If you invented a time machine in the late 1970s or early 1980s, then used it to visit the first decade of the 21st century, you might have more pressing things to do than check out what films were showing. But should you stroll past a cinema, you couldn't fail to notice that the titles on the marquee were eerily familiar. The past year alone has seen remakes of, among others, The Hitcher, The Poseidon Adventure, The Omen, The Amityville Horror, The Hills Have Eyes, When a Stranger Calls and The Wicker Man. The 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was followed by a prequel, while this year's The Hills Have Eyes II was both a remake of the 1985 sequel to the 1977 horror, and a sequel to a remake in its own right. Variety magazine reported recently that out of 46 studio movies scheduled for wide release this summer, almost half are sequels or remakes. (And that's without "disguised" remakes, such as the hit thriller Disturbia, which rehashes Rear Window, or the current Are We Done Yet?, which is really a third version of Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House). Whether this is postmodernism at its most playful or cultural cannibalism gone berserk, one thing's for sure: we had better get used to it.

For cinemagoers in their 30s or older, the deja vu is about to become even more intense. Some of the titles coming soon, yet again, to a cinema near you date from the 1970s or earlier - The Taking of Pelham One Two Three starts shooting later this year, with new versions of The Women, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Barbarella, The Heartbreak Kid, The Birds and Don't Look Now in the offing.

If that doesn't sound like a lot of remakes, that's because we have not mentioned the new versions of All of Me (with Queen Latifah in the Lily Tomlin role), Clash of the Titans, Creepshow, Dressed to Kill, The Entity, The Evil Dead, Fame, The Fly (itself a remake), Hellraiser, The Long Good Friday (transposed to the US), Near Dark, Piranha, Scanners, Short Circuit, The Star Chamber, Taps and Tony Scott's LA-set revamp of that quintessential New York movie, The Warriors. And let's not even get into Hollywood's mania for remaking foreign films.

When it comes to the craze for revisiting movies from the 1970s and 1980s, the director John Carpenter may be the most remade of living film-makers. Hollywood studios are eating through his back catalogue like locusts in a wheat field, with remakes of Assault On Precinct 13 and The Fog already released, and filming underway on new versions of Escape From New York, Halloween and The Thing. Carpenter, who is himself responsible for witty takes on the Howard Hawks classics Rio Bravo (as Assault On Precinct 13) and The Thing From Another World (as The Thing), is sanguine about this glut of remakes.

"I'm flattered if someone comes to me with the idea of remaking one of my films," he says. "Remake or original, making a movie still comes down to old-fashioned hard work. If it's based on another film, well, so be it. Remakes have been part of cinema since its earliest days - think of A Star Is Born, which was remade numerous times. And they're especially big right now because it's become increasingly difficult to lure audiences into theatres. Advertising a remade title that may be familiar to audiences can hopefully cut through the clutter of titles and products that one sees."

It is this promise of brand recognition that motivates studios and producers to go digging in the recent past for movies that can be spruced up and wheeled out. "Marketing and distribution costs so much, almost as much as making the film," says Ashok Amritraj, CEO and chairman of Hyde Park Entertainment. "So it's important to have a title that people recognise. It's irrelevant whether or not they saw the film in the first place - if you've got that recognition, however faint, it's a valuable asset to a movie because it makes it easier to sell."

Amritraj has form in this area, having produced the 2004 remake of the 1973 thriller Walking Tall. "That was a good combination, because we used recognition of the title to bring in the over-35s, while casting The Rock in the lead ensured that the kids came to see it, too. That mixture of new and old viewers is ideal. Hopefully the people who remember the original will say, 'Hey, I'd like to see what they've done with this.'" Amritraj is now producing a film version of the Tony Curtis/Roger Moore TV series The Persuaders and a straight-to-DVD remake of Dressed to Kill; he also has a new version of The Star Chamber, the 1983 Michael Douglas film about a judge-turned-vigilante, in development.

"You have to be careful with what you choose to remake," he says. "I mean, you wouldn't want to do Casablanca, that would just be dangerous. The best remakes are titles that audiences have heard of, but which weren't necessarily huge hits, or something that was a good idea but perhaps wasn't done very well."

The screenwriter Rick Alexander, who is writing the Dressed to Kill remake and has a new version of Conan the Barbarian set up at Warner Bros, agrees with this assessment. "I have a pet theory that great ideas that were poorly executed in the first place make for the best remake fodder. When I consider whether or not a remake could work, I tend to gravitate toward those I believe to be flawed yet feel some sentimental fondness toward. The remakes I'm interested in tend to be things I feel could be 'improved upon' or 'spun' in some unique way. I'd never want to remake, say, Only Angels Have Wings, and I'd hope no one else would. The irony is that I'm certain there are those who feel the same about projects that I'm involved in now."

There can be no guarantee that any of the remakes in development or production will spark the imagination of a new audience, or not be overshadowed by memories of the original. For every Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes, there are other, ill-advised remakes that acquire the taboo ring that the word Macbeth has in theatre dressing rooms: Diabolique, Get Carter, Gloria, The Ladykillers, The Wicker Man. But from the studios' standpoint, remaking is about more than generating interest in the new film; it's also a means of revitalising an old property, mouldering in DVD bargain bins and on cable channels, into a new income stream. If the remake is even a moderate success, studios find themselves milking a cash cow that would otherwise have run dry a long time ago - though the uncharitable might invoke another unsavoury animal-related metaphor and call it flogging a dead horse.

The Star Chamber, for example, is in development at 20th Century Fox, the studio that made the original. With the proposed remake comes the possibility of reanimating this "expired" title, as Disney discovered when it remade its own Freaky Friday and revived the Herbie franchise with Herbie: Fully Loaded. Likewise, Dressed to Kill is already a title in the MGM back-catalogue, and MGM is partnering with Hyde Park Entertainment for the remake. In a similar manner to the compilations and reunion tours that make the heritage rock industry so lucrative, studios have discovered a way to extend the commercial lifespan of titles that weren't even huge money-spinners to begin with.

It's easy to allow snobbery about remakes to eclipse the fact that the form has delivered some genuinely adventurous works. Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped was a brilliant reinterpretation of James Toback's Fingers, as well as a rare US-to-France remake, while Gus Van Sant's colour, shot-for-shot Psycho, though vastly unpopular, will come to be seen as an authentically avant-garde experiment within the confines of mainstream cinema. But the prospect of climbing back into that time machine and going another 20 or 30 years into the future to see what's playing at the multiplex is a mildly disheartening one: will our children or grandchildren be stumping up their pocket money to see remakes of Hostel II and 300, or a sequel to the remake of Ocean's 19? Doom merchants can take comfort in the fact that it was ever thus.

"I know there are a lot of 1970s and 1980s titles around again right now," says John Carpenter. "But my theory is that there's a 20- to 30-year nostalgia cycle in American pop culture. We long for those great old movies of yesteryear. In the 1950s, there was a nostalgia for the Karloff/Lugosi Universal monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s. It's difficult to look into the future, but I don't think that trend's going to change. I think there'll be a remake or two to be seen in 2027, that is if there's any furniture left to sit on."