If you’re a horror fan, you’ve no doubt had to deal with this question before. Hell, this reporter had to deal with it twice in the last seven days. So take it from someone who’s an expert in the field – there are two ways you can go about this:
(1) The decidedly non-stellar route that I always take. Namely, listing every freaking movie in the series and expounding on the crossovers and remakes. To be sure, this is a move that not only overwhelms the unfortunate sap that you’re talking to, but virtually insures that you will never – ever – be laid by any female that said person happens to know.
(2) The following sentence, which you should all laminate, put in your wallet, and memorize: “As many as you want there to be.”
When it comes to long-running horror series (and, by extension, the genre itself), most people already have their minds made up. Anything that goes on this long, and with that many roman numerals after the title, just can’t be good. And you know what else? Any type of story that would allow that sort of thing to happen sucks.
Sadly, based on the evidence that I’ve gleamed from the 21st century, it’s hard to disagree with them.
When the "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchises exploded in popularity in the early ‘80s, it was the dawn of a new age for horror films. Regardless of the up-and-down quality of the individual movies in these franchises (and some of them are indeed spotty at best), I have a hell of a lot of respect for these two notches in movie history. And don’t laugh, stuffy English major; Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger (that’s hockey-masked psycho and burn victim razor-glove killer to some of you) are important pieces in movie history. They weren’t just place filler; these two villains and their respective movies took the horror genre by storm, competing with each other for supremacy during much of the golden age of the slasher flick but doing something much more vital in the process.
Like presenting the above moral. Yikes.
You see, before F13 and ANOES came along, the long-running horror series were focused almost entirely on literary villains. Dracula and Frankenstein ruled the roost. As a result, the settings were centered around Victorian times, European countries, and other far, far away places. Then came Jason and Freddy, and horror came home. Right to modern times, right to kids on the screen who seemed a whole lot like ones you might have known, right to your own backyard. "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" (and, to a lesser extent, the "Halloween" series, whose long-lasting appeal was a direct result of the success of the two stalwart franchises) dragged horror forward where it needed to be and, in essence, out of the dark ages.
Despite every critic in the world hating these films, and even despite the true purpose of the two franchises (produce movies on the cheap and make loads of cash doing it), Paramount Studios and New Line Cinema showed true chutzpah by giving these movies wide releases. In turn, the films themselves – seemingly never-ending stream of sequels included – possessed true courage and, even at their worst, always gave us some classic moments that are still talked about endlessly by nerds like myself and…fellow nerds like myself.
Diving even deeper into the abyss, they even brought something DIFFERENT to the table with each film, for the most part. The "Nightmare" movies would turn Freddy Krueger from near-silent serial killer to legit pop culture icon, and (for better or worse) giving him a personality that Frank Gorshin himself would envy. Meanwhile, the "Friday" flicks, while featuring the same killer in (almost) every chapter, was able to lure in directors who each took their own turn handling the admittedly simple setup, with entries ranging from straight horror (Part II) to all-out gorefest (Part IV) to slasher satire (Part VI).
So ends the rah-rah cheerleading portion of this essay. Now, are you ready for some good old fashioned Jon Lickness negativity?
While the "Scream" franchise of the late ‘90s was a brief blip on the radar (to say nothing of the extremely disappointing "Scream 4" released earlier this year), the long-running horror series has taken a big – no, scratch that. The long-running horror series has taken an EPIC hit in quality, memorability, and guts in the ‘00s, while simultaneously forgetting to add new wrinkles to the recipe throughout the franchise running length. But don’t take that bold blanket statement’s word for it – it’s time for another tale of the tape, complete with ALL-CAPS-HEADING-FOLLOWED-BY-RANTING OF DOOM:
FINAL DESTINATION
I figured I’d lead off with this one considering that we’ve got movie #5 headed to us in a scant 12 hours or so. On some level, I find it amazing that a movie that was originally written as an "X-Files" episode has managed to spawn five feature films, but that’s what we’ve gotten. While the first movie is good, goofy fun, the sequels are the equivalent of the Greek restaurant SNL skit. No one would ever confuse "Friday the 13th" for a dynamic series experience, but at least the Jason films had varying shifts in tone and a phony killer along the way. Arguably the most redundant film series I’ve seen, and that’s saying something.
SAW
First, I have to state that I’m VERY impressed that an October is approaching and we’re not getting yet another entry in this confusing, convoluted series. Much like "Final Destination," the "Saw" series (which focuses on a cancer patient who invents horrific death traps for people to solve a “game” with which may or may not lead to their redemption) gives us a first flick that deserves its instant classic status. Almost everything that comes after is masturbation and a veritable geek show where the only fun to be had comes from watching whatever other crazy contraptions the Jigsaw killer has in store for a few possibly deserving sickos. Of course, this is also the movie series that launched the separate "Hostel"/"Turistas"/whatever “torture porn” craze of the mid-‘00s, so make of that what you will. Of course, it’s also the movie series where the main villain is dead (and not in the Jason Voorhees “undead zombie” way, either) for the final four films in the series, yet somehow had the foresight to plot out approximately 98,000 additional traps for his endless series of “apprentices” to carry out in advance. Oh yeah, spoiler alert.
The "Saw" series would eventually come RIGHT AT US!! IN 3D!! Sadly, the series ended before we could get the obligatory “in space” entry.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
Oh boy…it appears that this right here is the new "Saw," and when you’ve already exhausted pretty much every story avenue in your first two films, you’re asking for trouble. "Paranormal Activity" is the movie that almost singlehandedly resurrected the “first hand camera” genre (well, along with "Cloverfield," anyway), and as its name suggests, it focuses on ghostly demonic phenomena and all the things that go bump in the night that are associated with it. Unlike a lot of online horror fans, I’m actually a supporter of both films already in existence (although the second one is much less effective than the first, which I saw in a theater 40 miles away from Horror Nerd H.Q., and then had to drive 40 miles in damn near pitch blackness through the middle of nowhere while my mind played tricks on me the whole way – that was a fun trip). However, even THIS GUY (*douchebag thumb gesture time*) knows that there’s nowhere else to go but further back, not forward.
And where are Freddy and Jason now? Michael f**king Bay owns them both.
Thus concludes the Generation Y American Horror Franchise Handbook (I should trademark that).
Looking back at what we’ve been given in these offerings ever since the heyday of the Friday/Nightmare period of dominance, it’s leapt out at me that with the exception of the "FD" films, the modern horror series (and film, for that matter) just takes itself too damn seriously. The definition of horror is different to every viewer; mine is “campfire scary story where there is also the morality tale of ‘be a good person or else bad things will happen to you.’” (I should trademark that, too). Put more simply, I’d rather be entertained by a good scary story with likable characters and a scary villain than be ham-fisted some twisted “moral message” about pain and redemption (that’d be "Saw"), or have my sole motivation for watching being the anticipation of different Goldberg variation-style reactions leading to impossibly gory deaths (take a guess).
So where do we go from here? We need several things to happen. Firstly, we need a producer/director/writer/what-have-you to have a fantastic original scary idea, and to be willing to drive the truck for the long haul through many sequels. Secondly, said idea needs to be something with the ability to MORPH and transform with the fears of society.
This is really the key; a good example of an awesome modern horror franchise is the Japanese "Ju-On" series. The idea is a simple one (enter a cursed house, you die), but the way that Takashi Shimizu managed to take the idea and turn it into new things (with one of the victim characters actually becoming the ultimate victim in the third film, and the series’ main villain being “reborn” in an immortal birth scene in the fourth before the series focused on two different stories entirely in the fifth and sixth entries) was downright ingenious. What was more, it was rooted in perhaps what we are most afraid of now – the breakup of our own admittedly fragile lives. The curse in these films begins with a jealous husband murdering his wife and child, thus turning them into Ju-On – vengeful spirits with the ability to follow and kill any living human being they see as a means of retribution for this injustice.
The result? Lo and behold, while there are six of these movies, they never feel like “same old s**t.”
And the moral of the story is…don’t murder your wife or she’ll turn into an evil helldemon and f**king KILL you.
One would think that some like-styled stuff (in theme if not story, at least) in a country with a 50% divorce rate would be some damn scary, relatable, and SUCCESSFUL stuff that hits REALLY close to home. And we might not have to deal with any more of the “huh, how many of those damn things are there?” morons.
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