1. Scare Tactics
You can’t keep a good horror-movie antagonist down. You may defeat the monster and vanquish your fears, but you can’t kill the undead. It always rises again, maybe to terrify someone else instead of you, but it will be waiting and lurking, as sure as light creates shadow.
Maybe that’s the reason so many horror films generate franchises. In the supernatural realm, where ordinary rules of logic and physics don’t apply, the writers can always find some excuse to bring the demon back and make the nightmare a recurring one. Okay, there’s also the fact that sequels are easier to conceive than originals, and that they’re lucrative, but that’s because audiences crave familiarity, even when they’re being shocked and frightened. The sequels keep offering diminished returns, and yet we keep buying the tickets, in the hope that something will scare us the way the first installment did, when we truly didn’t know what was hiding there in the dark.
Give director James Wan credit, then, for creatively mixing the horrific with the familiar. As one of the twisted masterminds behind the Saw series, he kept coming up with inventive but consistent ways to keep maiming and killing his movie victims. Now he’s trying again with another franchise, the ghostly Insidious series, whose second installment is hitting the screen with the cast of the first movie intact.
Can Insidious: Chapter 2 turn these movies into an enduring horror franchise that will keep scaring viewers, film after film? Check out the list below of some of the most terrifying and enduring horror franchises ever, and after you complain about your favorite that we left off the list, let us know if you think Insidious deserves to join their ghoulish company.
2. The Evil Dead
The initial Evil Dead is a marvel of low-budget filmmaking, of ingenuity triumphing over lack of resources. It’s most surprising monster is a tree, and its most terrifying effect is generated by a camera mounted on a two-by-four, with a guy holding each end of the beam and running through the woods. The film moves at a relentless pace, unleashing increasingly gruesome shockers every few minutes.
An archetypal college-kids-at-a-cabin-in-the-woods tale, Evil Dead was the calling card to Hollywood for a then-unknown Sam Raimi (who’d eventually go on to make the first Spider-Man trilogy and Oz the Great and Powerful). He essentially remade the movie as Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, with a bigger budget and the same protagonist, chainsaw-handed Ash (the invaluable Bruce Campbell), followed by an out-of-left field third installment, Army of Darkness, that saw Ash transported to medieval Europe to fight more demons.
The series was rebooted this year, with Raimi and Campbell’s blessing, but the new Evil Dead, while surely the goriest of the lot so far, lacked the amateurish, homemade charm of the original.
see more after cut..
3.Final Destination
Here’s a series that remains reliably scary because its Big Bad is the Big Kahuna himself, the Grim Reaper. Sure, the formula is the same — some youngster has a premonition that a group of pals are about to die in a horrible accident. They’re saved briefly, but Death will not be denied, and stalks the surviving teens one by one, claiming its due. The inventive part comes via the elaborate Rube Goldberg-ian processes by which Fate turns seemingly benign arrangements of random objects into sources of horrible freak accidents.
In a way, Death is an even better monster than Jason (Friday the 13th), Freddy (Nightmare on Elm Street), or Michael (Halloween) – it’s just as implacable and impervious to bargaining, reasoning, and negotiation, but what’s more, it can’t even be seen or spoken to. And it doesn’t dispense tasteless wisecracks every time it claims a new victim. Really, there’s no reason they can’t keep making these movies forever, since Death is the one horror movie baddie that really will never run out of victims and that actually will come one day for us all.
4. Friday the 13th
Nearly everything about this series seems cribbed from the Halloween movies. There’s the silent, masked killer Jason Voorhees (his visage of choice is a hockey mask) who’s as unstoppable as a Terminator; there’s the urban-legend backstory (in this case, a summer camp ghost story), and there’s even the fateful day mentioned in the title (in this case, one that often occurs more than once a year, unlike Halloween).
Yes, there are a few novel wrinkles (the killer in the first movie turns out to be not Jason but rather his mother; Jason’s having been left to drown in Crystal Lake as a child makes that body of water his sole weakness), but otherwise, Jason is pretty much the same stalker of teen miscreants that Michael Myers is.
Still, he proved so durable that one installment even sent him into space. Even Freddy Krueger found him to be a badass in the first inter-franchise match-up, Freddy vs. Jason, fighting him to an apparent draw. Like Michael, he’s always just one lightning bolt away from being resurrected and resuming his murderous ways.
5. Halloween
The horror franchise that pretty much wrote the rules for all horror franchises to follow. There’s the implacable killer, of course, Michael Myers, who, despite some lame attempts to psychoanalyze him, is simply pure evil, a seemingly unstoppable killing machine. Yeah, he’s wearing a William Shatner mask, he never speaks, he tends to show up around October 31, and he bears an unspecified grudge against his sister, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) that makes him come after her again and again, but those are just idiosyncrasies. (He could have come on Arbor Day and been just as scary.)
Really, no one is safe from Michael, but especially not randy and misbehaving teenagers. As with many horror franchises, the scariest is still John Carpenter’s original, with its many hat-tips to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (including the casting of Curtis, succeeding her mom, Psycho star Janet Leigh, as the scream queen for a new generation). Nonetheless, it’s hard not to shake the fear that the unstoppable Michael is still out there, waiting for the next reboot.
You can’t keep a good horror-movie antagonist down. You may defeat the monster and vanquish your fears, but you can’t kill the undead. It always rises again, maybe to terrify someone else instead of you, but it will be waiting and lurking, as sure as light creates shadow.
Maybe that’s the reason so many horror films generate franchises. In the supernatural realm, where ordinary rules of logic and physics don’t apply, the writers can always find some excuse to bring the demon back and make the nightmare a recurring one. Okay, there’s also the fact that sequels are easier to conceive than originals, and that they’re lucrative, but that’s because audiences crave familiarity, even when they’re being shocked and frightened. The sequels keep offering diminished returns, and yet we keep buying the tickets, in the hope that something will scare us the way the first installment did, when we truly didn’t know what was hiding there in the dark.
Give director James Wan credit, then, for creatively mixing the horrific with the familiar. As one of the twisted masterminds behind the Saw series, he kept coming up with inventive but consistent ways to keep maiming and killing his movie victims. Now he’s trying again with another franchise, the ghostly Insidious series, whose second installment is hitting the screen with the cast of the first movie intact.
Can Insidious: Chapter 2 turn these movies into an enduring horror franchise that will keep scaring viewers, film after film? Check out the list below of some of the most terrifying and enduring horror franchises ever, and after you complain about your favorite that we left off the list, let us know if you think Insidious deserves to join their ghoulish company.
2. The Evil Dead
The initial Evil Dead is a marvel of low-budget filmmaking, of ingenuity triumphing over lack of resources. It’s most surprising monster is a tree, and its most terrifying effect is generated by a camera mounted on a two-by-four, with a guy holding each end of the beam and running through the woods. The film moves at a relentless pace, unleashing increasingly gruesome shockers every few minutes.
An archetypal college-kids-at-a-cabin-in-the-woods tale, Evil Dead was the calling card to Hollywood for a then-unknown Sam Raimi (who’d eventually go on to make the first Spider-Man trilogy and Oz the Great and Powerful). He essentially remade the movie as Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, with a bigger budget and the same protagonist, chainsaw-handed Ash (the invaluable Bruce Campbell), followed by an out-of-left field third installment, Army of Darkness, that saw Ash transported to medieval Europe to fight more demons.
The series was rebooted this year, with Raimi and Campbell’s blessing, but the new Evil Dead, while surely the goriest of the lot so far, lacked the amateurish, homemade charm of the original.
see more after cut..
3.Final Destination
Here’s a series that remains reliably scary because its Big Bad is the Big Kahuna himself, the Grim Reaper. Sure, the formula is the same — some youngster has a premonition that a group of pals are about to die in a horrible accident. They’re saved briefly, but Death will not be denied, and stalks the surviving teens one by one, claiming its due. The inventive part comes via the elaborate Rube Goldberg-ian processes by which Fate turns seemingly benign arrangements of random objects into sources of horrible freak accidents.
In a way, Death is an even better monster than Jason (Friday the 13th), Freddy (Nightmare on Elm Street), or Michael (Halloween) – it’s just as implacable and impervious to bargaining, reasoning, and negotiation, but what’s more, it can’t even be seen or spoken to. And it doesn’t dispense tasteless wisecracks every time it claims a new victim. Really, there’s no reason they can’t keep making these movies forever, since Death is the one horror movie baddie that really will never run out of victims and that actually will come one day for us all.
4. Friday the 13th
Nearly everything about this series seems cribbed from the Halloween movies. There’s the silent, masked killer Jason Voorhees (his visage of choice is a hockey mask) who’s as unstoppable as a Terminator; there’s the urban-legend backstory (in this case, a summer camp ghost story), and there’s even the fateful day mentioned in the title (in this case, one that often occurs more than once a year, unlike Halloween).
Yes, there are a few novel wrinkles (the killer in the first movie turns out to be not Jason but rather his mother; Jason’s having been left to drown in Crystal Lake as a child makes that body of water his sole weakness), but otherwise, Jason is pretty much the same stalker of teen miscreants that Michael Myers is.
Still, he proved so durable that one installment even sent him into space. Even Freddy Krueger found him to be a badass in the first inter-franchise match-up, Freddy vs. Jason, fighting him to an apparent draw. Like Michael, he’s always just one lightning bolt away from being resurrected and resuming his murderous ways.
5. Halloween
The horror franchise that pretty much wrote the rules for all horror franchises to follow. There’s the implacable killer, of course, Michael Myers, who, despite some lame attempts to psychoanalyze him, is simply pure evil, a seemingly unstoppable killing machine. Yeah, he’s wearing a William Shatner mask, he never speaks, he tends to show up around October 31, and he bears an unspecified grudge against his sister, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) that makes him come after her again and again, but those are just idiosyncrasies. (He could have come on Arbor Day and been just as scary.)
Really, no one is safe from Michael, but especially not randy and misbehaving teenagers. As with many horror franchises, the scariest is still John Carpenter’s original, with its many hat-tips to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (including the casting of Curtis, succeeding her mom, Psycho star Janet Leigh, as the scream queen for a new generation). Nonetheless, it’s hard not to shake the fear that the unstoppable Michael is still out there, waiting for the next reboot.
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