It may be an easy way to draw a crowd, whether they tune in out of genuine curiosity or petty pessimism, but generally speaking, revisiting a tried-and-true IP time and time again won’t yield content worth anyone’s time. Halloween Ends, with a pair of Rotten Tomatoes scores numbering 40 and 57 percent from critics and audiences, respectively, appears to be the latest victim.
But against the odds, other horror franchises have managed to stay strong, whether that’s by way of knowing when to quit while they’re ahead or being home to ideas that have five or more films’ worth of malleability, and the r/horror faithful have taken to shouting these champions out.
Scream and Evil Dead found themselves in the same breath on a number of occasions, with the former continuously succeeding as a subversive slasher with a lukewarm-at-worst low point, and the latter continuing to inspire to this very day without having missed a beat. Let’s hope Evil Dead Rise carries that streak forward.
The Alien franchise was another popular entry, despite being guilty of a number of stinkers that were slammed or defended with varying degrees of tenacity by the Reddit masses.
But the winner just might have to be Final Destination, for putting out five films that seem to have garnered nothing but love.
Perhaps Halloween simply fell on some poor luck, but you can only feature Michael Myers so many times before the intrigue surrounding him, the very intrigue that drives his fear factor, begins to show some cracks. Nevertheless, the value it provides from its 1978 original amounts to just as much as some of its more serializable counterparts, and putting the individual strengths of cinematic storytelling front and center is surely a move we can all agree on.