Since there has been horror, there has been horror sequels. One of the most beautifully twisted quirks of the genre is how often these independent, shoe-string flights of fancy suddenly turn into money-printing franchises.Halloween.Friday the 13th.A Nightmare on Elm Street. Horror is built on the backs of nightmares that were only supposed to last a single night and ended up stretching across decades. Just by the law of averages, this has resulted in plenty of…less than stellar films. Even the most diehard among us can admit that horror is littered with a vast selection of subpar sequels, reboots, reimaginings, and every story extension in-between. And yet! It’s also a wonderfully deep landscape filled with diamonds in the rough for those willing to dig.
Below, we take a trip through 20 horror franchises and highlight the times that, against all odds, spooky lightning struck twice.
Friday the 13th
‘Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives’
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Livesis not only the bestFriday the 13thsequel, but it is also the bestFriday the 13th, period, and proof positive that a franchise can still have juice long after people are calling for it to be put in the ground. In a wonderfully zany homage toFrankenstein, Jason Voorhees—played with hulking intensity this time around byC.J. Graham—is raised from the dead by a bolt of lightning, bringing to life the superhuman, increasingly-slimy version of the character most people picture when they think of Jason Voorhees. Writer/directorTom McLoughlinalso hit the entire series with a jolt of electricity, introducing the type of meta-humor that set the stage forScreamalongside genuinely impressive action set-pieces, like the van-flip that results in one of the mosticonic horror images of all time. At the end of the day, any franchise with 12 movies will spark an endless debate about which one is “best, but it is inarguable that only one Friday the 13th begins with massive mutant killing machine Jason Voorheesparodying James Bond,a thing that is Good, Actually.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors’
It might be the third of eight films, but tonallyThe Dream Warriorsrepresents the dead-center ofA Nightmare on Elm Streetfor Freddy Krueger, in between the horrific boogeyman introduced byWes Cravenin 1984 and the circus clown marketing machine he’d become by the timeFreddy’s Deaddebuted in 1991. What that means is, this istheultimate Freddy Kreuger;Robert Englundis still terrifying and the kills are still gnarly as hell—the tendon puppet strings, dear lord!—but also the one-liners hit hard. There’s simply nothing that can top an immortal nightmare ghoul saying “welcome to prime time, bitch” before smashing a young woman’s head into a television set. The script, Craven’s last contribution to the franchise before he returned for the (also great!)New Nightmare, makes incredibly clever use of dream logic, introducing a likable band of psych ward misfits who can fight back against Freddy by becoming the best versions of themselves while asleep. Future Oscar-winnerPatricia Arquetteis incredible in the lead, and teaming her up with the series' original final girl, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), is the best bit of continuity ever seen onElm Street. Just a classic meal made from the perfect mix of cheese and chills.
‘Halloween H20: 20 Years Later’
DiscussingHalloweenas a franchise means confronting a harsh truth that often gets drowned out by that timeless synth score: Almost all ofHalloweenis bad.John Carpenter’s original belongs on the damn Mt. Rushmore of the genre, a masterclass in tension and release that’s as chilling today as it was in 1978. The rest of the series is like, the gift shop at the bottom of Mt. Rushmore selling dinky replicas.Halloween IIis mostly pale imitation.Halloween III: Season of the Witchis a fun little sci-fi diversion. The 1988-1995 trio of films that aimed to soothe angry fans and bring back Michael Myers are, collectively, a hot mess, mostly raising the question of why nobody could ever make thatWiliam Shatnermask look cool again. Rob Zombie’s set of remakes are interesting but anextremelyacquired taste. The 2018 legacy sequel is…good. It’s good! But I also think it might’ve gotten a little overpraised because, again, we got so accustomed to movies featuring Michael Myers being very bad!
So! That leaves us with the only entry in this complex, complicated franchise that hits all the marks fans want while also feeling wholly satisfying: the terribly-titledHalloweenH20: 20 Years Later. It’s not a perfect movie, but Jamie Lee Curtis' return as Laurie Strode—now running a boarding school and dealing with some serious PTSD—is a powerful performance. H20 arrived in the post-Screamafterglow where slashers actually got budgets, and genre veteranSteve Miner(Friday the 13th Part IIandPart III) adds a wonderfully late-90s polish to the action. This is also the most intense the connection between Laurie and Michael has ever felt, a real destined-to-do-this-forever vibe that adds more to the mythology than anything the Cult of Thorn ever did.
‘Scream 4’
I simply will not ever stop dying on theScream 4hill, stabbed over and over again by the knife of public opinion. The impact ofWes Craven’s 1996 meta-slasher is inarguable, but what is very, very arguable are the merits of its three sequels, which carried the horror icon all the way to 2011. Folks,Scream 4, Craven’s final film, is good. It’sgreat.Scream 4not only introduces the best new cast of characters since the core crew—Alison Brie!Adam Brody!EmmaRoberts!—but also remains frighteningly prescient in 2020, satirizing every toxic aspect of internet culture and fandom still going strong today. The gist: 15 years after the first Woodsboro massacre, Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) makes the extremely ill-advised decision to return to her hometown on a book tour. Surprise, surprise, a new Ghostface pops back up the moment Sydney crosses state lines. The accuracy with which Craven and writerKevin Williamsonnail the anything-for-clicks attitude and the fanatic fandom that comes with it is astounding, nearly a decade before Tik-Tok meant anything outside a clock. Plus, they do so while also poking fun at the idea of a horror franchise doing one too many sequels—Screamwas supposed to be a trilogy, you see—a wink-nudge bit of meta-humor that would’ve been far too cute in the hands of anyone but a master.
The Evil Dead
‘Evil Dead II’
What do you do after making a masterful micro-budget horror that catapults your name into the pop culture conversation but doesn’t quite live up to your ambition? If you’reSam Raimi, you basically do the same movie, again, but with roughly 10,000x the physical comedy, practical effects, and overall insanity.Evil Dead IIis the blood-soaked crown jewel of the franchise, turning the isolated “cabin in the woods” subgenre into an epic and transformingBruce Campbell’s Ash Williams from charming survivor to one-handed horror icon. The movie’s just a whirlwind from beginning to end, combining Raimi’s trademark POV shots, a healthy dose of stop-motion, and Campbell’s full-body performance, in which he tosses himself around and through the set to sell Ash’s battle with the demonic Deadites. In a word:Groovy.
Paranormal Activity
‘Paranormal Activity 3’
Paranormal Activity, the micro-budget that basically created Blumhouse while forcing anyone who still owned a hand-held camera to toss that shit in the trash immediately, absolutely did not need to become a franchise. And yet it also absolutely made a crapton of money, so a franchise it became, and if each passing entry isn’t going to reinvent the wheel it might as well be scary. EnterParanormal Activity 3, which is, in fact, very scary. An 80s-set prequel to its two predecessors, the film works to explain how and why the hilariously-named demonic entity “Toby” entered the lives of Katie (Chloe Csengery) and Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown). It doesn’t matter. It’s witches? It doesn’t matter. What matters is co-directorsHenry JoostandAriel Schulmanconjure up the most clever jolts outside of the original, the master-stroke being a camera fixed to the top of a painfully slow oscillating fan. It’s like centuries of tension-building techniques distilled into one DIY idea, and the purest encapsulation of the fiendishly simply vibes that madeParanormal Activitya phenomenon in the first place.
The Conjuring Universe
‘Annabelle Comes Home’
The connected universe of ghouls and demons kicked off byJames Wan’sThe Conjuringstraight-up did anAvengers-style event film and not nearly enough people are aware of it. Famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick WilsonandVera Farmiga) had been teasing their warehouse of haunted objects since their first appearance. But in an act of parenting so brazenly irresponsible you almost have to respect it, the Warrens leave their daughter, Judy (McKenna Grace) and a babysitter, Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman), alone with the cursed trinket garage, and thus:Annabelle Comes Home. The seventh film in the franchise and third focusing on the demon doll Annabelle, the film also serves as a fright-filled backdoor pilot for at least a dozen hypotheticalConjuringspinoffs. When the warehouse is inevitably opened, Judy and Mary Ellen face off against a cabal that includes, but is not limited to, a werewolf ghost, a possessed suit of Samurai armor, a homicidal Milton Bradley board game, and one of those cymbal-clapping monkey toys that doesn’t do much but look vaguely menacing. I love him most of all. LongtimeConjuring-verse scribeGary Dauberman, making his directorial debut, corrals all these horrors into a thrill-a-minute roller coaster, one that should be slotted into all October marathons going forward. Just so much dang fun.
I think what I like most aboutSaw VIis the way it’d play like complete gobblygook to anyone who’d never seen aSawmovie before. Over the course of five sequels, the chilling simplicity of James Wan’s original movie become tangled into an impenetrable knot in which each passing entry changed something about its predecessor and the story’s main villain, Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), continued to pull the strings despite dying inSaw III. So I can’t really boil down the plot of this movie without turning intoCharlie Kelly explaining the mail, but rest assured that it’s much more compelling than it has any right to be, led by a sturdy directorial debut fromKevin Greutert. But it’s also a lot more clever than it appears on the guts-covered surface. (And there’s a lot of guts on that surface.) By putting Jigsaw’s successor, Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), into a type of test all his own,Saw VIhas the moxie to ask whether the increasingly gore-focused series had any point at all. (Subsequent sequels would, of course, not go near this question with a two-foot-chain.)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’
One of the greatest misconceptions in horror history is the ideaThe Texas Chainsaw Massacreis a terribly gory movie. So effective was directorTobe Hooper’s power of suggestion and the film’s gross, gritty production design that history has remembered a largely blood-less movie as a bloody affair. Twelve years later, Hooper returned for a sequel and delivered anactualgorefest. To be blunt,The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2is an absolutely batshit black comedy.Dennis Hopperplays a chainsaw-wielding Texas Ranger hellbent on catching the first film’s cannibal crew. FutureRob ZombiefavoriteBill Moseleyputs on a masterclass in mishegaas as the hammer-swinging “Chop Top” Sawyer. At one point, Leatherface (Bill Johnson) gets way too horny to commit murder. This movie doesn’t add much to the original, but it is, in all ways, insane. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to watch Dennis Hopper get in a chainsaw fight underneath an abandoned amusement park, which should be anyone with a pulse.
The Amityville Horror
‘Amityville: The Awakening’
Picking anAmityville Horrorsequel is like picking your bedroom in the actual Amityville Horror house. It doesn’t really matter, you’re gonna' have a bad time. In the years since directorStuart Rosenberg’s original film debuted, that haunted house from the New York suburbs has churned out more sequels, reimaginings, and remakes than any other title, and against all odds and logic pretty much all of them are unwatchable. The #1 best thing to emerge fromThe Amityville HorrorisRyan Reynolds' beard in the 2005 remake. The #2 thing isAmityville: The Awakening, a 2017 continuation that scores points for an above-average cast and unique idea. In its tenth installment,Amityvillegoes meta, following a teenager (Bella Thorne) whose family moves into the “real-life” house that inspired the book and film in the first place. DirectorFranck Khalfounhandles the scares with subtly, and a young cast—primarilyMcKenna GraceandCameron Monaghan—make it clear why they’ve both done better projects thanAmityville: The Awakening.
