Editorials
What Are Your Favorite Insane Sequels?
I honestly believe that the horror genre is the biggest provider of sequels. By percentage, the superhero genre might have it beat but nothing beats the sheer number of horror sequels that get churned out year after year. Some of these sequels are solid, a ton are, admit it, crap, and then there are the ones that make us scratch out head because they went so far from the original that it’s absolutely batshit to take in.
Below are several examples of sequels that felt almost like a complete 180 from the original film. And yet they have some pretty amazing merits to them, each offering something that the original didn’t have but then going in a totally different direction.
Check out my recommendations and then leave a few of your favorites in the comments!
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
The original had two or three important locations while the sequel went into the bowels of Hell. Seriously, that right there should tell you all you need to know about how insane things got in the Hellraiser universe.
In a weird way, I honestly think this is why the rest of the films didn’t work out so well. When you go balls to the wall so early on, it’s hard to make anything feel as important or epic.
Evil Dead 2
Evil Dead was actually rather scary at points and the humor felt almost incidental. But the humor in Evil Dead II was overt, it was on point, and it was utterly over-the-top. After all, a wall that shoots geysers of fake blood after a disembodied hand that has a love of flipping the bird gets “shot”? Or how about a spinning vortex that sucks in a car, a tree, and a chainsaw-armed stud?
Yup, we went from 0-60 REAL fast!
Gremlins 2
From being a fun, cute, and surprisingly scary Christmas horror/adventure (for a young child) to an insanely energetic film, Gremlins 2 cranked everything to the max. Seriously, that Key & Peele sketch absolutely nailed it. Just watch that and you’ll understand how absurd yet hilariously awesome things got.
Aliens
From one alien to hundreds. From not understanding how the eggs got to the ship to a Queen. From a crew of miners to a squadron of space marines. From a sci-fi/horror masterpiece to a sci-fi/horror/action masterpiece, emphasis absolutely on the “action” part of that ménage à trois. Both films are prime examples of the very best that can be offered by cinema but both are also sharply different in their feel and attitude.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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