of indignation and curiosity: Their attitude is that if movies they remember fondly don't need to be remade, what justifies a return to The Omen, which wasn't very good the first time?

But remakes often happen to correct significant errors with original films, namely that they didn't make money for the right people. Why should Dr. Seuss's estate alone profit from How the Grinch Stole Christmas? Can't Ron Howard get some of that sweet Who-ville coin? And so, we get remakes -- even remakes of films as marginal as The Omen.

But then again, if pop culture is often a indicator of how people are actually feeling -- if there's a link between the stories on the front page of the New York Times and the books at the top of the Best-seller lists in the Book Review section -- then we can see that supernatural claptrap with one foot in the Dark Ages and the other somewhere around the End Times has been selling pretty good recently: The Da Vinci Code, the Left Behind book series. So at the beginning of John Moore's version of The Omen, footage from 9/11, Katrina and the Indonesian tsunami provokes plenty of long, serious looks from The Vatican's top men, who've met to decipher symbols from the Book of Revelation with a series of PowerPoint slides...