Our annual Horrors Week is coming to an end, but not before we ask: What’s a horror franchise you just can’t quit? As always, we invite you to contribute your own responses in the comments—and send in some prompts of your own! If you have a pop culture question you’d like us and fellow readers to answer, please email it to [email protected]. And happy Halloween!
Final Destination
Like the best slasher franchises, the uniting force behind the Final Destination movies isn’t an impenetrably dense collection of lore, but a mode of death. As long as these films continue coming up with hilariously complicated Rube Goldberg scenarios that forever tarnish otherwise innocuous settings or objects, I’ll be seated, waiting to find out which are fakeouts and which take their falling dominoes all the way through to the deadly end. It helps that the latest Final Destination, while ostensibly more plot-heavy than some of the previous entries, ramped up the gore and comedy to balance things out, which sets up a future for the series that should continue to lean into the sillier side of meeting the Reaper. [Jacob Oller]
Hellraiser
Hooks ripping strips from flesh, flayed corpses steaming on a filthy floor, leather torture-angels, geometrically insane puzzle boxes, Ashley Laurence, “Jesus wept”—I don’t wanna sound gross or nothing, but Hellraiser is precisely my shit. And yet each successive installment in this horror franchise, born of the profane 1987 Clive Barker film (adapted from Barker’s novella, The Hellbound Heart), has found increasingly maddening ways to blunt those hooks. Tony Randel’s quick-turnaround sequel, Hellbound, nailed its insane take on the Cenobites’ cosmic origins but flubbed the psychosexual component that gave the first Hellraiser its edge. Barker’s sense of perverse, angular horror eventually became lost in the glut of edge-dork sequels that followed. That 2020 remake admirably tried to reach the franchise’s heinous heights, but I felt its attempts were too sterile. Yet all is not lost—October has brought us Hellraiser: Revival, a new game from Saber Interactive in collaboration with Barker himself (which stars the original Pinhead, Doug Bradley). That’s incentive enough to keep the Hellraiser franchise near my own hellbound heart. [Jarrod Jones]
George A. Romero’s Dead series
I know beloved zombie-daddy Romero died almost a decade ago, but what’s a zombie franchise without a little resurrection? There have been rumblings of fourth Dead film, Twilight Of The Dead, since before Romero’s passing (he said he doesn’t consider outliers Diary Of The Dead and Survival Of The Dead to be part of the same storyline), with wife Suzanne shepherding the director’s uncompleted project to, it seems, a posthumous revival. And I’m okay with that—Romero literally created one of the most enduring horror genres, and his films, while scrappily uneven, are peerless examples of the form. Even if I didn’t always jibe with Romero’s evolving idea of his evolving undead (they’re scarier when they’re dumber, sorry), the core concept of humans faced with shambling, inevitable, implacable extinction remains inviolable. And while I hold out hope that Twilight’s rumored desert island plot will return Day’s Sarah, John, and McDermott to the universe, I’ll never stop being fascinated by Uncle George’s decrepit world. [Dennis Perkins]
Halloween
Most horror franchises have highs and lows, but after 1978’s Halloween, Michael Myers’ slashers fall off a cliff—so much so that arguably the franchise’s second-best film is the one without its star killer. Nevertheless, when the Thorn shines in the sky, and a new Halloween appears in theaters or, these days, Peacock, I’m powerless to resist. From the cozy autumnal vibes of the Jamie Lloyd trilogy to Busta Rhymes’ reality TV monologue, and even the confused ambitions of David Gordon Green’s legacy sequels, I can’t say no to what amounts to a whole franchise of interesting, enjoyable failures. I genuinely like a lot about this malformed timeline and running through the series like an obsessed Dr. Loomis hunting for his perpetually on-the-loose patient. Whenever they reboot Michael Myers again, just stick me to a wall with a butcher knife and force me to watch whatever retcon explains why he’s come home…again. [Matt Schimkowitz]
Resident Evil
Even before Zach Cregger made one of my favorite video game adaptations ever—put more high-strung protagonists in survival horror stories, I say—I was prepared to watch whatever new Resident Evil film emerged from the wreckage of the last one. Paul W.S. Anderson isn’t the most inventive or assured director, but he got one thing right with his RE franchise: Putting Milla Jovovich front and center, with nerves of steel, unquantifiable powers, and outfits ill-suited for the end of the world. (Garters, a miniskirt, and a duster? Sure!) I’ve played most of the games (somewhat competently), and while I’ve gotten a kick out of seeing characters like the Redfields make their way to the big screen, I’ve also enjoyed the blank slate that Alice provides. So whether it’s Cregger going deeper into Raccoon City or Anderson wife-guying it up one more time, I’m in. [Danette Chavez]
Scream
Wes Craven’s original Scream injected new life into the slasher genre by deconstructing, subverting, and (lovingly) mocking everything that made it great. (I cannot tell you how often I find a reason—still— to say “They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who’s always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door; it’s insulting” when discussing movies in real life.) And 30 years later, Scream still holds up. The rest of the franchise… not so much. Scream 2 is great and Scream 3…exists, but almost everything afterward has struggled to recapture the franchise’s signature self-aware attitude and subversive intelligence, even as the films poke fun at everything from celebrity culture to internet fandom. And yet, I cannot let go of this universe, no matter how many presumed dead relatives return or nostalgia-bait connections (Sydney’s daughter!) the sequels forge. Am I still in this because I want to recapture the feeling of those first movies? Probably. But there’s just something about the thrill of a Ghostface mask that means I will keep returning to the theater anyway. [Lacy Baugher Milas]
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