For a genre so heavy on gruesome death, horror certainly struggles with endings.
Horror franchises often simply refuse to die, extending infinitely into the future. This is certainly true of the Halloween series. Since it started in 1978 with John Carpenter’s undoubted slasher classic Halloween, the bedlam in Haddonfield has extended over four decades, with Michael Myers apparently dying on many occasions, only to emerge from the ashes with a kitchen knife in his hand. At the recent San Diego Comic-Con, Blumhouse unveiled two more movies in the spooky saga, following up the 2018 franchise reboot. Halloween Kills will arrive in 2020, followed by Halloween Ends in 2021.
It’s the second one of these that’s most interesting, suggesting that it will bring the franchise to a close – 43 years after it first graced cinema screens. But horror doesn’t like to say goodbye that easily.
The trend for declaring horror franchises to be dead, before reanimating them into a shambling, undead version of themselves is something that dates back many years. Perhaps the first example of the phenomenon is 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which was the fourth entry in a franchise that now comprises a dozen movies in total. At the time, Paramount Pictures was acutely aware of the declining popularity of slasher films and used the title as a marketing hook for a movie that was genuinely intended to be the climactic entry.
In what would become a trend for movies billed as “final chapters”, Friday made solid money at the box office. It tripled its budget and still sits as the fifth highest-grossing movie in the entire series. Not even a year later, they went back to the well with another outing for Jason Voorhees’ hockey mask, albeit with someone else behind it. Less than a decade after that, in 1993, Paramount sold the franchise rights to New Line Cinema for Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. This one didn’t get the same box office bump and did put an end to the franchise for a good few years until Jason X in 2001.
That box office spike is a crucial reason why the gimmick of finality so often rears its head in successful horror franchises. 2009’s The Final Destination remains the highest-grossing entry in that particular series, while Resident Evil: The Final Chapter raked in $312m globally in 2017 – the franchise’s best total to date. Sure enough, neither of these films are truly final. Final Destination 5 hit cinemas in 2011 and a reboot of the Resident Evil franchise is currently being developed, with 47 Meters Down director Johannes Roberts on board as writer-director. The reboot was announced just four months after The Final Chapter was released.
It’s not always a foolproof strategy, though. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, which was released in 1991, reversed the disappointing box office decline of the fifth Elm Street movie, but did not hit the heights of the third and fourth installment. When Robert Englund’s iconic serial killer made his return for the meta New Nightmare, the box office plummeted, but the crossover event of Freddy vs. Jason in 2003 returned him to franchise-high takings, leaving the supposed “final nightmare” in the dust.
As with the first supposedly definitive Friday the 13th franchise closer, the idea of labeling a movie as final is sometimes done out of pure commercial necessity. Sometimes people are just tired of seeing a franchise over and over again, but might see one more if it means they never have to return to that world. Certainly, many will be hoping that The Last Sharknado marks the final time they have to see Tara Reid as a shark-slaying cyborg…right?
This was the case with 2010’s Saw: The Final Chapter – also known as Saw 3D. Lionsgate had originally planned a two-part finale for the franchise, but rolled all of the ideas into one movie after the miserable box office performance of Saw VI – well in excess of the gradual decline that had been playing out at the multiplex since Saw III featured John Kramer’s death by power saw.
The gambit didn’t necessarily pay off, with The Final Chapter beating the meager box office of its predecessor, but falling below even the total of the first Saw movie in 2004 domestically. When the franchise returned with Jigsaw in 2017, it was yet another step back, with that film landing considerably short of The Final Chapter. With Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson on board for yet another revamp though, rumors of Saw‘s death have certainly been greatly exaggerated.
While delivering a supposed “final chapter” is a commonly used marketing ploy to inject life into a flagging horror franchise, it’s clear that it isn’t always a success. Genre audiences are wise and cynical enough now to see through the transparent fiction that such titles often prove to be. No one will be surprised if another Sharknado is announced, or if Tom Six decides to return with a follow-up to The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence), despite the promise in its title.
So on that note, will Halloween Ends actually mark the last of Michael Myers? The honest answer is that it probably won’t.
In fact, Danny McBride – co-writer of the 2018 Halloween and the upcoming sequels – has already declared his own certainty that their movies will not be the final outings for Michael Myers and the Halloween universe. He told SlashFilm that there is “no way” their films will mark the end and said that “10 years from now there’ll be another group of knuckleheads” who will put together their take on the series.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. And that’s the final word on this.
Or is it?
