The fear of reinventing the wheel: Modern horror’s detrimental obsession with legacy
More than most other genres, horror tends to move in clear cycles that see one trend dominate the medium for years on end before it slowly gets phased out in favour of a shiny new toy. Based on nothing but how many of them have arrived in such a short space of time, ‘legacy’ is by far the most prominent buzzword of the moment.
The slasher boom took over towards the end of the 1980s before Scream led to a string of self-aware terrors that tried too hard to prove how smart they were, which segued into The Blair Witch Project, igniting the found footage fad, prior to the Michael Bay-produced remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre spawning reinventions of virtually every established classic, while Eli Roth helped popularise torture porn along the way.
Having exhausted the back catalogue of noteworthy titles to slap in a fresh coat of paint, it was apparently decided that legacy sequels were the next potential goldmine. It worked to a certain extent, but the feeling is starting to creep in that so many films bending over backwards to tie themselves into pre-existing mythology is detrimental to not just the movies themselves but horror as a whole.
Take The First Omen, for instance, the most recent offender. It’s been well-received as a prequel to Richard Donner’s classic original that ticks all of the required boxes, but the final scene is like something ripped straight from a Marvel Cinematic Universe flick, to the point it wouldn’t have been a surprise in the slightest were an enterprising Nick Fury-like nun to admit she was putting together a team to combat the devil himself in a post-credits stinger set to establish an entire interconnected world of Omen offshoots.
David Gordon Green has a lot to answer for after his Halloween ignored the entirety of the franchise canon and picked up right after John Carpenter’s opener, finding massive success as a result. Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends were major disappointments, though, with both of them failing miserably to toe the line between paying tribute to what came before and telling a new, engaging, and worthwhile story.
Universal was so swept up in the hype it splurged over $400million simply to purchase the rights to The Exorcist, with Green on board to do the exact same as he did with Halloween. When Believer turned out to be terrible and indicated it was a very poor investment on the studio’s part, Green ended up stepping down as director of the planned sequel Deceiver, which was then quietly removed from the release schedule altogether.
2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre fired its original directors, Ryan and Andy Tohill, replaced them with David Blue Garcia, refitted the entire production into a blatant Halloween facsimile that picked up right where Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic left off, and even threw in a credits scene for good measure. Much like Believer, it was an awful attempt at marrying nostalgia with blood, guts, and gore, with the blatantly signposted follow-up yet to materialise.
The seventh chapter in the Scream saga lost its two main stars and director, but it’s happening anyway because the show must go on regardless, and of course, the fifth and sixth entries turned a tidy profit. Legacy sequels, in general, have been big business since studios realised IPs like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones could be repackaged and sold to a brand new audience through a combination of splashy visuals and built-in name recognition, but the trick has hardly worked to horror’s immense benefit.
Ironically, one of the best examples of the phenomenon came in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, which underlined how trying something different can reap huge rewards. It’s undoubtedly rooted in the same lore as Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell’s unforgettable adventures, but it doesn’t make a point of reinforcing that fact to the audience every five minutes. It’s very much an Evil Dead movie, but not to the point where it overshadows everything else that goes on.
It’s not a coincidence that some of the best and most inventive horrors of recent years – including Get Out, It Follows, Hereditary, Midsommar, Under the Skin, and The Babadook, to name a select few – aren’t based on anything at all. It’s far too easy to fall back on a known entity, but the downside is that far too many legacy horrors are shooting themselves in the foot by making it abundantly clear they’re being shepherded and steered by the iconography and mythology of what came before, instead of trying to push it forward on their own terms.