Why I Love Horror Movie Sequels

Sequels get a bad rap.  Most people say that the best a sequel can hope to do is recapture what made the original good but it will still be inferior because it lacks the originality factor.  This has some truth to it as most sequels that succeed do so by expanding the story of the original in ways not possible the first time around or by taking things to crazy new heights.  The Godfather Part 2, almost universally considered the benchmark of sequels, gives us back story that the original didn't have time for while also moving the story forward.  Aliens, James Cameron's renowned spin on Ridley Scott's classic, took the character of Ripley and fleshed her out while also introducing great new characters and upping the stakes exponentially.  Cameron's other sequel masterwork, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, took the simplistic sci-fi/horror charm of The Terminator and expanded it to a truly epic action movie and showed us the evolution of characters we cared about.  This is all to say that sequels in general can be good, even exceptional, but are usually derided as cheap cash-ins, which at times they definitely are.  But I've never felt that they are pointless because at worst you end up with a mess that fans of the original can just ignore, or at best you end up with an expanded world in which you get to spend more time with characters that you like.

Nowhere is the sequel more popular than in the world of horror movies.  And, yes, it's undoubtedly true that just about every horror sequel ever made was made to make money.  Take a surprise hit, spend some money (a lot of times less than what was spent on the original), and have something new to sell.  But then we also have something new to watch, and whether it's genuinely good or so bad it's funny, its usually pretty fun to check out.  Just about all sub-genres of horror have had needless sequels churned out over the years but the ones with the craziest amount has to be the slasher flick.  The plots of slashers are so simple that you can basically just keep making the same movie over and over with different characters and people like me will watch them all.  The Halloween series has ten titles to its name, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser both have nine, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has seven, and even something as silly as Child's Play has six.  The reigning king though has to be my favorite, Friday the 13th.  The Friday the 13th franchise has cranked out twelve movies since 1980 and more will surely be made.  To most people this probably seems like overkill, but I, and a lot of other horror fans, can't get enough.

"Well...maybe he can come back."

The Friday the 13th series is actually the perfect example to flesh out my defense of horror sequels.  The first entry originated as a cash in rip off of John Carpenter's Halloween about a disturbed mother who kills camp counselors as revenge for the death of her disabled child.  Along the next 11 movies that dead child inexplicably grows up to be a murderer living in the woods worshiping his mother's severed head, a resurrected Frankenstein-ish zombie creature, a body jumping Hell worm, a reluctant astronaut, and an opponent to Freddy Kreuger in a fight to the death.  How the hell did these things happen?  Why the hell did these things happen?  That's what makes these movies so fun to me.  The original Friday the 13th is basically a simple but effective murder mystery but the fact that the producers wanted to keep exploiting its success caused a lot of different people to come up with more and more strange ideas and it's interesting to see the various ideas that get used.  It's almost like the way comic books work.  Characters exist in a fictional universe but different writers give them a different flavor over the years and you eventually have a mythology that might not make the absolute most sense but is no doubt fun to study and critique.  Each subsequent entry gives you something completely new to dissect and you can then compare and contrast it with the previous entries.

So, even though some of these films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween are stone cold classics I've never felt that the sequels hurt those legacies.  Sure, there are some duds like Halloween: Resurrection and the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake that get made along the way when the studios keep the franchise train rolling but that doesn't take away from what made the originals so good.  And when the reins of these sequels are given to smart, creative, and ambitious young filmmakers sometimes you end up with entries that are almost as good as the source material like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part 6 and that makes it all worth it.  Take a chance and revel in the insanity of some of these sequels one day.  Some of them are good, a lot turn out bad, but they are always a fun way to spend a movie night. - TG