Horror sequels

Saw's attempt at continuity are pretty silly though, because the timeline gets absolutely absurd after a certain point with the ever piling retcons.

Yeah, plenty of directors have loosely "connected" movies together through a common thematic element (some filmmakers even include the same common motifs in more than three movies and make them personal trademarks), but that is, by definition, completely unrelated from a sequel, which primarily exists either to continue or build upon a direct narrative from a preceding work or grow a franchise name/brand.

Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive (1976), for instance, has a lot in common with both of the first two Texas Chainsaw Massacre films and can be seen as bridging the tonal shift between both of those other movies, but that doesn't make it a sequel to the original TCM or make TCM Part 2 a sequel to Eaten Alive.

The only significance that Carpenter's informal "Apocalypse Trilogy" carries is in assessing a larger theme in a director's filmography across completely separate, individual movies, which isn't entirely on-topic.

My two "favorites"...

The previously mentioned Sorority House Massacre 2 first turned the original film's "mental asylum escapee" into a killer from a completely different movie altogether (for flashbacks) before revealing this film's killer to be the dead spirit of the killer from the flashbacks, now possessing (and killing) the other sorority girls.

Silent Night Deadly Night, Part 2 notoriously replaced the original movie's Killer Santa (who died in the original film) with his younger brother who loves to shoot people on Garbage Day. Further sequels turned this same character into a mute Bill Moseley with a glass skull and a psychic link to a blind clairvoyant and Clint Howard as an evil cult's lackey.

Edited by SeanMurrayI on Oct 12th 2018 at 4:27:47 AM

Didn't one of them also feature Mickey Rooney as a robot? This series really got weird.

Yeah, after Clint Howard's turn, the series character was dropped altogether, and the fifth movie revolved around Mickey Rooney playing a toy maker who designed toys that kill people.

More often than not, especially in the direct-to-video market, many horror sequels have no direct connection to previous installments and are only tied together by some sort of familiar theme, like a holiday theme in the case of Silent Night Deadly Night 5, or later Howling sequels simply being about werewolves.

In some cases, horror movies originally made completely independently and never intended as part of any existing movie franchise get billed as sequels by studio distributors simply hoping that a title brand alone can get a movie better name recognition. The Lance Henriksen/Brion James movie The Horror Show was initially marketed by distributors as House III, following House and House II: The Second Story, when the only thing the movie has in common with the previous movies is a haunted house. For that matter, the only installment in the House franchise that is a direct continuation of a previous movie was House IV: Repossessed, which is intended as a continuation of the original House movie.

Edited by SeanMurrayI on Oct 13th 2018 at 9:25:33 AM

Thorgy is currently doing a small series about Horror sequels...which made me realize that there are quite a few good ones, or at least ones which are better than you would usually expect from a sequel. I mean, Poltergeist 2 actually shows that some care went into it, even if quite a few choices are … odd, and Gremlins 2 is in a way really brilliant. If anything it got better over the years.

The only thing that's great about Gremlins 2 is John Glover, because that guy is utterly fantastic in everything.

It's also a great commentary on sequels in general and on Hollywood...and somehow even on Internetfandom years before the Internet was even a thing.

Just plain old fandom then.

Another series of movies I just remembered going the Halloween III route is The Curse franchise.

The original movie was simply a 1987 film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space with Wil Wheaton and Claude Akins, which was fine. Later, original horror movies being released direct-to-video were sold under the same franchise banner, as if they were about other forms of "curses," with their original titles now serving as subtitles.

The first of these sequels, marketed as Curse II: The Bite, followed a young man bitten on the hand by a radioactive snake whose hand begins to change into a snake head, which attacks everyone he comes into contact with. Also, his body becomes filled with snakes. Really fun stuff. I haven't seen these movies in a long, long time, but I do remember having a lot more fun watching the sequel than the original Curse film and it being better received with the crowd I originally watched it with.

Sometimes, movie sequels are the result of directors getting more money to make the kind of movie they wanted to make or better concepts of how to realize their vision.

• Aliens
• The Evil Dead 2
  • Army of Darkness
• The Purge 2
  • The First Purge
• Friday the 13th Part 2
• Dawn of the Dead
• Silence of the Lambs
• Terminator 2
• Scream 2
• Blade 2 (iffy about this)

Generally speaking, every Friday the 13th movie got better until Friday the 13th Part IV, which is easily the best.

Part 2 and Part 3 introduce Jason as well as the mask.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 14th 2018 at 8:32:40 AM

Maybe for some of them, but Alien and Aliens were made by different people with very different visions. The first one was conceived as Jaws IN SPACE with the script of Dark Star and art from Jodorowsky's Dune, whereas the second one is the Vietnam war^note from the POV of the poor American soldier of course IN SPACE.

And I would argue that the only good thing about Friday the 13th Part 3 was the music.

I'd hesitate to call Silence of the Lambs a sequel. It's adapted from a novel, which was a sequel to the novel that was adapted into Manhunter, but the films themselves have no connective tissue. It's a bit like calling Dr. No a sequel to the American TV version of Casino Royale.

Edited by RavenWilder on Oct 15th 2018 at 1:12:59 AM

Aliens and Terminator 2 underwent genre shifts that very noticeably diminished many of the horror themes/environments that made their original movies effectively gripping.

And I'd be willing to argue that giallo movies from Italy are much more closely related to the horror genre (slashers, especially) than The Silence of the Lambs.

I'd disagree on the F13 movies, at least the first four. They benefit strongly from Developing Doomed Characters, particularly 3 and 4. The story arcs of 3 and 4 could have carried a non-slasher movie.

How much of this was the writing versus talented actors for the material (Crispin Glover, Corey Feldman) is anyone's guess.

But it's a matter of taste, of course.

The worst example of replacing the killer is Friday the 13th Part V, which ends by revealing the killer to be a completely random character who was onscreen for a minute or two. That movie is the worst of what was a pretty bad collection of films to begin with.

I never had a problem with the killer not being Jason. After all, he wasn’t the killer in the first movie either. The movies are called “Friday The 13th”, not “Jason”

Also "His Eyes" by Pseudo Echo, wow was that a catchy song. Also Violet's death was one of the relatively few that really saddened me in these films. She could have made an interesting "Final Girl" I think.

The problem with the "whodunit" in Part 5 is that, it was really obvious who it was. The movie set it up so that it could only be one person (Roy).

F13 doesn't do "whodunits" very well it seems. The original works as a slasher/suspense film, but it fails as a murder mystery.

And of the first 4, I'd argue that Parts 2 and 4 are the best.

Edited by Punisher286 on Oct 15th 2018 at 11:45:01 AM

F5 has a lot of problems but one of the major ones was the fact there was almost no development for the characters. The point of survival horror as a genre is you care about the protagonists and want to see them survive. F5 changed the perspective to being purely about the kills and "jason."

Its why Nightmare 1 and Dream Warriors stands out because Nancy is such a strong character.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 15th 2018 at 11:48:57 AM

Yeah, except for maybe Tommy Jarvis. Also it'd lacked the tension that some of the earlier films had.

I think that Part 2 is probably my favorite of the "Jason is just a guy" films.

Tommy was originally considered to be the "new" Jason but they backed off so the majority of the film is just him acting suspicious for a Red Herring no one wanted or cared about.

It certainly isn't completely random if the masked killer is revealed as a pre-established character, and rewatching that character's initial scenes after learning who was behind the murders does allow viewers to see it in a different context, just as in other "whodunnits."

I'm not a big fan of the Friday the 13th franchise, either (although I do have a certain fondness for Part IV, which is certainly THE definitive film of the series), but I can appreciate how Part V and other early installments pay homage to their Italian influences, particularly Mario Bava's Bay of Blood (or Carnage, Twitch of the Death Nerve, whatever other titles it has).

Part V still doesn't properly work as a giallo film, but it at least gave an honest try. It had its red herrings, abundance of amoral assholes, and, most significantly, more than one murderer with differing motivations. (A lot of people generally overlook that last part)

Indeed. Many don't seem to know that the modern slasher has much to owe to the giallo. Especially films like Friday the 13th or My Bloody Valentine (My Bloody Valentine especially because it has whodunnit elements). It's strange to think that a sequel to an already creatively-bankrupt franchise would pay overt homage to the giallo.

Hell, now you got me thinking they should've just gone all-in on Part V and reveal multiple "Jasons."

It's crazy that the filmmakers would've thought to move slightly more in the direction of a giallo when the movie's intended audience (even today) would already have a very different, deep-seeded set of expectations, based on an already-established franchise and greater familiarity with American slashers.

The result is a fumbled "whodunnit" that lacks any of the intrigue and inspiration of most great gialli and struggles to remain familiar to anybody whose showing interest on the strength of the franchise name. It can leave no one feeling genuinely satisfied.

Nevertheless, I don't see how any of that can be worse or look more ridiculous than Jason's soul possessing people's bodies in order to continue murdering via proxy.

Edited by SeanMurrayI on Oct 15th 2018 at 11:49:55 AM

I'm not sure I believe that Friday the 13th Part V was an attempt at giallo. Seems more like the filmmakers just wanted to squeeze in as many deaths as possible.

I remember years later re-watching the Friday the 13th movies when I was a little bit past the "watch for the next topless woman" stage, and I noticed that the deaths are always very quick. It's like Instant Death Bullet but with knives and pitchforks and whatnot. That's what separates the cartoony violence of those films from truly disturbing movie violence like, say, the shower scene in Psycho or Drew Barrymore's death in Scream.

I did not mean to infer that Part V was "an attempt at a giallo," merely that the film makes an effort to include more of the genre's themes. It's undeniable that giallo carried a lot of influence on the earlier Friday the 13th films, right down to murder sequences from Bay of Blood being recreated nearly shot-for-shot in Part II, and it would make sense for filmmakers to try and return to some of the influences of those same movies in hopes of creating, well... A New Beginning.

Albeit, by 1985, the trendy, underground, ultraviolent European murder mystery movie would more closely resemble Pieces than Bay of Blood.

I strangely recall with Part V a lot of the people involved have remembered thinking they were making a porno because of the nudity, with the director even claiming he filmed enough footage to make one.

Speaking of strange horror sequel turns/replacement villains, Jason Goes To Hell is certainly a weird case with how it involves a complete change in an existing character. Plus, there’s that cameo of the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead that still weirds me out with how casual it is.

In terms of unconnected sequels, are there successful horror anthologies like what Halloween III tried to start?

I recommend people watch the Crystal Lake Memories documentary (hosted by Corey Feldman) or read the book if they want to know some interesting facts about how the franchise completely went to shit and the attempts to revive it.

A constant struggle was with the censors, budget, and creative teams. In 5's case, they had the story rewritten multiple times, had the movie edited to measure, and serious issues with the cast.

There was also the belief the body count should always rise.

Which...of course...is a stupid-stupid rule.

A New Blood with Lar Park Lincoln was supposed to get everything back on track and had a cast everyone loved and worked well with each other—except the censors ordered almost every bit of violence taken out of the movie—which included large portions of the acting.

One of my friends is a huge Erin Grey fan and basically noted that there's an alternate universe movie with her protecting her daughter Sarah Connor style that saves the franchise.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 16th 2018 at 5:33:39 AM