What’s with all the horror sequels?

Ella Dysinger, Staff Writer

If you enjoy old-horror films, then you’ve probably seen the movie Scream. In that movie,  senior student Randy Meeks claims that there are certain rules that a horror movie sequel has to follow, number 1: the body count is always bigger, number 2: the death scenes are always much more elaborate, with more blood and gore. This is the case in most horror film sequels, but almost every time, the sequels are not only unnecessary but over-numbered.

If you’ll remember in 1978 after the first Halloween movie came out, people thought that the mask-wearing Micheal Myers’s story was ended and that he got his fill with only one movie. Boy was everybody wrong. Mr. Myers’s story would continue to grow and more of his movies were made until eventually he now has eleven, I repeat ELEVEN movies. He doesn’t appear in Halloween 3 but I think we could all agree that he has a ridiculous amount of sequels. But Michael isn’t the only horror icon with a ton of movies under his belt, just ask Jason Voorhees. Apparently it’s unclear exactly how many movies he has. (somewhere between eleven to fourteen different films, two of which he isn’t even in.) I guess back in the day most horror movie directors apparently thought that a horror movie starring an unkillable, mask-wearing, silent, insane, knife-wielding maniac deserves at least eight movies, and it looks as though they went through with it because we have three different film franchises with the same plot. The third being the texas chainsaw massacre with eight movies.

And apparently no one ever learns from negative reviews and a loss of respect for the series because pretty much every iconic horror film has a crap-ton of sequels and reboots. Examples include Child’s play, Saw, Scream, Sleepaway Camp, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jaws, Evil Dead, Final Destination, Alien, Leprechaun, The Purge, Predator, and Silent Night Deadly Night, Shall I go on? I think you see my point.

I seem to sense a pattern. The original movie is such a hit that the production company wants to make a sequel to make more money, the sequel comes but it’s not as good as the first, then the third one is even worse, then for whatever reason, the directors decide to throw the series in a whole new direction that fails miserably, sometimes the terrible movie gets a terrible sequel, then the entire series is rebooted from the original movie that is fairly good in quality, but not so much in plot, a lot of times the reboot gets a sequel, then finally the entire franchise gets a movie in modern-day style. I think I’ve established that horror movies, no matter how good they are, could very well be destroyed by a crappy sequel.