I'm making a bold claim here, and it flies in the face of the most basic semblance of plot any horror movie has: None of these monsters or ghosts want anything. How could they? While it seems like Jason, Freddy, Kayako, Mama, the Poltergeists, Samara and all the rest are vaguely motivated by vengeance for a perceived wrong, not a single one of those silly tits even remotely goes about it in a way that has any sincerity. Freddy Krueger isn't taking out his vengeance on the people who killed him by attacking their children, he's just an asshole. The concept of vengeance, of righting a wrong, and of being bound to a place until things are resolved is some bullshit gaslighting that the plot throws at you.
There is no end game whatsoever for these creatures and that's proven by the most terrifying monster in all of Hollywood -- the sequel. In order for a sequel to exist, the notion of goals must not exist. If you, as a ghost or undead chucklefuck, are out for justice, you can't keep murdering every hapless stranger who crosses your path. That's like saying your goal is to make dinner and your method of accomplishing this includes emptying every grocery store in town into a burning pit of ham and despair.
The entire plot of the movie Mama revolves around a creepy, jerky-motion gibbon-terror who cares for a pair of girls in the woods until they're rescued, then it gets awfully pissy trying to get them back. It's discovered (spoilers for those not up to date on horror films from 2013) that she was a patient in an asylum who died with her child but was unaware of what happened to the baby so she'd been searching for the child ever since, and ended up caring for two living ones. So they find her real, actual baby and give it back. Yay, she can move on to the afterlife -- oh wait fuck no, she's just as crazy as ever. But wait, then one of the little girls dies to be with her and Mama and new child can exist in peace. Oh wait, fuck no, they're producing the sequel. Thanks to rendering the entire movie we just sat through as useless.
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