“Every man carries a circle of hell around his head like a halo.”

Martin Scorsese’s decision to follow up Goodfellas with a remake of an old ‘60s thriller might have seemed like a surprising change of pace for the director. But once you realize that he’s updated, complicated, and perverted the original’s simplistic tale of good vs. evil into an unyielding descent into abject terror tinged with complex moral considerations, his choice makes a great deal of sense.

The original Cape Fear had a fairly simple premise, both narratively and morally. Adapted from John MacDonald’s novel The Executioners, it was directed by J. Lee Thompson and starred Gregory Peck’s straight lawyer squaring off with Robert Mitchum’s crooked ex-con. When Max Cady (Mitchum) is released from prison after serving eight years for raping a girl, he begins stalking the family of Sam Bowden (Peck), a witness to his crime who testified against him in court and whom he holds personally responsible for his lost years in the pen. Mitchum and Peck both return in the remake, the former as a police lieutenant and the latter as a high caliber defense lawyer. (Martin Balsam, who played a police chief in the original, also returns).

In Wesley Strick’s script for Scorsese’s version, the moral gulf between the two men is similarly wide, but dramatically shifted toward evil. Whereas in the original Bowden (played here by Nick Nolte) had witnessed Cady’s sexual assault of an underage girl, here his role is shifted to that of Cady’s defense lawyer. Bowden, convinced of his client’s guilt and desiring his punishment, suppressed evidence that suggested his victim had presented herself as an adult and had numerous other partners around the time that she had relations with Cady. On top of that misdeed, legally if not morally wrong, pile on previous infidelities against his wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) and a contemptuous relationship with a rebellious teenage daughter named Danielle (Juliette Lewis)—you’ve got a broken man harassing a broken man. One just does a better job of hiding his shortcomings. And so when Cady initially asserts himself into the Bowdens’ life, perpetually chomping a cigar and slinging half sensical lines hither and yon, he’s menacing but more or less harmless. And yet his ominous presence serves as a catalyst for all of the slow boiling familial crises of the Bowden clan, kicking off arguments about old scars and providing a hidden satisfaction for a mother and daughter who don’t see eye to eye with prideful old dad and enjoy seeing him in distress.

Cady (De Niro), illiterate at the time of his incarceration, has sharpened himself into a formidably intelligent, single-minded psychopath hellbent on his former lawyer’s personal destruction. To that end, he’s spent his time behind bars learning to read, studying law, and unsuccessfully appealing his conviction. He’s also pumped quite a bit of iron. Most importantly for the plot’s purposes, he’s discovered the evidence Bowden had surreptitiously buried all those years ago. And thus he emerges from his steel cage hardened and bitter, tattooed and greasy, sinewy and sinister, quoting scripture and Nietzsche and Dante Alighieri.

De Niro’s performance dominates the film. The script offers him plenty of memorable dialogue to chew on—biblically-flavored rambling, cheerful riffing on the sexually candid works of Henry Miller, explosive diatribes against his sworn enemy—all delivered in a disturbing, wicked drawl. It’s perhaps De Niro’s most committed performance and produces a monstrous fiend that is unhinged and terrifying. He’s so over-the-top with his cartoonish villainy that one wishes he had dialed things back a little bit so as to not appear obviously deranged from the start. Anyhow, like Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, De Niro’s Cady is able to produce a charming visage when the situation demands it, appearing not just normal, but intriguing, mysterious, and desirable. He cranks up the charisma for the first time in a bar with Lori (Illeana Douglas), a young clerk with whom Bowden is having a platonic affair. The scene gradually builds in tension as he continues to ply her with drinks and they begin to joke about serial killers. Then he takes her home, handcuffs her, rapes her, bites a chunk of flesh out of her cheek, and beats her to the brink of death in a startling sequence that I wish I could scrub from my memory. It’s made even more disturbing by the fact that Scorsese’s style in Cape Fear is openly reminiscent of older Hollywood thrillers—films that would never contain such graphic violence. And so we’re kind of lured into a false sense of security with his quaint framing and dramatic zooms only to be sideswiped by the rape scene.

But that sequence is much less harrowing than when Cady lures Danielle into the basement of the school theater and seduces her with his knowledge of literature and his bad-boy allure. There’s a mildly illicit moment here, apparently improvised between the two actors, that is startlingly effective (similarly forceful to the audition scene in Mulholland Drive). The film reaches its peak shortly after this interaction when Bowden, at the suggestion of a seedy, pepto-and-whiskey chugging P.I. (Joe Don Baker), hires three goons to put Cady in the hospital and the maniac gets the upper hand and dispatches all three as Bowden looks on from a hiding spot. After that it gets more violent but less suspenseful as things wrap up in a protracted finale on a houseboat that moves into the realm of straight up horror.

By infusing the older film with psycho-sexual and religious overtones and adding moral conflict within the familial life of his passive protagonist, Scorsese effectively updates his source material for modern audiences and aligns it with the rest of his oeuvre. It’s not top shelf Scorsese but it’s a fine horror film and a reminder that the genre can work in a prestige picture.