When MGM made the Academy Award–winning version of Gaslight in 1944, they didn’t just remake it. They bought the rights to the 1940 film, “burned the negative and set out to destroy all existing prints.” They didn’t succeed, of course—the first film survived. You can still see it. But how strange, how weirdly on the nose. They didn’t just want to reimagine the film; they wanted to eliminate the evidence of the first, as though it had never existed at all.