The 6 Baffling Mistakes Every Horror Franchise Must Make
Horror franchises are like the monsters who populate them: Just when you think a horror series is dead, it'll rise from the grave in some new, grotesque-yet-unintentionally-ridiculous form.
Yes, like a serial killer who's been buried underground for years, most horror sequels stink to high hell. Mostly because they fall back on the same gimmicks to try to squeeze a little more cash out of the franchise. So we wind up seeing movies where...
#6.
The Killer Goes "Ghetto"
When horror sequel writers begin running out of ideas, they'll often resort to throwing the antagonist in new, wholly unexpected settings. One particularly crass plot device places the monster in the midst of city-dwelling African Americans, thus fusing the yin and yang of what terrifies white folks.
One problem with this approach is that the writer must first drag the monster out of its element and shoehorn it into the inner city. In Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (a.k.a. the lowest grossing F13 flick), it took the entire movie to chronicle the Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events that transported Jason from Crystal Lake to New York City. By the time he actually arrived in the Big Apple, the damn movie was basically over.
Similarly, the Children of the Corn franchise only made it to the third movie before throwing out the series' entire premise (demonic children in rural Nebraska killing adults). In Children of the Corn: Urban Harvest, the murderous tykes moved to Chicago and enrolled in an inner city school deserving of a #1 Coolio single.
The Worst Offender:
Leprechaun. We're not suggesting that the Leprechaun films are anything but stupid, but shit, when it comes to overkilling a lousy gimmick, Leprechaun leaves everyone else in the dust.
The fifth film, Leprechaun in the Hood is about gangsta rappers rising in the ranks of the music industry while being pursued by a marauding fairy of the Irish peasant tradition. It's perhaps the most bizarre instance of genre-bending in modern cinema. A Tyler Perry movie about Madea battling minotaurs would've made more sense.
Leprechaun Five = Lep in the hood
Leprechaun in the Hood was such a great idea that it got its own sequel, Leprechaun: Back 2 Da Hood. Presumably the correctly spelled title of the original just wasn't black enough.
#5.
The Killer Goes To Space/Cyberspace
Like the inner city, the cold, dark vacuum of outer space gets the average filmgoer all aquiver. The upswing of the intergalactic approach is that you rarely have to bother explaining how the villain got there in the first place. After all, space by its nature is vast and unfathomable. You could totally get drunk and just wake up there.
In Jason X, the ridiculously big-budget 10th Friday the 13th movie, a space-faring civilization of horny teens stumbles upon Jason Voorhees's frozen corpse. Apparently the Earthmen of the past got sick of Jason's resurrection antics and cryogenically preserved him. Even in the distant future, the guy still had it out for innocent campers.
If studios don't want (or can't afford) an all-out space opera, the least they can do is find a way to incorporate cyberspace into the film. In 2002's Halloween Resurrection, Michael Myers picked off teenagers through the course of a Big Brother-style webcast. A single Internet viewer eventually guides the teens to safety--oddly, the film never explains why he's the only person on the Internet watching the webcast.
The Worst Offender:
Hellraiser. It's the only series with a space episode and an Internet episode, thus proving that a movie studio will try to feed you the same shit sandwich twice.
It only took four movies before they decided to fire Pinhead into space in Hellraiser Bloodline, directed by Alan Smithee. By the way, "Alan Smithee" is a moniker that Hollywood directors use when they're so ashamed by a film that they don't want their name on it.
A few films later, and we got the straight-to-DVD Hellraiser: Hellworld, the dreaded online installment in which teens used their superior websurfing abilities to evade the denizens of Hell. And in a result that surprised absolutely nobody, it spelled the end of the franchise.
#4.
The Killer Gains Superpowers
With some exceptions, the most notable of the dead-teenager franchises showcase non-supernatural villains. It's easy to understand why--horror stories rooted in reality are simply scarier. We're afraid of Michael Myers because men just as evil--shit, worse--have existed in the real world. He's just really strong and really good at killing people. You know, the way you imagine the hobo on the subway might be.
But when your franchise approaches the double digits, writers start to have a problem. Most of these films end with the killer being killed. It's the very first job of a sequel writer to explain how the killer survived his last mortal wound. When such explanations reach the point of ridiculousness, Hollywood employs a special group of writers to fix the problem once and for all. They're called "hacks."
"What if Crystal Lake WAS AN INDIAN BURIAL GROUND? BOOM, Saturn Award."
Michael Myers was perhaps the first of the horror icons to be granted sudden and inexplicable superpowers. In the sixth Halloween film (1995's Halloween: The Curse of Mike Myers) it was revealed that Myers was the victim of an ancient druid curse that makes him (A) obsessed with murdering his family, and (B) impossible to kill. Given that these were the only two components of his personality, it neatly summed his entire character motivation in one fell, totally retarded swoop.
Fucking Druids.
In 1994, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre followed suit in its fourth installment, The Next Generation, in which Leatherface and his redneck clan were revealed to be mind-controlled puppets of mysterious men-in-black who were aliens or some Illuminati-esque group. How does a group of chainsaw-wielding cannibals terrorizing hillbilly Texas advance the conquest of mankind? Better question: Why was Leatherface a transvestite in that film?
Thanks to the Bucket Bros. for the screencap.
The inexplicable superpowers gimmick never, ever catches on, as the next installment retcons it exactly 100 percent of the time. The sequel inevitably steamrolls the previous celluloid abortion out of existence, and the studio prays that you don't notice.
The Worst Offender:
Friday the 13th. Most of the time the supernatural card is used as a quick patch-up, whereas the F13 franchise picked up that ball of stupid and ran with it until they hit the sea and waded to Madagascar.
We can forgive the fact that Jason Voorhees was once raised from the grave by a lightning bolt. This was born out of laziness, not complete off-the-wall madness. But when the franchise hit nine movies, some intrepid writers decided it was time to offer at least a perfunctory explanation for his immortality.
So, in 1993's Friday the 13th Part IX: Jason Goes to Hell, it was revealed that Jason was an immortal demon-worm who can leap between bodies, an ability it took him nine films to discover.
Of course, this followed Jason Goes To Manhattan For 10 Minutes And Doesn't Really Do Much Of Anything When He Gets There, so no one cared.
Curse of Mike Myers? Honestly thought that was trolling...
ReplyAt least the Friday The 13th & Nightmare on Elm Street reboots were decent. Making freaking Rorschach from "The Watchmen" as the new Freddy seemed to instill some new scariness into him.
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I'm still confused by the whole reboot/remake thing. I do think that Halloween H2O is a reboot, but all the rest listed are remakes (and they ARE remaking Leprechaun now). The Rob Zombie Halloween especially screams remake and not reboot. The remake doesn't really alter the original at all, except for adding some details. Most of the rest of them are pretty close to the originals. I guess you could say Friday the 13th is a reboot, since it wasn't Jason's mother like in the original...that and there were several other differences. I think a reboot should completely change everything, weather that means going back to the original or going back to a certain point in the canon like H2O did. So as far as reboots, I'd think Prom Night and April Fools Day are more of reboots than remakes, since they are completely different from the original. I always remakes retain a good deal of the original's lore, and not so much changing things as they are taking a different angle. They're basically telling the same story, only in a different way but not really contradicting the original. To me, reboot completely contradicts established lore.
ReplyIs Friday the 13th the only franchise to meet each and every one of the criteria presented in this article?
ReplyIt was the longest-running, so the series was bound to meet at least the majority of them.
How about rewriting your own continuity for the new sequels, like the Jaws franchise did. Jaws 1 & 2 were about Sheriff Brodie battling two different sharks on different occasions & killing each one each time. Jaws 3 was about his son battling one at a waterpark and killing it in the end.
ReplyJaws: The Revenge (aka part 4) has them saying it was one shark that's been menacing the Brodie family for so many years and it even tracks his widow down to the Bahamas for revenge.
#4 Worst Offender: the Silence of the Lambs franchise.
ReplyHere is why they suck: The premise of an an unassuming guy-next-door who happens to be a cold, psychopathic genius is great, *because it's possible". Real serial killers don't wander around in hockey masks talking with other serial killers about how great it is being serial killers; they live essentially normal-seeming lives when they're not mining people for their livers. This is why when they're caught, the news report invariably interviews some neighbour how though so-and-so with the fridge full of Girl Guide eyeballs was " a nice, quiet guy who just kept to himself".
Real life example: John Wayne Gacy. Excellent movie example: the killer in "Spoorloos" (the original Euro version of "The Vanishing".
On the other hand, you have Hannibal lechter. He *could have been* menacing, but the creators of his character gave him super powers, immediately making him impossible in the real world. Don't believe me? He perfectly eviscerates and artfully - including the mood lighting - suspends a 220lb man from the roof of a cage in the time it takes two people to walk a short hallway. Later, he skillfully castrates someone who is fully dressed as he passes him on a crowded sidewalk with such precision that the victim doesn't even notice. Etc etc etc. As soon as the writers gave Lechter the ability to defy real-world physics and logic, he became just another poorly-plotted super-villain. All he needs is a cape.
I think he had slightly more time for the one with the artful evisceration
And I don't think he castrates that guy, just cuts his artery. Hannibal isn't your usual serial killer, that's the point, he is a whole other kind of thing, a genius who is entirely amoral. Serial killers are pathetic creatures, driven by weird and powerful lusts. Hannibal lecture is not pathetic and is totally in control.
Im sorry but Rob Zombies remakes of Halloween were quite awesome, and just about everyone I know agrees.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesall that means is that you and just about everyone you know has no taste.
The only time I've ever heard anyone say anything bad about the Rob Zombie Halloween movies is on the internet, and we all know the internet is not to be trusted.
I loved it, but I've actually never met anyone else who has...other than on the internet. Whenever I've mentioned liking it to a horror movie fan, they always scoff. But I know that I don't have very discerning taste when it comes to horror movies, it's rare that I see one that I don't like much, though remakes/reboots are far and away the ones that I most often hate.
I know this may actually be a plus for lots of people, but what about the massive amounts of nudity? My sister and I are horror film nerds, renting every film we can get our hands on, but the nudity thing is starting to get annoying. I understand it here and there, but I am here for the story and the thrill of the scare, not a bunch of naked girls (its always girls too isnt it?). I am no prude, but seriously guys, us females like scary movies too, and it turns us off a little.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesPlus you can always tell the girl who is going to die naked early in the movie: the slutty friend, but never the lead girl. She might just run around in the rain in a white t-shirt for half the movie.
This is so prevalent that i saw this one guy list the top 4 things wrong with the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Apparently the series isn't any good because there is pretty much no nudity
I refuse to read this much writting without tits, for the same reason i won't watch an awful movie without something to distract me from the above mentioned terrible writting.
My sister and I recently had a Friday the 13th marathon over three weekends, including the pointless reboot. We ended up spending the first few scenes (provided it didn't happen in the first scene) wondering when the boobs would pop up. One of them (I think it may have been #9) took so long to show us some boobs, that we thought we'd accidentally gotten the wrong franchise. Regardless, every single one of them showed some poor girls boobs at some point. Thankfully the original series tended to show actual boobs, rather than the spherical atrocities shown in the early scenes of the reboot.
Has anyone else noticed that he said the 1994 movie The Next Generation FOLLOWS a 1995 movie Curse of Micheal Myers
Replyseeing as this isn't arguing a historical case, but pointing out trends in popculture as a comedic writting, i don't give a shit.
I would have mentioned turning a thriller into nothing more than a slasher. It happened to Friday the 13th, it happened to Nightmare on Elm Street, it happened to Hellraiser, hell, it even happened to Alien (if you replace "slasher" with "action movie."
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesOne of the biggest offenders in my mind is Saw. The original Saw pulls most of its punches--not even letting you see the event that the title is based on--and still comes across as a fairly well imagined thriller. The sequels (Saw 2 being an unrelated movie script forced into a sequel once Saw made a lot of money) replace the pacing and thrills of the original movie with more and more disgusting gore. What a let down.
Don't Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser count as horror films? They have preternatural origins, whereas [you're right] the first Friday 13th didn't.
I just mean specifically that a lot of franchises started out as horror thrillers (gore included) and quickly devolved to be little more than cheap excuses to see blood and guts. Not that the movies aren't technically "horror."
The original Friday the 13th isn't a thriller, it's basically the quintessential slasher movie. Yes, I know it's Mrs. Voorhees doing the killing. If you watch any interviews or behind-the-scenes stuff with Sean Cunningham or Tom Savini they will unabashedly talk about how they just wanted to make a fun slasher movie. They even picked the title of the movie before they even knew what the plot actually was, it was basically fill-in-the-blank slasher formula with a crazy twist. Nothing wrong with that.
They're eating her . . . . and then they're going to eat me . . . .
ReplyAnd you can't piss on hospitality! I won't allow it!
I'm sure I'm in the minority here but I actually liked Halloween 3. I wish they had gone in the direction of anthology instead of Druid Michael.
ReplyNever liked any of the Child's Play movies. I hate any killer toy movie (Zuni fetish doll excepted).
Jason X. Overall the movie blew, but when they did the whole Holodeck (sp?) scene with the 2 topless campers I had to rewind that scene a dozen times. I laughed my ass of for 10 minutes. To this day I tell people how funny that scene is.
Not that I liked Halloween 3, but I know John Carpenter didn't like the idea of even writing Halloween 2, to him the perfect ending was Michael Myers disappearing and the camera showing all the spots he has been through the run time. He's suppose to be out there, it's a camp fire tale!
So the idea of a horror series that is like an anthology appeals to me. Especially since it wouldn't have to fall into any of the above issues and can just pick a scary story and add it in.
If they didn't convince him to "finish" the Michael Myers series before doing the story he wanted to do the movie would have gone over a lot better.
I think the #1 problem should be that the producers are making the new movies PG-13. Making a much weaker product just to try and squeeze more money out of the high school crowd.
ReplyFor #4, the thing about horror stories rooted in reality are simply scarier or having it based on real life making it scary is part of the reason the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The director Tobe Hopper distributed it as based on a true story.
Replyi left out the phrase succeeded after the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
ok i must be weird. i like bride of chucky.. even tho its still a childs play movie i hold it seperatly to the original 3.. i also dont understand whats with all the reboots?? the originals are classics for a reason.. you dont see ppl redoing gone with the wind.. or the sound of music... and i know this is full of bad grammer and spelling...
ReplyI agree with you about Bride of Chucky, that movie was really awesome for what it was. And for all the reboots, It's all about the money.
Thinking about the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, I felt they missed an opportunity to make the film into something more... substantive.
ReplyHere's what I mean: in the reboot, the parents kill Freddy because they suspect him of abusing their children... only that for a part of the movie, the two main protagonists think that Freddy was wrongly accused of the abuse, and was an innocent victim to vigilante mob justice of the parents.
At that point in the movie, I was honestly excited! I thought the filmmakers were going for a "we created the very monster that is hurting us" angle, in which Freddy was innocent when he was burned to death, but then he returns as a vengeful ghost, having now become the evil monster everyone thought he was in life. It would have added an interesting twist to the movie, perhaps a warning against the dangers of mob justice and the long-term consequences of having a society based on that sort of snap-judgment mentality.
But nooooo... turns out that the parents were right and Freddy was a pedophile, after all. So we feel absolutely no sympathy for Freddy, and since the protagonists are cookie-cutter horror movie heroes that follow ALL THE CLICHÉS, we feel nothing for them either. The movie is completely one-dimensional, and dull, and a "reboot" offered no added value to the original series.
...or maybe I'm expecting too much of the filmmakers here... this piece of s**t was produced by Michael Bay, after all.
Interesting. My problem with the reboot the inverse of yours. The idea of a daycare worker who may have been an innocent and suffered horribly following the false accusations of easily suggestible children (see Ray Buckey, who spent seven years in jail despite never having done a thing wrong or being convicted of a crime) isn't necessarily a bad one.
The method of execution, however, is problematic. I find the implied moral equivalency repugnant. The implication is that Freddy's actions in killing the kids who accused him as revenge on them and their parents for having killed him are mitigated by the fact that he was innocent. In simpler terms, he has some degree of justification for his revenge if he was innocent, and the parents were somewhat justified if he were guilty.
This I find morally reprehensible. Freddy molesting the kids was wrong. The parents murdering him, regardless of his guilt, was also wrong. Freddy taking revenge on the kids by killing them only compounds the series of immoral actions.
Lest someone think this is my reading too much into the movie, the entire thrust of the second act is that Freddy may have been an innocent victim the entire time, and whether or not he was is something that is important for Nancy to find out to determine whether he's just a monster or a tragic victim of Nancy, her friends, and their parents. In other words, whether he was, to some small degree, justified.
That simple, but almost universally applicable adage we all learned in kindergarten applies here: Two wrongs don't make a right. Being a victim doesn't give one the right to victimize others. Most child molesters were victimized as children. Many serial killers were the victims of abuse and/or neglect as young children. This doesn't mitigate what they choose to do as adults.
I thought both of Rob Zombie's remakes were good. It's a lot better than anyone else in Hollywood could have done. The Nightmare and F13 were terrible for obvious reason if you've seen them.
ReplyAnyone remember the Hellraiser movie that involved kids getting invited to some rich dude's party by solving the puzzle box on the internet, and then the ruch dude poisons the kids and buries them alive, and the only time Hellraiser appears is in one of their hallucinations? Or are we just going to pretend it never happened? Because I'm kind of okay with that.
Reply Hide All See All 4 Replies"Hellraiser" is the name of the movie, not the character. The character's name is Pinhead.
Yeah I remember that movie. At the end pinhead rips apart the guy who buried the kids so at least he gets one kill n the movie
Hellworld the internet movie mentioned here
Hellworld. I dutifully watched all of the Hellraisers available on Netflix, thus solving my dilemma of actually doing homework.
Yeah, the 6th 'Nightmare' film was pretty horrible. By the time it got to the video game scene I was sitting there going, "...the hell?".
Reply(I did not choose to see that of my own free will, mind, a friend was doing a 'Nightmare' marathon and I only saw this after dozing in and out through some of the other entries in the series)
What bothers me the most about this comment is that, in this scenario, using the term "Nightmarathon" doesn't even seem to have crossed anybody's mind...