Re-quels

It happened during Horror Fest: upon hearing the news that Child's Play and Hellraiser were joining the ranks of remakes, one attendee exclaimed "why do they have to keep remaking these movies? what's so wrong with just making sequels?"

That's an interesting question to ponder, and I think I have a few good answers. Let's take a look at the sequel vs remake chart, shall we?

* One of the things that the modern remakes are getting away with is being able to say "hey, I'm not a part of those movies. I'm a fresh start on the series with a new cast and a fresh attitude." In many ways, producers, writers, and directors can have their cake and eat it too with a remake; they frequently trade only on the audiences' vague recognition of the title, but can disavow any comparisons to the actual film by dropping phrases like "re-imagining" or "reboot".

To explain further the "vague recognition", allow me to use a personal anecdote: for years prior to seeing the film, I was aware of a movie called The Hills Have Eyes. I'd seen the title in a movie guide and no doubt on the shelf of the local video store, and even though I had not ever experience The Hills Have Eyes, I "knew" what it was, insofar as I recognized it existed.

Producers are trading on this recognition of a film's existence and banking on the fact that most people who go see it never actually saw the original. The vocal minority who did see the original are therefore canceled out by the masses who are looking to experience something familiar for the first time.

Yes, stop for a moment and wrap you heads around that.

The sequel can, with very few exceptions, never do that. Almost all sequels tie something, be it plot element, character, or visual reference, back to the original. Barring that, many sequels build on each other. A Nightmare on Elm Street parts 3-5 tell one broader story, even if the films are self contained. The same can be said of Friday the 13th parts 4-6. All of the Hellraiser movies are linked in one way or the other, and the Child's Play films are broken up into the "Alex vs Chucky" stories and the "Chucky and Tiffany" movies. In a sense, you have to see one of them for a sequel to make sense, regardless of where the new movie goes.

Remakes don't have to do that. Remakes can kill of Pamela Vorhees in the first five minutes and flash forward to Jason killing people using various kills from sequels. They can fill in the gaps of Michael Myers childhood to include Laurie Strode as part of the exposition instead of a mid-sequel twist.

I would like to mention that so far (we're pretty early into the game, to be fair), that sequels to remakes don't seem to fare so well. The Hills Have Eyes 2, The Grudge 2, The Ring 2 and Halloween 2 have been in one way or another failures, in part because they begin to set up the expectations of sequels that remakes can eschew. This is also part of the old "law of diminishing returns", where as the sequels press on they tend to get worse and worse. Interestingly, the box office failure of Halloween 2 seems to be linked to Rob Zombie's desire to move away from strict Halloween canon and create a new continuity within this alternate universe. This time the vocal minority was the audience, and despite the promise of a Halloween 3, the excitement is muted. Curious indeed.