Horror Movie Franchisees Have A Problem!!

Tis’ the season of remaking horror movies! Cheers to that! Close on the heels of last year’s ‘Halloween’ remake, we have got another one on our hands, with Stephen King’s dark novel ‘Pet Sematary’ (it’s how the kids spell ‘cemetery’ in the movie). Apart from this, we have another such remake in the form of ‘Child’s Play’, which had immortalized the doll villain ‘Chucky’, while last year also saw the release of Dario Argento’s masterpiece giallo horror ‘Suspiria’, albeit with a slightly different story, and I’m sure many other makers will be looking towards bringing up one or the other movie back from the dead (no pun inten-dead!). However, in this crowd of remakes, let’s not forget one thing- too much of anything is bad, especially horror movies, and there are reasons that horror movies are better remade than continued in series.

Let’s start with the above mentioned ‘Halloween’, a slasher movie that bulldozed its way into theatres when it first came out in 1978, directed by John Carpenter. The story concerned Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who while babysitting a couple’s kid on Halloween, is stalked by a serial killer Michael Myers, who wears a white mask. The movie is different in a way that the killer’s actual face is never shown, and he has no motive to kill. The movie scored at the box office, and a series of sequels followed; however, they all followed a similar pattern, adding extra gore, while the third part of the movie completely changed the central story, thus making it quite redundant. Perhaps that is why the lead Jamie Lee Curtis only appeared in the movie in its sequel in 1981, and another one released in 1998, and to put it best, it was above average. Which is why the present movie, directed by David Gordon Green, went back to the basics, respected the central theme, used the original cast and thus scored a winner at the box office.

Similar has been the case with the ‘Blair Witch’ series, which released a sequel to lukewarm reviews, while its remake was an above average watch. Same goes for ‘The Conjuring’ universe, which has endured mixed fortunes with its various spin-offs.

These are only some of the franchisees that I mentioned, and Indian horror movies fare much worse than their foreign counterparts. The major reason being a lack of originality or creativity in spinning those stories. The audience is smart, and will sniff out if it finds the story to be monotonous, which many of the franchisees are doing. It is not easy to keep a story moving for a few more movies, if there is nothing left to tell. That is why originality in this genre is required, with Hereditary (U.S.), Veronica (Spain), The Witch (U.K.) and Tumbbad (India) some of the movies that scored big with audience owing to their originality and atmosphere. Makers should focus on getting creative and scoring with environments. To paraphrase from ‘Pet Sematary’, “Sometimes standalone is better”.