Well, bring them on. I've been watching horror movies for too long and stocked up far too many contrary views so I think it's time to let them out.
HORROR HERESY #1
THE FAN FAVOURITE FRANCHISES FROM THE 1980S ARE MOSTLY NOT VERY GOOD
There: I said it. The beloved horror movie icons of the slasher movie heyday, to put it into the vernacular, are not all that and a bag of chips. The series might have started out with a few good entries, but invariably they're outnumbered by the duff ones and, pretty much without exception, they all go on for maybe two entries more than necessary. TCSM, Halloween, Elm Street, Friday The 13th... there are demonstrably more bad ones than good, in some cases to the extent that you wonder how they became iconic in the first place.
And yet, there they are in the pantheon: any horror fan's Mount Rushmore includes any four from Freddy, Jason, Michael, Leatherface, Ash, Chucky, Ghostface, Pinhead or Jigsaw, maybe a few second or third tier entries like the Firefly Family or Art The Clown (frankly lucky to get fifth tier along with The Toxic Avenger or Little Jimmy Osmond), or classic vintage figures like Norman Bates or Lugosi's (or indeed Lee's) Dracula....Yet even the most charitable horror fan surely has to accept that a large proportion of them aren't up to standard and more than a few of them are utterly shameful.
Take Halloween. The first one is fine: it's the original, it's the one that really started the slasher subgenre (granted, Black Christmas predates it). Seen today, it's actually safe and restrained, with no swearing, no gouts of blood, no severed heads, and only a bit of discreet nudity. As Kim Newman pointed out in Nightmare Movies, Michael Myers seems to enjoy scaring people more than killing them, and Halloween ends up as the iconic slasher movie that you can actually show your kids (the 18 certificate seems ludicrous now, when far bloodier movies get away with a 15). And if you're going to have a Halloween II, then Rick Rosenthal's sequel is pretty much as good as you were ever going to get. It's decent enough, and that's where they really should have stopped. But they didn't... Halloween III (Season Of The Witch) is pretty damn good, but it's an unrelated standalone episode and doesn't really count. Halloween 4 (Return) is back to Michael Myers stabbing people and is utter rubbish, Halloween 5 (Revenge) is utter rubbish, and Halloween 6 (Curse) is utter utter rubbish, at least in its standard release cut. Apparently the Producer's Cut is better but I haven't seen it and am not about to. Halloween H20 is a solid entry, the last one that's remotely any good, and Resurrection is more utter rubbish. The Rob Zombie films are mostly rubbish and complete rubbish respectively, and the David Gordon Greens are "well, okay if you really have to", utter rubbish and not much good.
Friday The 13th is fine. But from then on it's actually quite difficult because the next seven are all basically the same film remade with minimal differences: Part 3 is in 3D, Part 5 doesn't actually have Jason in it, but there's really very little to distinguish them except Part 8 (Manhattan), which is an atrocity. Jason Goes To Hell is nonsense, Jason X is the one where they go into space and isn't any good, and the remake is terrible. Elm Street: good, bad, better, okay, more of the same, rubbish, much better, and the remake is terrible. The only Freddys that really work are the ones Wes Craven either wrote or directed. TCSM? The first one was a masterpiece, the second and third are gory where the first one was just shrieking demented, the fourth wasn't any good, and the two Platinum Dunes were gloopy and yukky but neither scary nor distressing. The 3D one was rubbish, Leatherface was rubbish, and the Netflix one was pretty rubbish as well....
None of the Hellraisers after Hellbound were any good either: I know Hellraiser 3 has a following but they're wrong, and Hellbound is much maligned (partly due to the original release being so heavily cut by the American censors). Child's Play wasn't much good after the first one (though the last reel of CP2 was well done). Army Of Darkness was a brave and not entirely unsuccessful attempt to do something different but the other Evil Dead sequels and reboots are nothing compared to that raw and rough-edged original.
It's not just the 80s, although that is where it really kicked off. If you want to go back to the 30s and 40s, many of the later Universal ensembles aren't up there with the originals. Similarly, Hammer's Dracula films aren't all gold (Scars Of Dracula is particularly grim). Moving forwards into the 90s: I Know What You Did... and Urban Legend managed two solid entries before fizzling out into direct-to-VHS twaddle. Scream and Saw did manage a higher hit rate (incredibly, the first seven Saws make for a terrific weekend binge) but eventually the wheels fell off the wagons: the last Scream entry in particular was easily the worst in that series (and many others). Pleasingly, the Scream's in-universe commentary about the Stab movies, and their deterioration into junk, is one of the most telling in-jokes in a series that winks to camera so much it's practically a cyclops.
Someone with a firmer grasp of Excel spreadsheets than I can work out the scores for each franchise and the ratio of good to toilet, but the numbers aren't high. And I like some of them, I like some of the Friday The 13th sequels even if, as mentioned above, they're basically the same movie, I like Halloween H20 and Hellraiser II and Elm Street 3 and New Nightmare. I like Psycho II, I like Phantasm II, I like Return Of The Living Dead III. And, at the top end of the table, I absolutely adore Aliens. I don't hate sequels in principle. But Halloween Kills? Freddy's Dead? Goodwill to the franchise and fondness for the iconic bogeymen can't make up for the absolute floaters they've produced, when they're clearly less interested in making a reasonably decent film and more interested in just churning out any old tat because the fans will make it a hit anyway.
Which is, sadly, more often than not. But when we profess love for these franchises, it's mostly for the best (or least awful) ones and that's usually for the early entries, before it ran out of the few ideas it started out with, before it became too familiar. You might well be Team Jason, but you surely can't be Team Jason Takes Manhattan or Team Nispel. Nobody seems to want to quit while they're at least level, no-one wants to stop milking the cow. And the viewers don't seem to want them to stop either, seeking to recapture that original magic. But there's only ever one first time .
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