Greatest slasher franchise ever? See who makes the cut in round 2
Jason, Jigsaw, Candyman and Leprechaun meet their match
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Yesterday brought round one of our Ultimate Slasher Franchise Tournament to a close. It was, true to the spirit of the whole affair, a total bloodbath: The Gingerdead Man got munched, the Evil Bong got cashed, and Maniac Cop was killed in the line of diabolical duty (#ACAB). Today, the competition gets stiffer and the stakes higher as we enter the Sweet 16 portion of our bracket.
Which ’90s slasher franchise will move on to the Elite Eight? Which evil plaything will live to slash another day? And can the luck of the Irish compete with the power of the Cenobites? Keep reading to see the movies we favored in round two of our tournament. And be sure to scroll to the bottom to vote in the parallel readers’ poll, which has already begun to diverge from our results.
Halloween vs. Happy Death Day
Winner: Halloween
There’s a simple way to settle this contest between pure horror and clever genre play: Happy Death Day’s time-loop mayhem wouldn’t even exist without Halloween to provide half of its hybrid formula. But Michael Myers wins on more than just technical grounds, even as both franchises here are blessed with smarter-than-average scripts and a lead performer (Jamie Lee Curtis on the one hand, Jessica Rothe on the other) operating at a caliber higher than what the Final Girl role typically demands. The fact remains that Happy Death Day, for all its merits, simply isn’t scary—even before Tree’s temporally imposed invulnerability kicks in. The franchise has laughs. It has sci-fi weirdness. It has a mildly creepy baby mask. But it lacks even a single frame that comes close to matching the skin-crawling horror of those slow tracking shots that captured The Shape’s first rampage across Haddonfield, and which inspire such looming dread even 40 years after the fact. [William Hughes]
Sleepaway Camp vs. Psycho
Winner: Psycho
The camper-murdering villain of Sleepaway Camp may have been able to take out a homicidal parental unit in our first round, but they’re no match for Norman Bates—or his bloodthirsty alter ego. Despite 23 years between them, both franchises began with films that feature shocking (and visually similar) twist endings that reveal the truth about their respective killers. But all those summer-camp deaths became awfully, well, campy in the lackluster Sleepaway sequels (and borderline unwatchable with the revival in the 2000s). Whereas Psycho at least had the pleasure of delivering the definition of a “better than it has any right to be” belated second installment with Psycho II, which avoids all the usual pitfalls of horror sequels in favor of a slow-burn breakdown of Norman’s mind games—and the reasons he’s eventually driven to kill again. Yes, the franchise started to falter after Norman himself, Anthony Perkins, stepped behind the camera to helm Psycho III, and the TV movie sequel/prequel combo Psycho IV: The Beginning tarnished it further. But how many classic horror films have the distinction of being granted an almost shot-for-shot remake some 40 years later? Norman Bates remains the murderous icon of midcentury American horror—no matter how hard Gus Van Sant worked to sap that iconic power. [Alex McLevy]
Friday The 13th vs. Silent Night, Deadly Night
Winner: Friday The 13th
Plot-light and stab-heavy, these holiday-themed slashers are cut from the same cloth—namely, a Halloween-branded beach towel. Aided by considerably higher production values and a flair for innovation in the field of freezing someone’s face and smashing it, the Friday The 13th movies edge out a win. While there’s plenty to enjoy in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, the fun comes at the films’ expense. Friday is plenty stupid, but it’s more technically sound, making it easier to settle in for a couple of good scares. With Silent Night, Deadly Night, you’re mostly getting coal—hilarious coal, but coal nonetheless. Still, few performances are as delightfully sweaty as Eric Freeman’s Ricky Caldwell in Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, the film that gave us “garbage day.” That this quintessentially terrible sequel blows 45 of its 88 minutes recapping and replaying scenes from the original is part of its so-bad-it’s-good appeal… but also further reason to favor Jason. Punish! [Matthew Schimkowitz]
Candyman vs. Scream
Winner: Scream
With the Candyman reboot still fresh in the collective memory and Scream 5 (only the original deserves to be called Scream, sorry those are the rules) approaching fast, it’s an interesting time to reevaluate the most thoughtful slasher franchises of the ’90s. They’ve both remained relevant for longer than your average series, keeping their iconic villains alive, even when the specific characters brandishing the knife or hook change. But though the teen-slasher revival Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson kicked off only lasted for a few years, the Scream movies have still made a surprise lasting impact on the genre, as evidenced by a recent crop of copycats. They’re also inherently watchable (and rewatchable), thanks to their meta commentary and standout performances. The first Candyman is as smart on folklore as Scream is on other movies, but its sequels pale in comparison—only this year’s fourth installment comes close to the original’s power. Though the Scream movies established that there can be more than one killer, only one can advance to the next round here. Better luck next time, Candyman. [Saloni Gajjar]
A Nightmare On Elm Street vs. Slumber Party Massacre
Winner: A Nightmare On Elm Street
If there’s anyone more perfectly suited to slashing his way through the dozing denizens of a slumber party than Freddy Krueger, their franchise doesn’t exist yet. A power drill-wielding madman may be able to take out high-school seniors, but he’s no match for a killer who can just wait for him to fall asleep. If anything, the Slumber Party franchise knows it’s outclassed—it ripped off some of Nightmare’s supernatural mojo for its sequel, which transformed the baddie into a magical rockabilly killer with a power-drill guitar. That’s certainly silly, but the campy music-laced madness was still preferable to the straight-faced blandness of the next Slumber Party—whereas Nightmare’s third entry is arguably its best. Freddy was just getting started, and saved his sillier outings for subsequent entries in the series. By that point, Slumber Party Massacre had already been killed off. Ambien, anyone? [Alex McLevy]
Saw vs. Child’s Play
Winner: Child’s Play
With both of these long-running, puppet-forward franchises, versatility is the name of the game. Unfortunately for Jigsaw, no one is more posable than Chucky. Able to play in shades of black comedy, Don Mancini and Tom Holland’s killer doll is the demonic-toy gold standard, the one all Annabelles aspire to. It’s not a first-round knockout, though. No monster was more recognizable than Jigsaw for the first half of the new century, even as the labyrinthine soap opera plotting became more over-the-top than the bloodshed. Unfortunately, The Book Of Saw seems closed for the foreseeable future, after the ironic punishment slaughterhouse of John Kramer (Tobin Bell) failed to recapture the world’s imagination in two failed reboot attempts. Unlike Jigsaw, Chucky never ruled the horror landscape, but he has endured in sequels, a remake, and a new TV series. Don Mancini, Brad Dourif, and Jennifer Tilly have proven time and again that they know how to keep Good Guys happy, refreshing the character in style and tone every few years. And so another menacing marionette falls to Chucky. [Matt Schimkowitz]
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre vs. Wolf Creek
Winner: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Mixed reviews and “F” CinemaScore be damned, Wolf Creek might be the most harrowing nightmare in the boonies since the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre—the rare movie about a murderous lunatic living off the grid that approaches some of the pounding terror of its iconic 1974 ancestor. But having dispatched another of that classic’s bastard offspring last round, Greg McLean’s outback variation must now contend with the slaughterhouse slasher to rule them all. And sorry Mick Taylor, your jackknife is no match for the Sawyers’ machine-powered tool. Truthfully, neither of these white-knuckle shockers needed to become a franchise, and plenty of the Chain Saw sequels (and prequels and remakes) stink like offal. But on a whole, they’re weirder, funnier, and/or scarier than the redundant Wolf Creek 2 and subsequent TV version. And there’s some deranged inspiration sprinkled like seasoning across the mangled, chronologically convoluted Chain Saw series—especially in Tobe Hooper’s over-the-top, blackly comic second installment, which gave us a chainsaw duel between Leatherface and Dennis freakin’ Hopper. That alone makes cackling Mick the head on a stick. [A.A. Dowd]
Leprechaun vs. Hellraiser
Winner: Hellraiser
If you keep your more depraved urges in check and don’t touch gold that doesn’t belong to you, it’s unlikely you’ll receive a visit from the villains in either the Leprechaun or the Hellraiser franchises. (Unless you’re in space. All bets are off once you leave the Earth’s atmosphere.) But were you to commit some transgression that put you face to face with either Pinhead or the Leprechaun, you could just dropkick one of them in self-defense, and it’s not the Cenobite. Setting aside the differing fearsomeness of their monsters, Hellraiser still has the advantage as a series: Both get dire pretty quickly, but the first two Hellraiser movies actually carry some thematic weight, supercharged by kinky subtext and diabolically inspired imagery. These give them an aura of transgression that’s infinitely more titillating than the self-aware silliness of Leprechaun. Point to the hell priest. [Katie Rife]
READERS POLL
The results of yesterday’s readers poll largely aligned with our own, especially when it came to the blow-out matches—those number eight seeds never had a prayer. (At just 14 votes apiece, tournament fodder Camp Blood and The Gingerdead Man are the biggest losers of day one.) But the voters diverged from our picks a couple times: In the battle of holiday horrors, you rather decisively went for Black Christmas over Silent Night, Deadly Night, while keeping three Wes Craven franchises in the mix by opting for The Hills Have Eyes over Slumber Party Massacre. Meanwhile, the day’s closest race was between two series about bloodthirsty rural bogeymen; Wolf Creek edged out Wrong Turn by a mere 34 votes, a true photo finish.
Does Black Christmas have a snowball’s chance in hell against Friday The 13th? And in a head-to-head between Wes Craven franchises, can The Hills Have Eyes pull the upset on Freddy? You decide, below or here!
49 Comments
You had Texas Chainsaw Massacre vs. Wolf Creek, but Wolf Creek lost to Wrong Turn in the first round. Not that it matters, either would have lost to the juggernaut that is Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it is what it is.
Most of these are correct. Then again, there was a lot of chaff in there that shouldn’t have survived the first round of culling: Leprechaun, Slumber Party Massacre, Silent Night Deadly Night. So a lot of tonight’s eliminations are no-brainers.Personally, I would take “Candyman” over “Scream”. And though I am not a “Saw” aficionado I think that it should best “Child’s Play”, as it’s easily gnarlier and nastier than Chucky at his worst. I guess both picks skew a bit too comedic to be top-tier slashers in my book. “Scream” of course is a parody, and it doesn’t have the gore of a proper slasher, while Chucky is too silly in premise and execution.Sad to see “Sleepaway Camp” go, though it can’t measure up to “Psycho”. I hardly see the original “Psycho” as a true slasher, more a progenitor of the form. “Sleepaway” is a better fit for the form, but certainly not the cream of the crop, as awfully and wonderfully bizarre as it is.
The first two Slumber Party Massacre films are genuinely great, with II being one of the best slashers in the genre. That’s a series that 100% should have overtaken The Hills Have Eyes, which has one pretty good movie and then a lot of diminishing returns.The other ones I agree with, especially Silent Night, Deadly Night. It’s so annoying that the last round tried to act like the two remakes aren’t incredible.
For my money, Slumber Party Massacre has one great moment, where one of the sisters opens the refrigerator to get a beer and doesn’t notice the corpse inside. I can appreciate that Rita Mae Brown wanted to make a feminist subversion of the slasher, and I can see what she’s going for but I don’t think it’s very successful. Part 2 doesn’t seem to have a high-minded thesis behind it, or any coherent idea really, but it is very strange and very watchable. It takes forever for the driller killer to show in earnest, and so you have off the wall non sequitur scenes with, say, the heroine being attacked by a raw chicken carcass or her friend’s face erupting into a giant zit. And the killer is… pretty out there. I mean, a rockabilly-singing thug with a drill-equipped electric guitar? Not something you see everyday.As regards the Christmas slasher with two underrated remakes, do you mean Black Christmas?
Your analysis of the original SPM reflects my feelings as well. I love that Rita Mae Brown took the helm to attempt to do something different. It is so cool, particularly in the early 80s, that someone was willing to fund a “feminist subversion of the slasher.” And that it was someone with the credibility of Rita Mae Brown? So fucking cool. BUT … it’s not successful. She wrote it as a parody. It potentially would have been Scream before we had Scream. But the studio wasn’t ready for it and made the director shoot it as a straight-ahead horror film. So the finished product is just … weird?
Unpopular opinion: Halloween feels like the dad rock of horror films nowadays. I watched a double feature of Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the theatres last year, audience was full of excitable uni kids and others expecting a fun camp (date) time. This persisted all the way through Halloween – everyone laughing at Nancy Kye’s awful(ly delivered) dialogue while groaning audibly at Laurie’s intensely dumb behavior in the finale (don’t drop the knife for christ sake!).Everyone was all jitters and giggles going into Chainsaw Massacre, but as soon as that grimy first shot of the grave came up the audience went from boisterous giggles to nervous. The quips disappeared when the door slam kill came around, and from the dinner scene on it was completely silent, and stayed that way as everyone shuffled out of the theatre during the credits seemingly shellshocked. I myself didn’t realize my jaw had been clenched tight for the entire third act.As technically well made and slick as Halloween is, it feels quaint by today’s standards. Chainsaw Massacre on the other hand still feels just as viscerally raw, disturbing and dangerous 50 years on. The dinner scene/escape especially goes from being just a movie to something unhinged and inexplicable, like a modern day avant garde visceral exercise in depicting hell (the quick cuts, the eyeball close-ups), ending with the iconic blood soaked visage of Sally laughing and crying maniacally (Midsommar, anyone?) and the equally iconic deranged chainsaw dance. I could still hear the chainsaw roaring in my ears as I went to bed that night.
It’s hard to take issue with this insofar as Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are both two of maybe my 25 or 30 favorite films. But if Halloween isn’t people’s bag, I don’t know what to tell them. I’ve watched it three times in the last year on top of the countless times I’ve watched it since I was a kid. It still scares the shit out of me.Your feelings about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are pretty much where I land, as well. It gets right under your skin from the get-go and only becomes more unsettling and nasty as it goes. It’s absolutely merciless, and few other horror films even approach the same impact. As a franchise tournament, obviously we have to pick, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re lucky to have both, because they’re both fucking incredible and immortal.
I think modern issues with Halloween mostly stem from how influential it was. Damn near everything John Carpenter did that scared the pants off of people has been copied, parodied, copied again, and remixed so many times that they’re well-known tropes that have largely lost their impact.
The single scariest scene in Halloween (a movie I adore) has to be when Laurie escapes from the house and runs next door, screaming “help me!” and ringing the doorbell. The lights turn on for a second or two—then turn off. There is no better metaphor for Gen X—where the hell are the grownups??? It’s a *terrifying* scene.
I wholeheartedly agree. Halloween has been copied and imitated so much that its power is diluted. But two remakes later, no one has duplicated the experience of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
I’d argue that Se7en gets close. Despite having Hollywood slickness and star power, it still emulates that griminess pretty well. The sloth scene haunts me as much as anything in TCM, though it’s admittedly a riff on the latter’s dinner scene.
I don’t object too much to Halloween being called the “Dad rock of horror” because both are things I’m sometimes in the mood for. I’ll grant that Halloween feels awfully _ cosy_ for a horror film, but that’s probably why I’ve watched it more times than TCM, perhaps even why I get some pleasure from some of the increasingly feeble andor awkward later sequels.
Reminds me of the audience i saw the TCM remake with back in 2004ish. The audience was blown away by the violence and dread. It was probably most people’s first Torture Porn movie.
100% Grizzly Approved
The bracket is wisely set up so that The Big Four (Jason, Freddy, Michael, Leatherface) are a foregone conclusion, at which point a Freddy vs Jason scenario is more or less unavoidable. But like any good slasher series, the predictability is part of the fun!
I don’t know about that the next match ups are Halloween vs Psycho, Friday the 13th vs Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street vs Child’s Play/Chucky, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre vs Hellraiser. Both Halloween and Psycho have gone this far based on the merits of the original while the sequels/remakes have all sucked but this is about the franchise as a whole so Bates Motel gets added in for Psycho which could help it win. I think Scream really should beat Friday the 13th as the Scream franchise manages to be smart in how it deconstructs the genre but also in how it scares the audience. The fact that there were two killers in Scream is a much bigger shock than the Mrs Voorhes reveal in my opinion as that was something that wasn’t done before and made you go back and see how it was obvious the whole time. Also I would say Ghostface is just as iconic as Jason Voorhes at this point in pop culture. Oh and most of the Friday the 13th movies are just plain bad and not all of them in the “so bad it’s good” way, just bad.Freddy vs Chucky is a tough one as both are the comedic slashers of the bracket. Personally I give it to Chucky as that franchise has a consistent voice due to Don Mancini being heavily involved in everything except the reboot while Elm Street’s tone has fluctuated greatly through out. Both feature supernatural killers and creative kills but Chucky has creative realistic kills that either get made to look like accidents or pin them on someone else. Also Chucky’s animatronics and practical effects (especially how it has consistently stuck with practical as much as possible to this day) gets points from me at least.Leatherface wins hands down though. The first film is a horror masterpiece that isn’t topped even by the best Hellraiser movie.
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is, in a lot of ways, the Scream before Scream. It leans into winking at the audience without being straight up parody (as opposed to something like Student Bodies), and expects that its audience is there for chuckles based around the conventions of the movies preceding it as much as scares.
These matchups are will be the most enticing so far. Between Psycho and Halloween, only one franchise bagged Vera Farmiga, so that’s where I’m leaning.
Chucky vs Freddy is tough. Kneejerk tells me the NOES series, but if I slow down and think about it, I agree with alot of your points. Even I admit I like at least four of the Child’s Play films to only 3 and 1/2 from Nightmare
“You’re Next” is my go-to example of a horror comedy where the comedy doesn’t undermine the horror, and unpredictability is the source of much of its dark humor. But audiences wanting predictability in their slashers is presumably why it wasn’t successful enough to become a franchise.
Ah but subversions of that predictability are how you movie forward. If the Cenobites take out Leatherface we’ve got an interesting scenario going on.
Man, imagine if Leatherface got ahold of the Cenobite puzzle box. Pinhead and crew would show up, take one look at all the grime and animal carcasses, and quietly slip away back to hell where it’s posh and clean.
I think Scream takes out Jason. And personally I’d like Hellraiser over Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Nah, Scream is one great flick and three listless retreads. F13 is literally *the* most storied horror franchise in existence, 13 installments (!!!), only 3 of which are truly awful. On the other hand, 3 are truly great, the star is the most iconic in slasher history, and the series sports the only reboot that didn’t suck.A case can be made for Freddy (and only Freddy) to topple it, but that showdown (the Godzilla vs Kong of the latter half of the 20th century) will forever be based on which character you connect with more.
Can someone please tell me why they thought that Black Christmas, a series with one of the worst films ever made managed to get through. Y’all must be real nihilistic if y’all prefer hatred soapbox screeching to goofy fun.
Get through what, it was bumped off in the first round
Verily, it has gone the way of The Gingerdead Man.
Wait, readers’ poll, my bad. Well, shit then. One unfuckwithable movie, one silly-but-likably-lurid remake, and one bad remake that couldn’t sustain its ideas really but hurt a lot of very sensitive men’s feelings and that is much more hilarious than anything in SN,DN 3-5.
SN,DN has the novelty of its mostly-flashbacks sequel being the most worthwhile movie because it has all the good shit from part 1, with but extra new schlock. It’s all you need, and it’s a howl, but there’s no comparison to the OG Black Christmas.
Brian Yuzna and SNDN4 would like a word. Its the Halloween 3 of that franchise and legitimately creepy/gnarly. Also, notably, not at all a slasher and BARELY Christmas related. 100% agree on all the rest though.
Scream had one good movie with some freshness, and just hacked away at the same ever more stale joke ever since. Ten years ago I thought the sequels were forgotten garbage; it turns out they’ve hung onto a surprising amount of fan esteem (but they’re still kinda garbage). Candyman had one great movie and a good one. And two bad ones, yes. Worse than Screams 2-4? I don’t know, suck is suck.But then, I think Psycho III is easily the Psycho sequel winner.
I don’t even think the first “Scream” is that good or original. There was a film that came out before it called “There’s Nothing Out There” (or something like that) that Scream definitely borrows from.
counterpoint: the only bad Scream is 3 because it was written by a for-hire writer and not Williamson. every other entry in the franchise is great-to-superb
Good morning, readers! Vote in the reader bracket embedded at the bottom of the piece or at this URL: https://www.polltab.com/bracket-poll/j15R5Jpe3b
I love happy death day but yeah round two was a breeze. Only one I voted differently on was Saw over Childs play as I never cared for Chucky after part 1 and Saw 1 and 3 were really good.
I’ve just never connected with Scream franchise. The first time I saw the first entry, I thought it was mildly clever, but repeated viewings haven’t revealed any hidden depths. Sure, it’s metacommentary on slasher movies, but it has nothing to say beyond “boy, there sure are a lot of unspoken rules in these movies”; it’s a TVTropes entry given life through the medium of nubile teen flesh. 2 years earlier, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare did the metacommentary thing, too, but it did it better, with real thematic resonance and weight. But it didn’t quite take off, much to my chagrin.
I think the tropes aspect gets overemphasized. It’s a theme, but as slasher movie/mysteries, they still stand on their own. There’s still good tension and inventive kills, and the characters are appealing enough that it hurts when they die/appear to die/appear to be the killer.Actually, that may be unique about them — I want to see the characters live, not die gruesomely.
I think New Nightmare was excellent, but was in a rough in-between period of horror movie special effects. I don’t know enough about the effects field so I can’t say if the problem was that it was clinging to old stuff too late or trying new stuff before kinks were really worked out, but to me the look of it was the problem. Script was good, Craven knew how to play the dread, etc. But there were some too-goofy moments to look at that make me cringe even now when I watch, despite loving the film.Scream had a lot of young people who were hot at the time, a bigger budget, little need for major effects, and a script that showed up right at the time that the way-too-self-aware dialogue style was catching on. It was all very fresh at the time and let people feel okay openly loving the genre again, so I don’t think it’ll ever lose that affection.
Shouldnt it be Texas Chainsaw vs Wrong Turn not Wolf Creek?…
I would just like to gripe that the new Candyman was bad and incoherent.
Look, I get it, NoES 3 is always catching the title of “best” in the series but I have to honestly pump the brakes on it. It was great and had that star power but it was also the start of the slippery slope of Freddy being more jokey than pure terror. For that reason I submit that NoES 2: Freddy’s Revenge was the better movie (with nothing beating out the original imho).Thematically it was a far richer experience if you accept the subtext as being intentional. Sadism, bullying, repressed homosexuality, and how all of those lead to a subconscious desire to act violently and the conflict that causes? There ain’t another 80s slasher flick that even comes close to dealing with those subjects seriously. Also, the fact that this was the first and unfortunately last time you can see Freddy showing any sort of internal conflict and emoting beyond being Freddy makes it an amazing performance in a movie that gets too oft overlooked.
But Freddy’s revenge also had exploding parakeets and Freddy running around a pool party yelling “BOO!”. As a standalone movie regarding its subtext, it’s unique. But as a NoES entry, it’s terrible. Part 3 is the true canonical sequel that perfectly bookends the core Freddy mythology. Nancy and her father must return to sacrifice themselves in order to save the last of the children of Elm St. and kill Freddy for good…Also the only numbered sequel that Craven felt was good enough to get involved with.
I disagree but not enough to fight. I respect your opinion except the whole part about it being terrible. On that point, you can go straight to hell. =)
Eat shit and live.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, and this seems like a good spot for it: Isn’t it utterly bizarre that Child’s Play of all things is currently the healthiest slasher franchise with the best hit-to-miss ratio by a country mile? Chucky utterly defies the usual path of horror sequels. I mean, you have the first two which are bonafide classics, that’s normal, but then you have 3 which was rushed out the door in record time and still manages to be enjoyable despite the obvious drop in quality (I know some would disagree vehemently, but 3 is joyful absurdity IMO). After that, we get a complete reinvention into gory comedy that does absolute gangbusters. That’s wild enough on its own. Then Seed happened, which, yeah, that was awful and nearly killed the series. But after *that*, not only does the series go direct-to-video, but they manage to make a character who we last saw masturbating and making Britney Spears jokes actually scary, AND they don’t entirely ditch the comedy. This is the point where it starts blowing my mind. Cult was a step down after that, but it was still among the best sequels IMO, and its big ending is being followed up on… with a TV series… on Syfy… that doesn’t suck. And this is after a remake that changed everything up and should have been horrible but somehow wasn’t. Don Mancini and Brad Dourif deserve piles of respect on their names. It takes something special to put this much life into what was basically “What if Talky Tina, but blood?”.
I chalk this up to Brad Mancini being the guiding creative force throughout the entirety of the series. I think having a steady hand at the helm helps a lot. Every other series faces those #3 drops you mention because the creative teams change around. I would also add that the next most consistent series is SCREAM and that had Wes Craven behind the camera the whole time (or up until the next one), which proves my point on consistency.
Good point on Scream and on Brad, and of course the most agreed-upon best Nightmare movies are the ones by Wes, to add to that. Maybe I’m biased toward overlooking Chucky’s flaws, though. I’ve stuck by Puppet Master through every sequel, so clearly I like killer dolls too much to be impartial, haha. But yeah, as much as I love a good horror franchise, they can be so predictable that I find the outliers fascinating.
Well I can’t agree about the remake which was a great example of everything wrong with remakes, but I do agree about the rest. Even the TV show, which is surprisingly surprising!
VERY PLEASED to see Child’s Play knock off Saw. Child’s Play 2 super creeped me out when I was younger, I love the end in the toy factory. Plus, Jennifer Tilly just totally gives it her all in the later sequels!
Next round if will separate the slashers from the final girls.
Candyman will always have a special place in my heart for being almost unique among horror movies for its urban setting — both in the euphemistic sense of being about black people, and in the literal sense of being in a city, rather than suburbia or rural America. In fact, it might be the only one even on the original list to get that distinction — unless someone can correct me. But, I can’t deny that none of the sequels have come close to capturing the brilliance of the original.Jigsaw, I think, deserved to win out over Chucky here. Saw gets a bad rap, in my (unpopular) opinion — like Final Destination and Hellraiser, it has fun in the ways fans are looking for fun (which is some combo of absurdist deaths and gross-out gore across those franchises), which I feel a lot of critics unfairly dismiss. The original three Saw movies, in particular, are all seriously fun, and three is a relatively good run for a slasher franchise, and they are structurally pretty different from one another; and the most recent one was extremely structurally distinct, basically playing like a police procedural, although, admittedly, it sucked.