Editorials
10 Most Unconventional Horror Sequels Ever Made
Horror fans are often of two minds about sequels. On one hand, they love their films and want to see more of the world they enjoyed on screen; on the other hand, nothing is more depressing than a landscape of horror films where every film is a remake, reboot, sequel, or rip-off of another film.
On occasion, though, a filmmaker will make an entry in an already established horror franchise that is somehow both a sequel to the previous series in some way while distinctively being separate because of its originality, style, or just plain strangeness. In those cases, horror fans’ reactions can vary from appreciative to confused to furious.
This is a list of ten films that belong to horror franchises, but they are so strange and specific that they stand alone as either great works, interesting failures, or generally despised departures from a beloved franchise…
HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH
The mother of all WTF movie sequels, this is by far the most well-known derailing of a popular franchise. Though the film has since been vindicated to a degree by fans who recognize it as a fun Quatermass-style horror/sci-fi hybrid, the film confused and enraged slasher fans who returned to the theater in the hopes of seeing the further adventures of Michael Myers and found instead a story about Stonehenge and magic masks that turned children’s heads into piles of bugs. The next entry in the series remedied the concern right in its title: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY
There are those who would argue that Friday the 13th: A New Beginning deserves to be here because it’s the only Jason movie without Jason in it. While that may be true, it is perhaps a greater offense to say Jason is in a movie, then provide one great opening scene with him and relegate him to a body-hopping, heart-eating specter for the rest of the film. Dropping the standard camp setting for a mythology-heavy story about magical daggers and Voorhees relatives, it was clear this film intended to try and take Jason in a totally new direction. Though the movie is fun, it makes more sense as a sequel to The Hidden or The Borrower than it does to Friday the 13th.EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC
Let’s be honest: no one wanted the job of making the sequel to The Exorcist. A nearly perfect horror film nominated for multiple awards, the job of following that act could be career suicide. John Boorman, the director who blew minds with his last two films, Deliverance and Zardoz, felt he was up for the task. Unfortunately, the film pivots from the original’s premise into the territory of hypnosis, locusts, psychic science, and the possible evolution of the entire human race. What? Audiences were confused and unhappy with the results, and the film has gone down as one of the great misfires of Hollywood history. While it holds a certain morbid curiosity factor, it makes little sense as a sequel to The Exorcist beyond the return of some familiar faces from the original.HELLRAISER: HELLWORLD
The Hellraiser franchise was already in a questionable place after the interesting but convoluted fourth entry, Hellraiser: Bloodline, and there had already been three tangentially related direct-to-video entries before Hellraiser: Hellworld appeared. The third of three Hellraiser films in a row from cinematographer turned director Rick Bota, this movie somehow distances itself even further from the Pinhead mythos by setting the story in OUR world, where people know and have seen the films, and the concept has been turned into an online computer game. What? No actual Pinhead? The whole thing was a hallucination? And then (SPOILER ALERT) Pinhead the film character actually DOES appear in the real world?! WTF is going on here?! This is sadly the last film in which Doug Bradley plays Pinhead, and it is not a proper farewell.SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD
There are plenty of clunky, poorly executed zombie films that borrow heavily from elements of George A. Romero’s living dead films, but only a couple of them were made by Romero himself. Ostensibly a western riff on the zombie film that is also oddly a continuation of his original series and an offshoot of his previous film, Diary of the Dead, Survival of the Dead is a tonal nightmare. The film is a family blood feud ala Hatfields and McCoys, but with two Irish families who somehow live on Plum Island off the coast of America. The series was running on fumes at this point, with Romero producing films faster than he could come up with thoughtful social commentary. This film actually contains a secret twin story and a zombie on horseback.PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION
It’s hard to tell when Paranormal Activity stopped being a plucky indie concept made with love and very little else and turned into a convoluted time-travel franchise that contained witches, gangsters, and an Xbox Kinect. But watching The Ghost Dimension, there is no doubt the series clearly went off the rails. Spanning thirty years over four previous films and one spin-off, the final movie in the series culminates with a magical camera that can see the spirit world, leading to a time tunnel in a wall that… I’m not sure. It makes a demon come to life as a grown, naked man named Toby? A phenomenally bizarre conclusion to a once interesting and revitalizing series.BLAIR WITCH 2: BOOK OF SHADOWS
When Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, the creators of the hugely successful original, The Blair Witch Project, showed no interest in returning for an immediate sequel, the studio decided to go ahead with one anyway. And how did they decide to continue the fake documentary narrative about three filmmakers lost in the woods? By saying it was all just a fake documentary. The sequel removes all the power of the original by saying it was just a movie, then it tells the story of a bunch of film fans journeying to the woods where it was filmed, only to find that perhaps the witch is real after all. Equally as bizarre as Hellraiser: Hellworld in its decision to remove it sequel from the reality of the other films, this film is a greater trespass because it also removes the stylistic conceit of the original by making its sequel a traditional narrative film. Whatever interest it holds as a film has little to do with how it connects to the original because, basically, it doesn’t.RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3
While the original Return of the Living Dead was a fun, action-packed reinvention of the zombie mythos, it didn’t take long for the series to fall into a familiar rut, with the second film a “more of the same” sequel in which we simply follow a new group of people dealing with the same issue from the original: more Trioxin gas spilled, more brains eaten. That’s why the third film is such a breath of fresh air. Part biker film, part love story a la Romeo and Juliet, the film is an animal all its own. Bride of Re-Animator director Brian Yuzna injects dark emotion into the series as a zombified woman tortures herself with physical pain in order to keep from feeding on her loved ones. The premise is unique but still fits into the overall series concept, and is equally as compelling as the Dan O’Bannon original in many ways.WISHMASTER 4: THE PROPHECY FULFILLED
Wishmaster isn’t a highbrow series, and that’s part of its charm. The simple premise, of a Djinn who uses people’s wishes against them in dark and violent ways, is an obvious template for a horror film filled with elaborate effects sequences and fun kills. So how did Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled ever come to be? The film is a love triangle between a wife, her recently wheelchair-bound husband, and a Djinn disguised as a lawyer friend. The complicated sexual dynamic of the husband and wife leads to a possible affair for her, but as the Djinn tries to get the wife to use three wishes in order to free all Djinn to take over the world, he finds himself trapped by a wish and starting to fall in love with her. Surprisingly touching and complex, this entry in the series is a good film that has little in common with its previous entries. The strangest part is that Chris Angel (the director, not the magician) was also responsible for directing Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell, arguably the least compelling entry in the franchise.SLEEPAWAY CAMP IV: THE SURVIVOR
The Sleepaway Camp franchise was always a strange one, right from the shocking end to the original film. The two films following the original were almost their own franchise, far funnier and weirder, and Return to Sleepaway Camp was a 20-years-later sequel to the original that basically ignored the events of the two middle entries. The strangest entry, however, is the one that almost never was. Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor was a quick exploitation attempt to cash in on the mild success of the first three films by creating, essentially, a “clip show” film. An amnesiac survivor reconstructs the events of the first three films in her memory (with VERY LONG clips that fill the majority of the running time), ending with a shocking murder. Much of the footage was shot, but the film was never completed and sat unused for years. Eventually, the film was cobbled together with footage from the first three and given a DVD release (oddly enough, AFTER the next film in the series was already released). It was intended as a quick cash-in, and it is the only entry not directed by either Robert Hiltzik or Michael A. Simpson.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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