Horror Franchise Cinema

Horror Franchise Cinema
This book explores horror film franchising from a broad range of interdisciplinary
perspectives and considers the horror film’s role in the history of franchising and
serial fiction.
Comprising 12 chapters written by established and emerging scholars in the
field, Horror Franchise Cinema redresses critical neglect toward horror film fran-
chising by discussing the forces and factors governing its development across his-
torical and contemporary terrain while also examining text and reception
practices. Offering an introduction to the history of horror franchising, the chap-
ters also examine key texts including Universal Studio monster films, Blumhouse
production films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street,
Alien, I Spit on Your Grave, Let the Right One In, Italian zombie films, anthology
films, and virtual reality.
A significant contribution to studies of horror cinema and film/media franchis-
ing from the 1930s to the present day, this book will be of interest to students and
scholars of film studies, media and cultural studies, franchise studies, political
economy, audience/reception studies, horror studies, fan studies, genre studies,
production cultures, and film histories.
Mark McKenna is Lecturer in Film, Television and Radio at Staffordshire Uni-

versity, UK.
William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bour-

nemouth University, UK.
Routledge Advances in Film Studies
Why We Remake
The Politics, Economics and Emotions of Remaking
Lauren Rosewarne
Hollywood Remembrance and American War

Edited by Andrew Rayment and Paul Nadasdy
Film Noir and Los Angeles

Urban history and the Dark Imaginary
Sean W.Maher
Australian Genre Film

Edited by Kelly McWilliam and Mark David Ryan
Flashbacks in Film
A Cognitive and Multimodal Analysis
Adriana Gordejuela
Trans New Wave Cinema

Akkadia Ford
Love in Contemporary Cinema

Audiences and Representations of Romance
Benjamín de la Pava Vélez

Edited by Mark McKenna and William Proctor
Philosophical Theories of Political Cinema

Angelo Emanuele Cioffi
Edited by
Mark McKenna and William Proctor
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Mark McKenna and William Proctor;
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McKenna, Mark, 1975- editor. | Proctor, William, 1974- editor.
Title: Horror franchise cinema / edited by Mark McKenna and
William Proctor.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. |
Series: Routledge advances in film studies | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021020030 (print) | LCCN 2021020031 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367183271 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032105871 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429060830 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Horror films--History and criticism. | Horror films--
Marketing.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H6 H7237 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.H6
(ebook) | DDC 791.43/6164--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020030
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020031
ISBN: 978-0-367-18327-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-10587-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-06083-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830
Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
We would like to dedicate Horror Franchise Cinema to the memory of
Professor Peter Hutchings. He had intended to contribute a chapter on
Hammer to this collection, but sadly passed away in 2018. Peter had a
profound impact on horror scholarship and his work continues to
serve as an inspiration to many in the field. He will be sorely missed.
Contents
List of figures ix
List of contributors x
Introduction: The death and resurrection show: horror franchise

cinema and the romanticization of cult 1
WILLIAM PROCTOR AND MARK MCKENNA
1 Building imaginary horror worlds: Transfictional storytelling and

the Universal Monster franchise cycle 29
WILLIAM PROCTOR
PART I
Slasher and post-slashers 51
2 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A ‘peculiar, erratic’ franchise 53
MARK BERNARD
3 If I were a carpenter: Prestige and authorship in the Halloween

franchise 66
MURRAY LEEDER
4 If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming: The Elm Street series as

recurring nightmare 81
STEVE JONES
5 Allowing ‘us just to LIVE there’: Atmosphere and audience

evaluations of the Alien film series 94
KATE EGAN
viii Contents
PART II
Millennial franchises 109
6 Cut-price creeps: The Blumhouse model of horror franchise
management 111
TODD K. PLATTS
7 When the subtext becomes text: The Purge takes on the American
nightmare 128
STACEY ABBOTT
PART III
Cult franchises 143
8 ‘What film is your film like’? Negotiating authenticity in the
distributive seriality of the Zombi franchise 145
MARK MCKENNA
9 Horror heroine or symbolic sacrifice: Defining the I Spit on Your

Grave franchise as horror 159
SARAH CLEARY
PART IV
Complicating franchising 177
10 Seriality between the horror franchise and the horror anthology film 179
DAVID CHURCH
11 When a franchise is not a franchise: The case of Let the Right One In 194
SIMON BACON
12 ‘A match made in heaven (or hell)’: Franchise experiments between

the horror film genre and virtual reality media (2014–2020) 206
SARAH THOMAS
Index 224
Figures
3.1 A meme parodying the Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Courtesy of Marcus Hart 68
5.1 Rating for each film in comparison to Alien 95
5.2 Breakdown of age in the atmosphere group 96
8.1 The unofficial ‘distributive’ zombie franchise 151
8.2 Audience responses to the Zombi series 156
Contributors
Stacey Abbott is Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roe-
hampton, UK. She is a leading scholar of cult and horror film and television,
with particular interest in vampires and zombies. She is the author of Celluloid
Vampires (2007), Angel: TV Milestone (2009), Undead Apocalypse (2016), and
Near Dark: BFI Classic (2020). With Lorna Jowett, she co-authored TV
Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2013) and co-edited
Global TV Horror (forthcoming 2021). She is currently researching and writing
a monograph on animation and horror.
Simon Bacon is an independent scholar based in Poznań, Poland. He has edited
books on various subjects, including Gothic: A Reader (2018), Horror: A
Companion (2019), Monsters: A Companion (2020), Transmedia Vampires
(2021), and Nosferatu in the 21st Century (forthcoming). He has also published
a series of books on vampires in popular culture: Becoming Vampire: Difference
and the Vampire in Popular Culture (2016), and Dracula as Absolute Other
(2019), Eco-Vampires (2020), Vampires From Another World (2021), and is
currently working on Unhallowed Ground: Emergent Terror and the Specter of
the Vampire on Screen.
Mark Bernard is Assistant Professor of English at Siena Heights University in
Adrian, Michigan, USA, where he teaches courses in composition, rhetoric,
media, and visual culture. He is the author of Halloween: Youth Cinema and
the Horrors of Growing Up (2020) for Routledge’s ‘Cinema and Youth Cul-
tures’ book series. He is also the author of Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD
Revolution and the American Horror Film (2014) and co-author of Appetites
and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation (2014).
David Church is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at
Indiana University, USA. He is the author of Grindhouse Nostalgia:
Memory, Home Video, and Exploitation Film Fandom (2015), Disposable
Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema
(2016), and Post-Horror: Art, Genre, and Cultural Elevation (2021). He is
currently completing a short book on the Mortal Kombat video game series.
List of contributors xi
Sarah Cleary is based in Dublin, Ireland, and lectures across a range of subjects
from the Gothic to media literacy and has dedicated her studies to exploring the
juxtaposition between the media and the alleged negative effects of popular
culture on children. Passionate about promoting the use of English and specifi-
cally Horror Studies outside the context of academia, she regularly assumes the
role of academic consultant within the media and has happily found herself
typecast as “Horror Academic” on Irish day time chat shows. With her first
monograph, The Myth of Harm, to be published in 2022, Sarah has written
extensively within academia and the media on a range of horror and pop culture
related subjects specifically related to moral panics and controversial horror.
Founder of Deadly Doses online community for horror and its fandom, Sarah
regularly hosts a podcast in which she interviews a diverse range of horror
industry professionals drawing upon academic theory in a conversational and
accessible format.
Kate Egan is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Northumbria University, UK.
She is the author of Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings
of the Video Nasties (2007), Cultographies: The Evil Dead (2011), and (with
Martin Barker, Tom Philips and Sarah Ralph) Alien Audiences (2016). She is
also the co-editor of Cult Film Stardom with Sarah Thomas (2012), And Now
for Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python
with Jeffrey Weinstock (2020), and Researching Historical Screen Audiences
with Jamie Terrill and Martin Smith (2021).
Steve Jones is Head of Media and Film at Northumbria University, UK, and
Adjunct Research Professor in Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University,
Ottawa, Canada. His research principally focuses on sex, violence, ethics, and
selfhood within horror and pornography. He is the author of Torture Porn:
Popular Horror after Saw (2013), and his work been published in Feminist
Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Sexualities, and
Film-Philosophy. He is also on the editorial board of Porn Studies. For more
information, please visit www.drstevejones.co.uk.
Murray Leeder is Research Affiliate at Institute for the Humanities, University of
Manitoba, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University. He is the
author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (2018), The Modern Super-
natural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017), and Halloween (2014), and editor
of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the
Digital Era (2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018).
Mark McKenna is Lecturer in Film, Television and Radio at Staffordshire Uni-
versity, UK. He has published on cult film and video distribution and his
monograph Nasty Business: The Marketing and Distribution of the Video
Nasties was published in 2020. His second book, Snuff, will be released in
July 2021, and his third monograph on the John Milius surf film Big Wed-
nesday (1978) is forthcoming with the Routledge series Cinema and Youth
Cultures.
xii List of contributors
Todd K. Platts is Associate Professor of Sociology at Piedmont Virginia Com-
munity College, USA. He has written numerous articles on horror cinema
and television with recent works examining the It duology and the critical
reception of Get Out (2017). He is currently co-editing Blumhouse Produc-
tions: The New House of Horror (forthcoming).
William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bourne-
mouth University, UK. He has published widely on various aspects of popular
culture and media fandom, including articles and book chapters on James Bond,
The Walking Dead, Batman, Star Trek, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Star Wars,
and more. He is co-editor of the books Global Convergence Cultures: Trans-
media Earth with Matthew Freeman (2018) and the BAFTS-award-winning
Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception with
Richard McCulloch (2019). William is currently writing his debut monograph,
Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia (forthcoming).
Sarah Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the Uni-
versity of Liverpool, UK. Specializing in research on the Hollywood film
industry, stardom, and immersive media, she is author of the Peter Lorre –
Face Maker: Constructing Stardom in Hollywood and Europe (2012) and
James Mason for the BFI Film Stars series (2018), and co-author of ‘Using
Eye Tracking and Raiders of the Lost Ark to Investigate Stardom and Per-
formance’ in Dwyer et al. (eds), Seeing Into Screen: Eye Tracking the
Moving Image (2018), and ‘The Star in VR’ (Celebrity Studies Journal,
2019).
Introduction
The death and resurrection show: horror franchise
cinema and the romanticization of cult
William Proctor and Mark McKenna
In many ways, the study of horror cinema has historically been underscored by
cultural distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects; between originality and
repetition; cultish exploitation and mass entertainment; between art and com-
merce. At the root of these oppositions lies a kind of disciplinary anxiety evinced
by the will to legitimize the object of study, through which an image of ‘good’ (and
therefore ‘real’) horror cinema is constructed as non-commercial, radical, and
politically shrewd, a construction that disavows, denigrates, or ignores ‘bad’ (and
thus ‘inauthentic’) horror cinema as corporate, commercial, and contemptible.
Arguably, one of the reasons for the paucity of academic work on horror franchise
cinema is due to the reproduction of ‘moral dualisms’ (Hills 2002) and ‘regimes of
value’ (Frow 1995) that consistently re-ascribe horror franchises as ‘bad’ commer-
cial objects manifested across several interpenetrating discourses, including acade-
mia; entertainment and arts journalism; ‘critical industrial practice’ (Caldwell
2008); and the rhetorical gestures of fan audiences for whom struggles for distinc-
tion operate as bids for (sub)cultural capital—bids that aim to shore up their status
as ‘real’ fans of ‘real’ horror (Jancovich 2000; 2002).
In The Horror Genre: From Beezlebub to Blair Witch, for example, Paul Wells
argues that Clive Barker’s work is ‘especially important,’ having ‘added a sig-
nificant myth to the canon of horror monsters, inventing Pinhead (Doug Bradley)
and the cenobites in the Hellraiser series’ (2003, 91). However, ‘like many of the
key artistic achievements in recent horror texts,’ Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), an
adaptation of his short story, ‘The Hellbound Heart’ (1986), ‘has been significantly
diminished by the rise of the “sequel”’ (93).1 Notwithstanding that horror sequels
have been a part of the genre since the early days of cinema, Wells claims that the
1980s witnessed ‘the McDonaldization of horror,’ epitomized in his account by the
Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. To support his argu-
ment, Wells introduces a quotation from Wes Craven, director of A Nightmare on
Elm Street (1984), in which he equates the franchise with the fast food industry;
that it ‘was like making cheeseburgers. You get a formula for something that
satisfies the appetite, and then you make it over and over again and make a busi-
ness out of it’ (quoted in Wells 2003, 93). Although ‘Craven essentially “self-fash-
ions” himself as a non-commercial, cult auteur standing in protest against an
egregious fast food cinema, which is flipped and sold without intellectual
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-1
2 William Proctor and Mark McKenna
nourishment,’ Wells uncritically embraces the director’s ‘ideological and artistic
posturing’ (Proctor 2020, 224) as evidence that horror franchises are a priori ‘bad’
objects by dint of their commercial objectives; formulaic enterprises that by
implication satiate audience ‘appetites’ for junk food cinema at the expense of a
‘good’ nutritional cult diet. Wells, however, does not seem to have an issue with
the fact that Craven produced and directed sequels himself, including The Hills
Have Eyes Part II (1977), the seventh installment of the Elm Street series—titled in
true auteurist spirit as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)—and, at the time of
Wells’ writing, three films in the Scream franchise (1997, 1998, 2000).
Although the association with film franchising and McDonalds’ golden arches
has been repeated ad nauseum in critical spheres, Wells’ argument that an original
film that is marked as a ‘key artistic achievement’ is later ‘diminished’ by sequeli-
zation has also been a routine trope in entertainment journalism and film criticism
since at least the 1970s. As Kathleen Loock explains, there was
an overwhelming dismissal of the sequel on aesthetic grounds, and on

account of its barely disguised commercial imperatives … Film critics thus
shaped the discursive construction of textual hierarchies between an origi-
nal work of art and the sequel as derivative, assertively commercial and
therefore artistically inferior product. Following this logic, the work-bound
aesthetic they associated with the self-contained ‘original’ was entirely dif-
ferent with the serial aesthetic of the sequel.
(2017, 102, italics in original)
Although Loock’s ‘good’ work-bound/‘bad’ serial opposition is often applied to

sequels and franchising in general terms, horror cinema in the 1980s saw ‘a genuinely
distinctive feature’ emerge in the genre ‘where one sequel followed hot on the heels
of another’ (Tudor 2002, 106). As a mode of seriality, sequels are of course the
building blocks of film franchises. Yet the more that subsequent installments are
produced to fuel the ‘unending churn of the diegetic engine’ in the race for profit
(Rehak 2007), then the more pronounced the critical denigration is likely to be. In
this context, the eight installments produced in the Friday the 13th franchise between
1980 and 1988, and the five Elm Street films released between 1984 and 1989, may be
marked pejoratively as ‘excessive’ for ‘sucking the life blood out of narrative for-
mulas’ (Jess-Cooke 2009, 53). This is not to deny that horror franchising practices
accelerated more than other genres in the 1980s, nor is it to pretend that profit was
not the primary motivation. The point here is that Wells unwittingly reproduces
journalistic prejudices regarding sequels and franchises which, we argue, should
remain the province of entertainment journalism rather than academic study.
That being said, Wells is certainly not a lone wolf in this regard. The ‘good’
work-bound/‘bad’ serial binary, attached as it is to the opposition between culture
and the economy, reoccurs repeatedly in academic discourses on horror franchise
cinema, often paralleled by a tendency to uncritically consecrate certain directors
as ‘auteurs.’ Kyle Christensen, for instance, states that A Nightmare on Elm Street
‘helped establish Craven as an auteur with a mastery of the macabre’ (2011, 23)—
Introduction 3
although in what ways Craven might be considered an auteur is not addressed—
while Karra Shimabukuro argues that the franchise ‘had moved from an auteur
film to just another cog in the studio system, with specific goals of making the
series a more commercial piece’ (2015, 58), a sentiment that excludes the fact that
Craven’s ‘auteur film’ amassed $57 million in box office receipts from a production
budget of $1.8 million. Profits from the film also provided independent studio New
Line Cinema—often described as ‘the House that Freddy Built’—with the financial
resources required to not only continue operating, but to begin competing with the
major studios; that is, until the company was purchased by Turner Broadcasting
System in 1993 before merging with Warner Bros. in 1996 (Holt 2011, 159). As
New Line producer Sarah Risher explains, had A Nightmare on Elm Street failed
commercially, ‘it could have literally destroyed the company’ (quoted in Hutson
2016, 314). It is therefore highly unlikely that New Line Cinema’s founder and
chief executive, Robert Shaye, would risk financial ruin if commercial ambitions
were not integral to the project from inception, indicating that there are significant
issues with constructing an immaculate distinction between art and commerce (or
to use Shimabukuro’s terms, between an ‘auteur film’ and ‘just another cog in the
studio system’). As Mark Jancovich argues, the concept of ‘the mainstream, com-
mercial cinema’ remains ‘one of the most problematic concepts in film studies,’
especially in ‘the ways in which its inconsistent and contradictory uses arise from
its function as the Other, the construction of which allows for the production of
cultural superiority’ (2002, 320–321), that ‘it is the very ideology which insists that
these [cultish/ independent] markets are free from economic criteria which needs to
be criticized’ (Jancovich 2000, 317). As Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes, cultural dis-
tinctions between ‘the “commercial” and the “non-commercial”
reappear everywhere. It is the generative principle of most of the judge-

ments which, in the theatre, cinema, painting or literature, claim to estab-
lish the frontier between what is and what is not art … It is always an
opposition between small-scale and large-scale (‘commercial’) produc-
tion … between a production based on denial of the ‘economy’ and of
profit (sales targets, etc.).
(Bourdieu 1993, 82)
Shimabukuro’s ‘denial of the “economy”’ regarding Craven’s ‘auteur film’ com-

plicates her argument that ‘economic concerns were intruding on the narrative’
during production on the third installment, A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream
Warriors (1986); that these concerns demonstrated a struggle between ‘conflicting
forces’ taking place, between ‘economic success and artistic intent’ (2015, 59). By
implying that A Nightmare on Elm Street was emancipated from the ‘intrusion’ of
such ‘conflicting forces,’ then, Shimabukuro establishes it as a ‘good’ cinematic
object, ‘an auteur film’ imbued with ‘artistic intent,’ which is evaluated against its
‘Other,’ a ‘bad’ franchised object driven solely by ‘economic success’ (2015, 58).
The romanticization of ‘horror-as-art’ (Hills 2005) also plays into the deni-
gration of sequels and franchises as cynical exercises in replication, ‘merely
superficial and dispensable tinkerings that fail to disguise the fact that essen-
tially this is the same old formula being repeated yet again for gullible audi-
ences’ (Hutchings 2004, 208). In the seminal Men, Women and Chainsaws, for
instance, Carol Clover claims that franchise installments, in which both the Elm
Street and Friday the 13th films are included, ‘are better taken as remakes than
sequels; although the latter part purports to take up where the earlier part left
off, in most cases it simply duplicates with only slight variation the plot and
circumstances—the formula—of its predecessor’ (1992, 23). In a similar vein,
Jeffrey Sconce claims that the Elm Street films follow a specific ‘Nightmare
formula’, arguing that fans of the series ‘do not attend these films expecting or
hoping for a compelling narrative. There is no mystery as to what is going to
happen in these films, nor is suspense really at issue’ (1993, 113). Peter Hutch-
ings, however, challenges the widespread assumption
that the films which make up the various horror franchises are all more or less
the same, i.e. unimaginative reproductions of a commercially winning for-
mula. If one takes the Nightmare on Elm Street cycle of films, for example, it
is quite easy to find changes and innovations occurring from one film to the
next. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the character of Freddy Krueger becomes more
central as the cycle proceeds and is given an increasingly complicated backs-
tory, and a story arc develops through the cycle that at any point requires, or
expects, a knowledge of previous events in earlier Elm Street films. In addi-
tion, there are stylistic differences between the films—with, for example,
Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) more visually ‘gothic’
that its predecessors—and, perhaps, qualitative ones as well, with some of the
films better made than others.
(2004, 208; see also Chapter 4 in this volume)
By the same token, Matt Hills argues that academic accounts of the Friday the
13th series exhibit a ‘formula fallacy’ that effectively reduces the franchise to
mere enactments of ‘gross, commercial repetition’ (2007, 236) without engaging
with narrative variations produced across the sequels:
In the first Friday the 13th, the killer is not Jason, it is actually his mother …
Only in Part III does Jason don the hockey mask that becomes his trademark.
It could also be argued that once Jason has become a constant fixture of the
series, he changes significantly across the franchise, developing superhuman
strength in Part III, becoming more obviously zombie-like after Part V and
Part VI, and displaying a capacity to inhabit other bodies in the ‘possession
horror’ reworking of Part IX, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.
(228–229)
Unlike Craven’s ‘auteur film,’ however, the idea that ‘key achievements in
recent horror texts’ are ‘diminished’ by sequels does not readily apply to Sean
Cunningham’s first Friday the 13th film (Hills 2007, 227). In this case, it is John
Introduction 5
Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) that has been consistently applauded, an ‘auteur
film’ that triggered the cycle of slasher films that followed in its wake, mini-
mized and diminished by an artistically impoverished replica unadorned by the
weight and worth of a bona-fide ‘auteur.’ As Hills writes elsewhere, auteurism
‘brings with it an ideology of quality: if much mass culture is supposedly
unauthored—supposedly being generated according to formulaic guidelines—
then “high culture” reading strategies intrude on this space through the recup-
eration of the trusted Creator’ (2002, 133). Thus, the recuperation and ‘recur-
ring construction of the auteur indicates the indivisibility of romantic ideologies
of authorship and the inscription of cult status’ (2002, 133). As much as studies
of horror cinema rely on processes of ‘cultification’ to construct and devalue the
‘bad’ commoditized ‘Other’ as a discursive yardstick with which to elevate the
‘good’ object, the way in which they aim to establish this duality dovetails with
similar processes ensconced within ‘legitimate’ film culture.
Hills’ ‘formula fallacy’ can also be applied to the Halloween franchise. Elizabeth
Emily Dixon argues that ‘each Halloween sequel serves to enhance, complicate, or
compromise the coherence of the narrative system as a whole,’ and in doing so, the
films complicate the notion that the franchise is simply repetitive and bound to for-
mula in the way that it ‘prompts the continual reconceptualization and recontex-
tualization of previously-established information’ (2017, 5). With these examples in
mind, then, Hills’ argument that the reception of the Friday the 13th franchise ‘in the
academy has been, if anything, more formulaic than the film’s themselves’ could, we
argue, be equally applied to horror franchises more broadly (2007, 230). Although
the challenges posed by scholars such as Hutchings, Hills, and Elizabeth Emily
Dixon demonstrate that academic discourses are not wholly monolithic, the wealth
of arguments that uncritically invoke the ‘formula fallacy’ run the risk of drowning
out these challenges, given how few and far between they are.
That being said, hierarchies of ‘good’ original/‘bad’ repetition are not solely
constructed around slasher film franchises, but are indicative of a broader trend
that continues to prejudice the study of horror franchise cinema more generally.
Consider Wheeler Wilson Dixon’s view that the ‘best’ horror films in the
twenty-first century ‘come from outside the Hollywood dream factory’—Hol-
lywood being viewed as a coherent homogenous entity, marred by ‘endlessly
repeating themselves’ and offering ‘nothing more than sadism and violence in
place of invention’—so that ‘we must look elsewhere for inspiration’ (2010,
203). For Dixon,
Robert Rodriguez’s 1986 [sic] horror film From Dusk Til Dawn was an
interesting mix of Tex/Mex vampirism and action film, with an intriguing
script from Quentin Tarantino and accomplished performances by George
Clooney, Harvey Keitel, Juliet Lewis, Salma Hayek, and Tarantino himself.
But did anyone really need Scott Spiegel’s From Dusk Til Dawn 2: Blood
Money (1999), or P.J Pesce’s From Dusk Til Dawn 3: The Hangman’s
Daughter (2000), both straight-to-DVD sequels that sullied the reputation of
an innovative and engaging film? Indeed, cheap sequels like these vitiate the
power of the few original films that do come along, if only because audiences,
having been decidedly cheated over and over again, have grown weary of the
continued deception and avoid the genre entirely. Thus the genre ‘eats itself’,
and innovation is jettisoned in favour of the safe returns of an endless cycle of
sequels and imitations.
(203, author’s emphasis)
Dixon’s account of post-millennial horror cinema is replete with moralistic and

common-sense value-judgments: that ‘sequels and imitations’ unproblematically
generate ‘safe returns’ for producers; that, echoing Wells, ‘cheap sequels’ suck the
‘power’ from ‘the few’ original films ‘that do come along.’ Despite the fact that
The Blair Witch Project (1999) garnered one of the largest returns-on-investment in
film history, taking in $248 million against a shoe-string budget of $35,000, Dixon
excuses these economic realities by claiming that this occurred ‘simply because it
displayed thought and originality in its presentation and execution, and suggested
or implied the truly horrific aspects of the supernatural, rather than whipping them
up in a whirlwind of special effects’ (2010, 204–205). Conversely, Joe Berlinger’s
‘bad’ sequel object, Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows (2000), only failed commer-
cially because it lacked ‘the spark of an original vision’ (2010, 204). Although
Dixon seems to be less concerned about the profit principle in relation to The Blair
Witch films, the box office failure of Berlinger’s film undermines his argument that
sequels universally generate ‘safe returns’ for producers.
Notice also the way in which Dixon presumes to understand the proclivities of
horror audiences, that ‘they have grown weary of the deception and avoid the
genre altogether’ (which makes one wonder how popular horror films continued to
make money during the 2000s if audiences were not supporting the genre). In lieu
of empirical evidence, Dixon effectively relies on ‘arbitrary moves, rhetorical fig-
ures and unsubstantiated claims’ by which ‘figures of the audience’ are constructed
through guess-work and ‘imputation’ (Barker and Austin 2000, 16). It is not simply
that horror franchises and sequels are demeaned for lacking ‘the spark of an ori-
ginal vision,’ and for ‘sullying the reputation of an innovative and engaging film,’
but that audiences are also implicated in this process. Franchises may be ‘bad,’ but
so too are its audiences who are either unaware of their complicity or ‘avoid the
genre entirely.’ Unfortunately, claims like these, made on behalf of an imagined
and imaginary audience, are relatively typical in the study of horror cinema, as
well as in film studies more broadly (see Barker and Austin 2000, 1–32).
Although there has more recently been a discursive flurry of claims that horror
cinema is experiencing a renaissance, or a new ‘golden age’ (for example, see
Meslow 2017; Ryan 2019; Smith 2017), Dixon’s ‘rhetoric of crisis’ regarding post-
millennial horror is widely shared in academic discourses, as explored by Steffan
Hantke (2010). This perceived ‘crisis,’ however, is not only anchored onto fran-
chises and sequels, but generally associated with various ‘aesthetics of repetition’
(Ndalianis 2004), including prequels, adaptations, remakes, and reboots. In Sleep-
ing with the Lights on: The Unsettling Story of Horror, for instance, Darryl Jones
reiterates Dixon’s anxieties by claiming that post-millennial horror is besieged by
Introduction 7
‘an endless (re)cycle of sequels, remakes, and reboots, a corporate production line
of unhorror, a waste land’ (2018, 143). The term ‘unhorror’ is Jones’ own, ‘a type
of horror which has no possibility of ever being horrifying.’ Leaving aside the
notion that horror’s modus operandi is solely to be ‘horrifying’ (and certainly not
pleasurable or fun), the ultimate ‘bad’ unhorror object for Jones is the Twilight
franchise; it is ‘pre-digested baby food’ that ‘does the thinking for the audience,
and ideally allows no space for even the possibility of opposition.’ The imputation
that audiences are not expected to think for themselves can be said to collude with
the general animus projected by the male ‘geek’ fan contingency toward the Twi-
light franchise and its female fans (Click 2009; Erzen 2012, xx–xxi), but even more
problematic is Jones’ unreasonable assertion that ‘the success of Twilight’ meant
that the horror genre finally ‘became totally incorporated within capitalism’ (Jones
2018, 141).
The romanticization of neo-horror

This notion that the ‘best’ examples of horror cinema ordinarily exist beyond
commercial imperatives—or, as Jones implies, ‘outside’ of capitalism—is a rheto-
rical move that remains persistent in academic writing on the horror film. Argu-
ably, the starting point for the academic entrenchment of the art/commerce binary
may be traced to Robin Wood’s enormously influential essay, ‘An Introduction to
the American Horror Film.’ First published over 40 years ago in The American
Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film (Wood and Lippe 1979), Wood aimed to
rescue horror cinema from its perceived status as a ‘disreputable genre’ by mobi-
lizing judgments of taste and value that worked to elevate ‘good’ cultish exploita-
tion films that meet with his progressive, ideological criteria, while simultaneously
denigrating ‘bad’ mainstream horror films for their commercial impulses. Through
a ‘chart of oppositions,’ Wood enacts the ‘good’ art/‘bad’ commerce dualism by
situating Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) against Richard
Donner’s The Omen (1976) whereby the former is ‘raw’ and ‘unpolished,’ ‘low
budget,’ ‘nonbourgeois exploitation,’ and the latter is ‘big budget,’ ‘bourgeoise
entertainment,’ slick with ‘glossy production values’ (2018/1979a, 94). On the one
hand, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is ideologically progressive and ‘achieves the
force of authentic art,’ while on the other, The Omen is ‘old-fashioned, traditional,
reactionary,’ and certainly not ‘art,’ authentic or otherwise (whatever those terms
might mean in any case) (101).
Here (and in other work), Wood continually elides shadow and shade by
exposing his prejudices toward ‘bad’ commercial horror films that invariably fail
to measure up against the good, the cheap, and the nasty of exploitation cinema.
Much of this may be attributed to the way in which the so-called ‘neo-horror’ films
of the late 1960s and 1970s are framed by Wood (and, by extension, other scholars)
as politically seditious, a viewpoint generated through ‘reflectionist’ interpretations
that claim that these films progressively mirror and critique several crises in
American society, from Watergate to Vietnam; whereas horror cinema in the
1980s more clearly ‘reflected’—and less critically challenged—the politics of
neoliberalism that paralleled Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy as president of the
United States (2003/1986, 168–180). Just as there are problems with the moral
dualism between ‘good’ non-commercial cinema and ‘bad’ corporate Hollywood,
there are also issues with viewing horror films as a game of ‘political football for
[good] left or [bad] rightwing views’ (Jancovich 2007), views that have more in
common with ‘the promotion of oppositional taste’ than anything ‘embedded’
within texts themselves (Tompkins 2014). This is not to suggest that such analyses
are unnecessary nor that there is no such thing as a ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’
film. Yet, if an exploitation film such as, say, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), has been
read as both left and right-wing simultaneously, as ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist,’
then the political substance of the film is more ambivalent and ‘multi-accentual’
than ‘reflective’ readings ordinarily permit (see Egan 2012, 146–147; see also
Chapter 9 in this volume). Indeed, reading ideology off the surface of ‘the text’ can
lead to bald claims about audiences and their unconscious subservience to the
Entertainment Industrial Complex (Bresnick 1999); or as Sconce puts it, ‘the
valuation of films, as often as not, is a judgement made about a particular audience
group’ (1993, 107).
Tellingly, Wood’s animus toward the slasher film cycle in the early 1980s repli-
cates the way in which popular critics at the time condemned the sub-genre, most
notably Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who argued on their review show, Sneak
Peeks, in 1980 that ‘the woman in danger film’ signalled ‘a depressing development
in American movies,’ constituting nothing less than an ‘anti-women’s movement’
genre (Christensen 2011, 28; Leeder 2018, 66–67; see also Rockoff 2016, 36–57 for a
robust counter-analysis of Siskel and Ebert’s argument). Wood accuses these
‘increasingly violent and gruesome low-budget horror movies’ for propagating an
‘undifferentiated stream of massacre, mutilation and terrorization’ that could be
‘called something like “When a Stranger Calls after Night School on Halloween on
Friday the Thirteenth, Don’t Answer the Phone and Don’t Go Into the House
because he Knows You’re Alone and Dressed to Kill”’ (2003/1986, 172–173). Along
with Wood’s claim that slasher films are ‘uniformly execrable,’ this jocular port-
manteau implies that he also falls into the ‘formula fallacy’ trap that Hills con-
ceptualizes regarding the Friday the 13th franchise, the ‘purest’ of the slashers
according to Wood (‘purest’ in this case being pejorative) (2003/1986, 172). Ulti-
mately, Wood viewed the slasher cycle, what he terms interchangeably as ‘the
teeny kill pic’ and ‘the violence against women movie’ (2003/1986, 172), as a par-
ticularly insidious and reactionary corollary to 1970s neo-horror:
How else could one account for the astonishingly abrupt shift in the American
horror film from the progressive, exploratory, often radical late ‘60s and ‘70s
to the reactionary and repressive 1980s? The Michael of Halloween (1978), the
Jason of Friday the 13th (1980), the Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm
Street (1984), do not develop out of the characteristic monsters of the ‘70s:
they represent a refusal of everything they embodied.
(2018/2004, 400)
Introduction 9
If one accepts that horror cinema is generally perceived to be ‘a disreputable
genre’—an axiomatically ‘bad’ cultural object—then horror franchise cinema
bears the burden of a double negation as ‘bad-bad’ object. Yet the proliferation of
slasher films in the 1980s, which are also scarred doubly as both horror cinema and
‘the bastard child of the horror film’ (Rockoff 2012, 1), would seem to suggest that
the slasher film franchise is perhaps the worst object of all: it is ‘bad’ horror, ‘bad’
franchise, and ‘bad’ slasher, all in one. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wood
disliked the unholy trinity of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krue-
ger, all of whom could be considered the ultimate avatars of horror franchising in
the ‘reactionary and repressive’ 1980s.
Although, as noted, Wood clearly sought to salvage the image of horror cinema
from its status as a ‘disreputable genre,’ it would be more accurate to state that he
does so by constructing certain horror films as reputable, as ‘worthy’ art objects,
while, in turn, framing other horror films as ‘disreputable,’ including The Omen,
the slasher, or in the case of Elm Street, the ‘post-slasher’ (Conrich 2015), high-
lighting that ‘tastes are asserted and defended by the refusal of other tastes’
(Watson 1997, 69). From this perspective, Wood’s ideological vector, for all its
claims for ‘non-bourgeoise’ progressiveness, actively works in concert with bour-
geoise ideals of ‘high’ art, fortifying Bourdieu’s claim that
taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by

their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make,
between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in
which their position in the objective classifications is exposed or betrayed.
(Bourdieu 1986, 6)
More revealingly, not only does Wood join in the chorus of condemnation that dis-
cursively circulated the ‘ugly’ slasher film cycle during the period, but he also sings
from the same hymn sheet as those critics who deplored the ‘vulgar’ blockbuster era,
which, as Carolyn Jess-Cooke suggests, has perhaps ‘morphed now into the fran-
chise era’ (2009, 46). In yet another binary move, Wood constructs a moral dualism
between Hollywood’s ‘beautiful’ golden age, the holy church of cinematic art, and
1980s ‘genre cinema’ as a metonym for the worst excesses of the sacrilegiously cor-
porate ‘Dream Factory.’ Genre cinema ‘obviously survives’ in the ‘reactionary and
repressive 1980s,’ but ‘only in an extremely debased and impoverished form’; it is
‘deprived of the sustaining base of the star/ studio system,’ having been ‘replaced by
a set of businessman sitting around a conference table asking “Well, what made the
most money last year?” and constructing a “package” that resembles it as closely as
possible but going a little further’ (2003/1986, 310).
Since the Reaganite takeover and its increasingly reactionary sequels, Hol-
lywood has indeed become the ‘Dream Factory’ for which intellectuals
always mistook it. Films are now financed, produced, and controlled lar-
gely by the massive corporations and conglomerates that are threatening
our world with devastation in the interests of ‘making money’: the function
of Hollywood has become simply that of ‘keeping people happy’ and inhi-
biting thought [as with] the Rockys, the Rambos, the Chuck Norris and
Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
(2003/1986, 288)
Gloomy critical diagnoses of this type are not solely the dominion of Robin
Wood, as mentioned above, but form part of a broader discursive legacy that cir-
culated frequently in journalistic spheres in the late 1970s and 1980s (and continues
to do so today). This is perhaps captured best in J. Hoberman’s famous claim that
Hollywood had been infected by a virulent strain of ‘sequelitis’ in his review of
films between 1975 and 1985—‘the decade that shook the world of cinema’ (1985,
42)—and many critics have followed in his footsteps since, with blockbusters,
sequels, and franchises often framed as creatively impoverished, imaginatively
bankrupt, and shamelessly corporate. For example, in an essay published by
Esquire in 1996, titled ‘Who Killed the Movies,’ David Thompson lamented the
‘bad state’ of popular cinema as ‘more and worse than a bad cycle,’ the medium
‘having sunk beyond anything we dreamed, leaving us stranded, a race of drea-
mers’ (1996, 56). ‘This is something like the loss of feeling,’ continues Thompson,
‘and I blame [George] Lucas and [Steven] Spielberg’ (1996, 56).
For Thompson, the contemporary blockbuster phenomenon triggered by Spiel-
berg’s Jaws (1974) and Lucas’ Star Wars, both of which inaugurated respective
franchises, symbolized a ‘betrayal’ of the promise offered by ‘New Hollywood’
films of the early 1970s (1996, 58). Echoing Hoberman’s metaphor of viral ‘seque-
litis,’ Thompson claims that the great blockbuster ‘betrayal’ is one that ‘spreads’
like a contagion throughout the diseased organs of popular cinema. And so, two
decades after the Lucas/Spielberg pandemic rampaged through the film industry,
Brian de Palma’s ‘Mission Colon Impossible’ is just one of Thompson’s examples
of ‘betrayal,’ a film that ‘grossed several dollars per head in its cockamamy comic
book of triumph’ to signify ‘a frenzy of hysterical optimism’ that ‘has not been
seen anywhere since Germany in the 1930s’ (1996, 59). Here, Thompson’s final
sentence denounces and devalues ‘bad’ blockbuster films as ideologically ‘fascist’
enterprises, much in the same way that Wood brands 1980s ‘bad’ horror films (and
‘bad’ sequels in general) as ‘right-wing,’ ‘reactionary’ Reaganite fantasies, all in the
interests of ‘making money’ and ‘keeping people happy.’
Like Thompson, Wood also criticizes George Lucas and Steven Spielberg by
equating their work with ‘the curious and disturbing phenomenon of children’s
films conceived and marketed largely for adults’ (2003/1986, 145). Star Wars may
be satisfying, at least as a form of spectacle and ‘only entertainment,’ but this is
‘repeated until a sequel is required; same formula, with variations. But instead of a
leap, only an infant footstep is necessary, and never one that demands an adjust-
ment on the level of ideology’ (2003/1986, 145). The implication in Wood and
Thompson’s criticisms are that audiences are easily hoodwinked by the glitter and
gloss of the corporate ‘Dream Factory,’ in a similar way that Daryl Jones argues
that Twilight is ‘pre-digested baby food’ that ‘does the thinking for the audience’
(notice also the repeated motifs of childhood and infantilization).
Introduction 11
To complicate matters further, Wood’s rejection of ‘Reaganite’ blockbuster
entertainment as perniciously nostalgic and comforting, coupled with the roman-
ticization of neo-horror as ‘progressive, exploratory, often radical’ (2018/2004,
400), is also re-enforced in discourses attached to the so-called ‘New Hollywood,’
which Thompson refers to as the ‘last golden age of American film’ (1996, 58).
According to Nick Heffernan, however, this is a kind of discursive myth-making,
an ‘abiding legend’ typically attached to ‘that brief flowering of politically and
culturally radical film-making that blossomed in the mid-1960s and withered with
the arrival of the big-budget blockbuster in the mid-1970s’ (2006, 12). Just as
Wood venerates neo-horror, film critic Peter Biskind, in Easy Riders and Raging
Bulls, valorizes the new Hollywood as ‘a remarkable era,’ as ‘a movement intended
to cut free from its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air
of art’ (1998, 17). Just as Wood identifies a cadre of rebellious directors helming
creatively unique films that elevated horror cinema to the pantheon of art, direc-
tors such as Wes Craven, Larry Cohen, George Romero, and Tobe Hopper, Bis-
kind also waxed lyrical about the ‘new power of directors’ who embraced the
ideology of ‘auteurism,’ like Peter Bogdonavich, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford
Coppola, and Dennis Hopper (1998, 15–16). And just as Wood accused slasher
films for ‘rejecting’ the progressive gains of neo-horror, Biskind grieved the passing
of a ‘true’ and ‘pure’ artistic movement cut down in its prime by Star Wars. This is
‘the “Magic Bullet” theory of modern film history,’ Tom Shone explains, ‘that all it
took was a single shot from Lucas’ laser cannons to bring down the Camelot that
was American film in the seventies’ (2004, 9).
Again, the opposition between mainstream, commercial movie-making and the
counter-cultural politics of independent cinema is re-ascribed through the fetishi-
zation of an imaginary, non-commercial authenticity (Church 2010). Yet even
though a canonically enshrined exploitation film like Easy Rider (1968) may have
been ‘produced physically by corporations other than the Hollywood film studios,’
it also ‘stood in close proximity with them and benefited routinely from their
financial and other resources’ (Tzioumakis 2018, 112). Likewise, the elevation of
1970s neo-horror by critics and scholars ordinarily exclude the ways in which ‘the
promotion of oppositional taste involves a disavowal of the financing, distributing,
branding and market segmentation that are in fact central to this “radical” horror
cinema’ (Tompkins 2014, 205). As David Church explains:
horror aficionados often struggle for a sense of cultural distinction by

retreating into genre currents—independent horror, foreign horror, his-
torically marginalized horror trends—seemingly less penetrated by ‘main-
stream’ consumerism, disavowing the fact that most of these ‘other’ films
were likewise made to maximize profits.
(Church 2010, 236)
Intriguingly, Robin Wood did not reject all horror film franchises. He was espe-
cially fond of the ‘Dead’ films directed, written and produced by George A.
Romero, writing that ‘[t]hey are among the most powerful, fascinating, and
complex of modern horror films’ (2018/1979b, 161). However, Wood can only
embrace Romero’s zombie franchise by affording them unique status through
denying the series’ commercial ambitions. Romero’s interest in producing the
sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978), was ‘initiated as much by commercial impera-
tives as it was by an interest in serializing the allegorical message of Night of the
Living Dead [1968]’ (Verevis 2010, 16, our italics). Incidentally, Wood also inverts
Hills’ ‘formula fallacy’ into what we could call the ‘originality fallacy’ by refuting
the repetitive seriality of the ‘Dead’ series with the claim that the first two install-
ments ‘are more distinct from each other—in character, tone, and meaning—than
has generally been noted (Dawn of the Dead is much more than the elaborate
remake it has been taken for)’ (2018/1979b, 161). He continues this argument in a
later essay published following the release of the third installment, Day of the
Dead (1985), captured succinctly by the phrase, ‘Romero never repeats himself’
(2018/1986, 319). It is a ‘particularly unfortunate and misleading critical strategy
has been to collapse the three films into each other as it they were not distinguished
by crucial differences’ (319). Yet, at
a level of generality, the Romero zombie films—in particular the trilogy—

do seem to repeat (or remake) the same basic plot in which a group of
survivors takes refuge in a safe environment (a deserted house, a shopping
mall, an underground bunker, a walled city) that it protects from the
zombie hordes until finally the haven is overrun.
(Verevis 2010, 17)
This is not meant to suggest that Romero relies entirely on formula and repetition,
but neither should it be taken to mean that the ‘Dead’ films are wholly original (in
the romantic sense of the term). Like all genres, Romero’s ‘Dead’ films oscillate
between repetition and originality, a dialectical movement that essentially collapses
the ‘fallacies’ that maintain the moral dualism between ‘good’ art and ‘bad’ com-
merce (perhaps moral illusion would be the better term).
Moreover, Romero’s films continue to harness capital today through the
commercial and critical industrial practices of specialist DVD and Blu-ray com-
panies that ‘have made an asset of a product that is located outside of a perceived
mainstream’ (McKenna 2017, 32). Distribution companies, such as Arrow Video,
88 Films, Scream Factory, and Vinegar Syndrome, all have extensive catalogues
that include repackaged cultish horror and exploitation films presented in
expensive boutique formats. On their website, Vinegar Syndrome state that they
specialize in ‘protecting and preserving genre films,’ which includes horror,
exploitation, and vintage pornography.2 Although these companies claim to
perform a curatorial role in scavenging low-budget exploitation cinema from the
dustbin of ‘trash’ history, they also act as cultish ‘canon-makers’ through rheto-
rics of ‘protection and preservation,’ disingenuously failing to acknowledge that
profit remains a central motivation—to protect, preserve, and profit from would
be a more accurate description of their objectives. In this light, processes of
canonization, enacted as they are through ‘the politics of inclusion and exclusion’
Introduction 13
that Janet Staiger identifies (1985, 8), also means that cult objects often end up
ensnared within processes of ‘gentrification,’ which perhaps to some degree
complicates their identity as oppositional ‘paracinema’ (Sconce 1995).
As if proving that the opposition between ‘legitimate’ film and ‘illegitimate’
cult canonization has always been more dialectical than binaristic, ‘cultish’
distribution companies have largely borrowed the boutique template from The
Criterion Collection, who originally ‘demonstrated a bias towards established
canonical titles and auteurs,’ from Ingmar Bergman and Sergei Eisenstein to
Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa, and so forth (McKenna 2017, 38), but
have more recently also delved into cultish/horror territories, examples of which
include The Blob (1958), Cat People (1942), Carnival of Souls (1962), and
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). It seems that Romero’s (sub)cultural
value travels in both directions, being accepted by the ‘legitimate’ film estab-
lishment and ‘oppositional’ cultish communities, emphasizing that
processes of cultural distinction have historically separated these cinemas

based upon preconceived valorizations, [yet] in recent years an increased
convergence of these markets has been observed. This is largely commer-
cially driven, with distributors reinforcing, extending and challenging tra-
ditional notions of what might constitute the canonical film, and
consequently further augmenting how ideas of value are constructed for
films which fall outside mainstream consumption.
(McKenna 2017, 32)
Romero’s first three ‘Dead’ films have been released on multiple formats, in
multiple forms, by different distributors and, at the time of writing, Dawn of the
Dead has recently been (re)released by UK distributor Second Sight, who, as sti-
pulated on their website, ‘have built a reputation for the quality of our releases
which often include new restorations and bonus features, audio commentaries,
archive material, special limited packaging and much more.’3 The boutique box-
set of Dawn of the Dead is priced at £74.99 and includes three cuts of the film (all
in 4K), three audio discs, a 150-page hardback book, and an armada of special
features—hardly an example of the ‘non-commercial.’
Romero’s ‘Dead’ franchise may encourage a new category, one that would
seem to be a contradiction in terms (at least if one buys into the non-commercial/
commercial opposition); that of the ‘cult franchise.’ It is worth noting that a few
cult franchises have already been released in several DVD and Blu-ray boutique
catalogues, either in full or in part, indicating that not all sequels are ‘bad’
objects after all. In the Arrow Video range, for instance, there are numerous
horror sequels including Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985), The
Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985), and Romero’s ‘Dead’ trilogy; and
the first three Hellraiser films—Hellraiser (1987), Hellraiser II: Hellbound (1988),
and Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)—have been released in single volumes or
as a box-set. Likewise, 88 Films have released The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Piranha
II: The Spawning (1982), Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), and a
number of sequels in their ‘Slasher Classics’ line. In 2020, Kaleidoscope Home
Entertainment released a box set containing five films from the I Spit on Your
Grave franchise, including Meir Zarchi’s original 1978 ‘video nasty,’ its 2020
sequel, Deja-Vu; the remake (2010) and its two sequels, I Spit on Your Grave II
(2013), and I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance is Mine (2015), which together
contain over six hours of extra content, including a new feature-length doc-
umentary. The set is branded paratextually with terms that are often deployed to
promote the subcultural value of excess, like ‘controversial,’ ‘X-rated,’ and
‘infamous.’ On Kaleidoscope’s website, a 60-second trailer exploits this further:
‘in 1978, one film changed horror forever’; ‘cinema’s most shocking franchise
returns’; ‘it’s in your face and it assaults the audience’; ‘I can say I am part of a
film that became a cult classic’. Priced at £39.99 in the UK, it is ‘The Complete
Collection of Cinema’s Most Shocking Cult Franchise’ (see also Chapter 9 in this
volume).4
It is therefore surely self-evident that signifiers of gore, violence, and extreme
horror are effective marketing techniques where subcultural capital becomes
entwined with commercial value, symbolic profit with economic profit, through
the critical industrial practices of home entertainment distributors that feed
upon the way in which films were received by conservative critics, moral
watchdogs, censorship bodies, and government officials during the period in
which they were originally released.
The same can be said of the so-called ‘video nasties’ that caused a ruckus in the
Tory government and tabloid media in the early 1980s, and which led to the for-
mation of new legislature in the United Kingdom, that being the Video Recordings
Act (Egan 2012; McKenna 2020). Although there were originally 78 titles that were
banned in the country, many of these titles are now not only available to purchase
legally, they have also been released on DVD, Blu-ray, and in some cases, 4K (such
as Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead [1982] and ‘Godfather of Gore’ Lucio Fulci’s Zombi
[1979]). This would seem to declare that these films are neither ‘nasty’ any longer,
nor that their medium is ‘video’ (we doubt the term ‘4K nasty’ will take off any-
time soon). What is more, it would appear that widespread availability of ‘notor-
ious’ films, on DVD, Blu-ray, and now 4K, works to de-stabilize the oppositional
value of cult objects through a ‘gradual mainstreaming,’ as Jamie Sexton puts it,
that ‘there is a yearning for a time when cult was more rarified, when cult was less
commercial, when cult meant something’ (2014, 141, author’s emphasis). Yet as
Sexton argues, ‘cult’ has always been an amorphous, oblique, and contested term:
‘there has never really been a type of film/ viewing experience that has been con-
sidered to be “genuinely” cult’ (2014, 141).
Claims that cultish horror and exploitation cinema are ‘non-commercial’ are
therefore fortified by a ‘denial’ of capital, exemplified through ideologies of the
‘anti-economic’ and ‘the “sordidly commercial”’; binaries that are ‘placed at the
very heart of the field [of cultural production]’ (Bourdieu 1993, 79). In other words,
these ‘practices, functioning as practical negations, can only work by pretending
not to be doing what they are doing’—making money (74, author’s emphasis)—
meaning that ‘the less visible the investment, the more productive it is
Introduction 15
symbolically’ (77). It is in this seeking out of ‘symbolic profits’ that rely on
obscuring the stark economic realities that scaffold the romanticization of ‘real’
horror (and, in turn, the demonization of ‘artificial,’ ‘commercial’ horror).
With all of this in mind, we can see that discourses that surround the study
of horror franchise cinema intersect with a variety of discursive utterances
involving cultish exploitation and genre cinema, the blockbuster era and film
franchises, mainstream movies and independent ‘art,’ the ‘old’ and the ‘new’
Hollywood, each of which exhibit that commercial entertainment
is objectively condemned to define itself in relation to legitimate culture …

The opposition between legitimate and illegitimate, imposing itself in the field
of symbolic goods with the same arbitrary necessity as the distinction between
the sacred and the profane elsewhere, expresses the different social and cul-
tural valorization of two modes of production: the one a field that is its own
market, allied with an educational system which legitimizes it; the other a field
of production organized as a function of external demand, normally seen as
socially and culturally inferior.
(Bourdieu 1993, 129–130)
Scholars working on cult horror cinema therefore seem to unwittingly buy into the
notion that low-budget exploitation horror films are ‘beyond the profit principle’
and deeply rooted in subversive traditions, meaning that the lionization of ‘cult’
may accrue symbolic profits and resources of subcultural capital for the field of
study itself by marking it as an outlaw, cultish discipline. Furthermore, discourses
of this kind tend to mirror not only industrial practices that ‘deny the commercial,’
but also fan debates centred on struggles between ‘real’ and ‘inferior’ horror that
Jancovich identifies; that the ‘image of mass culture as the inauthentic Other, and
of the consumer of mass culture as the simple conformist dupe, recurs again and
again’ (2000, 312). Yet, given that academics are often fans of the objects that they
decide are worthy of study, ‘the similarities between fan discourses and academic
discourses should be no surprise’ (308). As Oliver Carter argues, ‘the boundaries
between the academic and the fan have been increasingly blurred,’ leading to a
celebration of ‘the object of study, such as a cult text, at the expense of thinking
about the conditions in which these texts are produced or, in some situations,
received,’ which can ‘result in work that becomes an extension of the scholar’s
own fandom’ (2018, 18). This is not necessarily a criticism, however. As Will
Brooker observes regarding the term ‘aca-fan,’ Henry Jenkins’ hybrid of ‘academic’
and ‘fan’ first coined in Textual Poachers (1992):
we could also consider that Shakespearean scholars are also, no doubt, fans
of Shakespeare—the same must be true of scholars of Dickens and Austen,
although we do not use the term for them. Academics who write about
politics [may] follow it in the same way that someone else might follow
Star Trek, through communities and gatherings … I suspect most maths
scholars love mathematics … I would suggest that many or most academics
are also aca-fans, studying something that they are deeply invested in, and
balancing that investment with a scholarly objectivity.
(Brooker et al. 2018, 64)
In the field of comic studies, for example, scholars also continue to reproduce
fannish moral dualisms similarly through distinctions that favor graphic novels
produced by independent creators, many of whom are also defined as ‘auteurs,’
while writers and artists that work on serialized monthly comics (especially in
the superhero genre) are nothing but corporate shills churning out commercial
product on an assembly-line. Consider Ben Saunders’ response to an article by
Hilary Chute (2008), which is worth quoting at length:
Chute’s essay confirms my suspicion that the nascent academic field of comics
studies is already divided from within, along the lines that replicate the most
basic division of the American comic-book market-place: the division between
genre works (dominated by but not limited to superhero stories) and what we
might call ‘literary nonfiction’. Dangers and distortions threaten when we
allow generic divisions to shape our critical narratives. Old-fashioned and
politically divisive arguments about high culture versus low culture, or fine art
versus commercial art, have a disturbing tendency to reassert themselves along
generic lines. Despite the best efforts of literary theorists to deconstruct such
aesthetic hierarchies, they prove remarkably resilient. Indeed, with almost
tragic irony, these hierarchies frequently reproduce themselves in the criticism
of art forms traditionally regarded as debased.
(Saunders 2009, 292–291)
As with the binary between ‘horror-as-art’ and mass-produced commercial

horror, Chute asserts that non-fiction comics represent ‘the strongest genre’
while ‘dismissing the entire output of Marvel and DC comics, in a misleading
parenthetical aside about the “commercial comic-book industry”’ (2008, 294). It
is nothing but ‘academic arrogance’ to assume that nonfiction is ‘the strongest
genre’ in comics or that
the critical marginalization of other comic-book genres is justified. The only

conclusion we can safety draw from this state of affairs is that nonfiction and
confessional comics are more congenial to current intellectual fashions than
genre comics … The point is not to invert the hierarchy of value that seems to
accompany Chute’s understanding of generic distinctions but to treat it with
skepticism. The academic preference for ‘literary comics’ of a confessional or
journalistic bent and even for the (almost useless) term ‘graphic novel’ itself
requires interrogation and at least a measure of resistance.
(Saunders 2009, 294)
If we replace ‘literary comics’ or ‘graphic novel’ with ‘cult horror’ or ‘low-budget

exploitation,’ and the ‘commercial comic-book industry’ with the ‘Hollywood
Introduction 17
Dream Factory,’ then the same hierarchies of value and taste can be seen to be at
work, which often accompany a scholastic desire to legitimate an nascent field of
study in the face of elitist sneers and jibes that debase ‘low culture’ in order to
reaffirm their status as connoisseurs and cognoscenti of ‘legitimate’ culture.
Although the turn to postmodernism ostensibly brought with it the dissolution of
cultural distinctions between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ popular culture, we can see
similar dualisms continue to occur with some frequency between most cultural
forms and artefacts: between literary fiction and genre fiction; quality television
and network programming; the art-house cinema and popular movies; prestigious
awards (such as the Booker Prize) and genre trophies (like the Hugo Awards);
popular music and alternative music; ‘real’ punk versus ‘pop’ punk; ‘real’ heavy
metal versus ‘fake’ Nu Metal; and so on and so forth.
This is not to suggest that struggles over such distinctions are non-existent
nor that consensus is truly achieved (although it can be). Turning to Bourdieu
once more, the field of cultural production is not a static ‘universe of belief,’ but
one that is subject to ‘endless changes,’ re-evaluations, and retroactive ‘position-
takings’ that suggest that the field is governed by a discursive and socially
inflected kinetic energy that is always on the move, always in flux. Bourdieu
emphasizes that ‘every position … depends for its very existence, and for the
determinations it imposes on its occupants, on the other positions constituting
the field,’ meaning that the field of cultural production involves ‘the space of
literary or artistic position-takings,’ ‘a field of forces’ that is also ‘a field of
struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces’ which effectively
‘receives its distinctive value from its negative relationship with the coexistent
position-takings to which it is objectively related and which determine it by
delimiting it’ (1993, 30, italics in original). In other words, the field of cultural
production, or in this case, the sub-field of horror cinema production—which,
following Howard Becker’s theory of ‘art worlds’ (2008), we might describe as
‘the horror world’—is a space of conflict and struggle fought over the status of
cult(ural) objects as either legitimate art or illegitimate commodity. These kinds
of ‘intrageneric conflicts’ occur regularly in fan cultures, in this case,
between horror fans as much as they do between those who define themselves
as pro- and anti-horror. Thus while some horror fans embrace Freddy Krue-
ger, of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, as a cult hero, others seek to dis-
sociate themselves from these fans through an association with cult ‘auteurs’
such as Dario Argento. However, for other horror fans, Argento’s films are
too mainstream and, in distinction, they privilege more ‘subversive’ and
‘excessive’ underground films. These conflicts between those who define
themselves as horror fans do not stop here, but even within the ‘underground’
fan culture, there are continual conflicts and distinctions in operation.
(Jancovich 2002, 26–28)
Robin Wood certainly did not see A Nightmare on Elm Street as ‘an auteur
film,’ but, rather, as artistically retrograde, an affront to the ‘intensity and
disturbance that gave Last House on the Left its peculiar and appalling dis-
tinction’ (2003/1986, 168). In Wood’s estimation, Craven’s ‘career has achieved
a certain consistency, in that each of his films since Last House on the Left has
been worse than the one before’ (2003/1986, 168). Hence, the romantic creed (or
cult) of auteurism is a matter of discourse, as Michel Foucault might put it,
which emphasizes the transitory and arbitrary nature of distinctions that are,
more often than not, constructed by cultural power and ideologies of taste.
Indeed, Foucault’s notion of ‘the author-function’ explains that authors are
discursive ‘projections’ that govern ‘our way of handling texts: in the compar-
isons we make, the traits we exact as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or
the exclusions we practice’; it is a ‘means of classification’ that is ‘strongly
reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it wished to prove the value of a text by
ascertaining the holiness of the author’ (1969, 127). As with Bourdieu’s dis-
tinction between ‘the “commercial” and the “non-commercial”’, oppositions
between ‘the sacred and the profane’ frequently circulate within ‘the market of
symbolic goods’ (Bourdieu 1993, 129–130). To continue Foucault’s religious
analogy, a ‘holy’ auteur’s imprimatur may be mobilized to discursively anoint a
cinematic object with the cardinal virtue of canonization, achieved through the
gospel of ‘non-commercial’ scripture, which is then contrasted by the demonic
force of ‘authorless’ commercial franchise cinema that stands as anti-Christ, a
deadly sin.
Therefore, films and their directors (or, for that matter, media texts and
practices in general) can move between categories, or as Stuart Hall puts it:
popular forms become enhanced in value, go up the cultural escalator—and

find themselves on the opposite side. Other things cease to have high cul-
tural value, and are appropriated into the popular, becoming transformed
in the process … The important fact, then, is not a mere descriptive
inventory—which may have the prescriptive effect of freezing popular cul-
ture into some timeless descriptive mould—but the relations of power
which are constantly punctuating and dividing the domain of culture into
its preferred and residual categories.
(1981, 236–234)
If we consider Alfred Hitchcock, it has not always been the case that the director has
enjoyed such a vaunted, auteurist pedigree, but has traveled up the ‘cultural esca-
lator’ after being viewed for much of his career as a commercial genre director. As
Robert E. Kapsis explains, before the 1960s ‘most American film critics did not rank
Hitchcock’s films as “serious art,” in large measure because in their view significant
work could not be achieved in the “thriller” genre’ due to its commercial impera-
tives. Many of the nation’s most influential and renowned film critics from the 1930s
to the late 1960s ‘asserted the value of “realism”’, that the ‘best’ films
were those of ‘quality’ productions which dealt with serious social issues.
At the same time, these writers in general dismissed the vast number of
Introduction 19
popular entertainment films, especially genre films, which Hollywood had
produced; their blatant commercialism was considered incompatible with
artistry and seriousness.
(1992, 12)
Similarly, Wes Craven may nowadays be viewed by many horror scholars as a

‘renowned horror auteur’ (Wee 2006)—or as with Hitchcock’s status as ‘master of
suspense,’ as ‘master of the macabre’—but this was not always the case (and is not
guaranteed to remain that way). Although Wood celebrated Craven’s Last House on
the Left, the critical establishment during the time of the film’s theatrical release
were not so kind, with protestors gathering outside cinemas to demand the removal
of the film from schedules (Proctor 2020, 223). It is perhaps this ‘shock’ factor that
excites horror and cult scholars most of all and feeds into the construction of an
oppositional, counter-cultural cinema ‘outside of capitalism.’ Therefore, the notion
that horror remains ‘a disreputable genre,’ which remains a central philosophy
within the study of cult and horror cinema, carries a wealth of ‘symbolic profit’ that
generates subcultural capital for citizens of ‘the horror world.’
We contend that the horror genre is neither ‘disreputable’ nor ‘reputable,’ but a
‘discursive category’ (Mittell 2004) that contains a wealth of sub-generic currents,
historic contingencies and industrial factors that cannot be sewed together into a
homogenous meta-narrative. Although there are certainly elements of horror
cinema that continue to cause consternation among film critics and members of the
moral brigade—such as the so-called ‘torture porn’ cycle of the 2000s (Jones
2013)—there are equally many examples of horror films that have been afforded a
degree of critical respect by ‘legitimate’ cultural processes and institutions of con-
secration. For instance, horror author Stephen King, who once ironically described
his work as the ‘literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,’ was honored with The
National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters in 2003 (which received a lion’s share of scorn from ‘legitimate’ establish-
ment figures, such as Harold Bloom). Added to this, we could also include the lit-
erary establishment’s consecration of authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose
Bierce, Edgar Allen Poe, and so forth, or the inclusion of horror films in North
America’s National Film Registry for being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically
significant,’ such as: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Frankenstein (1931),
Dracula (1931), The Invisible Man (1933), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935),
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Psycho (1960), Night of the Living
Dead (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Rocky Horror
Picture Show (1975), Halloween (1978), The Shining (1980), and Silence of the
Lambs (1991). Naturally, these examples are neither exhaustive nor fully repre-
sentative of the horror genre (which would be impossible in any case); but what it
does do, perhaps, is highlight the problems with viewing genres as totalities.
Of course, there are no ‘video nasties’ in the National Film Registry, but if
being controversial, censored or banned outright is a signifier of outlaw or
oppositional status, then it is worth pointing out that more than a few notable
exemplars of American ‘classic’ horror cinema were deemed ‘lurid’ at the time
of their original release; not that they were invariably ‘disreputable,’ but that
they indicated a struggle over what counted as ‘wholesome’ entertainment.
Though both Universal Studios’ Dracula and Frankenstein were reviewed posi-
tively by the New York Times and other newspapers in 1931, they would also
become a cause célèbre that accompanied the first cycle of horror films, as
documented by Tom Johnson in Censored Screams (2006). Although in many
ways, the last straw was 1935’s The Raven, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris
Karloff, which paralleled the creation of the ‘H’ film category in the United
Kingdom—the ‘H’ standing for horror—James Whale’s Frankenstein and its
sequel Bride of Frankenstein created a storm among censors, civic groups,
members of the clergy and moral watchdogs that saw the film either banned,
cut by local governments, condemned for blasphemy, and, in the case of Bride,
necrophilia and thinly veiled homosexuality, with one critic describing Dr.
Pretorius as a ‘scruffy fag’ (Johnson 2006, 32–46, 111).
Interestingly, Jon Towlson (2016) argues that there is more in common between
the Universal horror films and 1970s neo-horror than academics recognize, a per-
spective that is maintained by side-stepping the critical reception of the former
during the 1930s when ‘[o]ne of the first to write negatively about the gruesome-
ness of thirties horror was—surprisingly enough—Alfred Hitchcock,’ who wrote:
The audience thrives on thrills, the cinema thrives on the audience, the direc-
tor thrives on the cinema. And everyone is happy … But this so-called ‘horror’
film—that’s an entirely different matter … The term, meaning originally
‘extreme aversion’, has been loosely applied to films which … exploit sadism,
perversion, bestiality, and deformity. This is utterly wrong, being vicious and
dangerous … The forerunner of the cycle of ‘horror’ pictures … was the
‘Grand Guignol’, and that was merely a ‘stunt’, calculated to attract a neuro-
tic section of the public. There is a growing body of opinion, inside as well as
outside the film industry, against such films, which are successful in direct
ratio to their power to create unnatural excitement.
(Quoted in Towlson 2016, 185–186)
Hitchcock’s aversion to horror films during the 1930s would seem to foreshadow
the reception of neo-horror, the video-nasties, torture porn, and so on; but it is
important to recognize that anxieties like this have a lengthy historic and cultural
vintage, not solely concentrated on horror, but on the ‘dangers’ of popular cul-
ture more broadly (see Springhall 1998). It may be that horror cinema in the
1930s seems tame and anodyne compared with so-called neo-horror, but once
contexts of reception are considered, it should be recognized that evaluating films
from the distant past through the lens of contemporary cinema is enormously
problematic, running the risk of distorting portraits of cinematic and cultural
memory. Indeed, critics that deplored the Hammer horror films of the 1950s and
1960s, such as Terence Fisher’s ‘repulsive’ The Curse of Frankenstein (1957),
‘whined for the good old days of “wholesome” shockers like the original Fran-
kenstein, forgetting (or, more likely, unaware of) the firestorm that film had
Introduction 21
created’ (Johnson 2006, 182). In 1983, Conservative politician Graham Bright,
the government’s moral figurehead who castigated the ‘video nasties’ and led the
charge for what became the Video Recordings Act, said: ‘All too many people
believe that a nasty is like some hotted up Hammer horror movie. It isn’t, it’s
something entirely different’ (quoted in Petley 2011, 46). It seems that each gen-
eration of the horror genre comes with the charge that this ‘new’ era is more
disreputable than the last, that ‘it’s something entirely different.’ This should not
be taken to mean that all horror films are qualitatively identical—far from it—
but to understand the discursive apparatuses that fortify claims of ‘lurid’ excess,
violence, and gore, while not forgetting the distinctions between ‘anti-commer-
cial’ and ‘commercial’ film-making.
As shown throughout this introduction, it is not simply that horror is dis-
reputable tout court, but that genre cinema, blockbusters, and franchises have been
typically framed as ‘sordidly commercial’ and, consequently, beyond the pale. It
could be argued that the most disreputable genre at present may in fact be the
superhero film, as illustrated by Martin Scorsese’s comments that the Marvel Stu-
dios films are ‘not cinema,’ but more akin to theme park attractions (Pulver 2019).
Other directors with a reputation as ‘auteurs’ have since spoken publicly in agree-
ment with Scorsese, such as Francis Ford Coppola, who stated unequivocally that
the genre is ‘despicable’ (Shoard 2019). There may be examples that complicate
this rule—Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) springs to mind— but it is
inarguable that the superhero genre has achieved less critical respect than horror.
The ‘auteur’ discourse that rejects superhero franchises as ‘not cinema’ takes us
neatly back to the beginning of this introduction. Just as Wes Craven stated that
the Elm Street series became akin to making cheeseburgers, veteran British director
Ken Loach more recently claimed the same for superhero franchises. They ‘have
nothing to do with the art of cinema’ said Loach. ‘They’re made as commodities
like hamburgers’ (Cotter 2019).
Aims and structure of this book

This book does not seek to celebrate horror franchise cinema, but neither does it
aim to continue in the ‘formula fallacy’ tradition that has worked to reject the
form as ‘sordidly commercial’ and unworthy of study. We agree with James
Chapman that ‘all films, whatever their critical or cultural status, [are] worthy
objects of analysis’ (2007, 55). While it is certainly true that media franchising, in
all its varied shapes and forms, is a mode of production that has ‘the bottom line’
as its core motivation, their primary purpose being ‘not only to attract but to
durably reattract as many readers or viewers as possible’ (Kelleter 2017, 13–14),
that franchises ‘makes excellent sense from an economic point of view’ (Hayward
2009, 2) by promoting ‘continued consumption’ of later installments within a spe-
cific storyworld (Hagedorn 1995, 28); they are also long-running or ‘evolving nar-
ratives’ that ‘have a special ability to generate affective bonds’ among audiences
(Kelleter 2017, 13, italics in original). Put differently, the political economy of
horror franchise cinema is clearly an important part of history, but solely
‘following the money’ (or in Marxist terms, the ‘cash nexus’) would surely lend
itself to distortions that exclude the fact that extended, serialized narratives have
been embraced by audiences for much of the history of western capitalism (see
Hagedorn 1995). Film franchising therefore is neither steadfastly economic nor
resolutely cultural, but more indicative of a dialectical conflict between profit and
narrative, business and storytelling, a conflict that cannot be resolved neatly (as
binaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects seek to achieve).
Although there are multiple facets to film franchises, including merchandise
and other ‘extra-textual’ expressions, the chapters that follow focus more on
the films themselves (although not exclusively). In this regard, the film franchise
is more or less coterminous with the film series, as Kristin Thompson argues:
People use the term ‘franchise’ rather loosely in relation to films. Essentially,
it means a movie that spawns additional revenue streams beyond what it
earns from its various forms of distribution, primarily theatrical, video, and
television. These streams may come from sequels and series or from the
production company licensing other firms to make ancillary products: action
figures, video games, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and the hundreds of other items
that licenses conceive of. In the ideal franchise, they come from both.
(2007, 4)
Derek Johnson explains that entertainment franchises are ‘not equivalent to

retail franchising’ in that there does not need to be a relationship between a
franchisor and a franchisee (2013, 45). For Johnson, his concept of ‘intra-
industrial franchising’ is defined by ‘multiplication across productions in a
single medium or institutional context,’ which ‘support serialization and
sequelization to keep generating content over time—whether confined to a
single medium … or multiplied more promiscuously across media’ (2013, 45).
Following Johnson, Horror Franchise Cinema explores the series/serial aspect
of intra-industrial film franchising and less on the production and distribution
of ancillary materials (although in the spirit of franchising, there is always the
possibility of a second volume at some point).
Of course, this book should not be read as the last (nor indeed the first) word on
the horror film franchise. Rather, we hope that it is seen in the spirit for which it is
intended to be; that is, as a route to scholarly dialogue that does not rely on judg-
ments of personal taste and value, but one that recognizes the enormous role that
the horror genre has played in the history of film franchises. Readers will no doubt
notice that there are many properties missing from this collection—for instance,
there are no chapters on Child’s Play, Friday the 13th, Final Destination, Saw,
Scream, and so on—but there are simply far too many horror franchises to con-
sider in a single volume of this kind (we’d definitely need a bigger book!) We hope,
however, that the chapters included provide at least an overview of some key
examples of horror franchise cinema produced over the past 80 years or so. Our
aims as editors was not to be overly prescriptive in order to allow scholars enough
space to marshal their own approaches, arguments, and viewpoints.
Introduction 23
Horror Franchise Cinema contains 12 chapters, each of which operate as
individual case studies centered on a particular film franchise or production
culture. In Chapter 1, William Proctor explores the various Universal Monster
film series from a world-building perspective, an approach that is common in
studies of fantasy and science fiction storyworlds, but is rarely taken in the
context of horror cinema.
The book is then structured by themed parts, the first of which is, perhaps
unsurprisingly, focused on slasher and post-slasher franchises. In Chapter 2, Mark
Bernard looks at the ‘peculiar’ and ‘erratic’ case of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre
franchise, exploring the difficulties producers have experienced in extending the
property into a viable and popular series; while in Chapter 3, Murray Leeder
addresses the lasting impact that John Carpenter’s authorial signature has had on
the Halloween franchise. Steve Jones visits the suburbs of Springfield to explore the
Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in Chapter 4, in which he considers the series’
ontological logic as a ‘recurring nightmare’, contesting the idea that Wes Craven
had clearly established diegetic ‘rules’ in the first film. In the final chapter in this
part, Kate Egan turns to audiences of ‘interstellar slasher’ (Lucklurst 2014, 8)
franchise, Alien, to examine the way in which respondents to the ‘Remembering
Alien’ project compare, contrast, and rate installments through the nebulous con-
cept of ‘atmosphere.’
The next part focuses on contemporary franchises. In Chapter 6, Todd K. Platts
looks at the production studio, Blumhouse, who became a key player in the 2010s
following the success of Paranormal Activity, going on to establish ‘a unique
model for franchise development,’ one that privileges directorial authorship and
‘micro-budget’ financing that has provided a challenge to the corporate blockbus-
ter template. Staying with Blumhouse, Stacey Abbott investigates The Purge fran-
chise in Chapter 7, arguing that the series ‘overtly offers a blistering critique of
racism, Christian fundamentalism, and Neo-Liberal patriarchal authority.’
Part III looks at cult franchises, beginning with Mark McKenna’s chapter on
the Italian ‘distributive franchise,’ Zombi, a series that operates within the Ita-
lian tradition of ‘filone’ (‘in the tradition of’) to explore how various distributors
in Italy, then Germany, Thailand, and the United States, aimed to latch onto the
coat-tails of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead by creating alternative,
parallel franchises that would include films that the director had nothing to do
with. In Chapter 9, Sarah Cleary turns to the notorious I Spit on Your Grave film
series to tackle the thorny issue of genre to consider whether the franchise can be
legitimately described as ‘horror’ by exploring the critical reception of the films,
the retributionist principle of lex talionis (‘like for like’), and the franchise’s place
in the Gothic tradition.
Part IV is titled ‘Complicating franchising,’ and comprises three chapters that
push at the boundaries of the concept. In Chapter 10, David Church examines
the horror film anthology as a mode of seriality in order to challenge current
understandings of what constitutes film franchising, whereas Simon Bacon
explores several adaptations and spin-offs in the Let the Right One In universe,
‘the franchise that is not a franchise.’ In the final chapter of this part (and of
this book), Sarah Thomas tackles the experimental marriage between horror
film franchises and virtual reality, surveying the intersection ‘between horror
aesthetics and immersive media’ in properties such as Saw, It, The Conjuring,
Alien, Hotel Transylvania, and Night of the Living Dead.
Each of the 12 chapters in Horror Franchise Cinema aim to draw attention to a
much-maligned phenomenon that is not only an important part of the genre’s his-
tory, but of the history of film and media franchising in broad terms. To para-
phrase Warren Buckland, it is perhaps time to stop condemning horror franchise
cinema and to start, instead, to understand it (1998, 175).
Notes
1 At the time of Wells’ writing, there had been three sequels to Barker’s Hellraiser—Hellraiser
II: Hellbound (1988), Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), and Hellraiser IV: Bloodline
(1996)—but there have since been a further six ‘direct-to-video’ installments, many of them
direct-to-video—Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), Hellraiser: Deader
(2005), Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005), Hellraiser: Revelations (2010), and Hellraiser: Judge-
ment (2018). A remake of Hellraiser that would also reboot the franchise has been touted
since 2006. More recently, HBO announced that they would be producing a series based on
the property that would be ‘an elevated continuation and expansion’ rather than a reboot.
2 https://vinegarsyndrome.com/pages/about
3 https://secondsightfilms.co.uk/pages/about
4 www.kaleidoscopehomeentertainment.com/movie/i-spit-on-your-grave-the-comp
lete-collection
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1 Building imaginary horror worlds
Transfictional storytelling and the Universal
Monster franchise cycle
William Proctor
In Media Franchising, Derek Johnson argues that the Universal Monster films of
the 1930s and 1940s should not be viewed as franchises because ‘no such discourse
was in play to make sense’ of these productions, that to do so ‘would be read back
onto it an anachronistic cultural logic’ (2013, 51–52). Although Johnson rightly
identifies the problems involved in reading media histories through a more con-
temporaneous lens, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the anachronism is not
strictly cultural, but terminological as well, the suggestion being that practices that
we would readily associate with franchising today should not be recognized as
such, principally because the term had not yet been deployed in that context.
Johnson’s claim, however, that ‘the language of franchising would not come to be
deployed in even the retail industries until 1959’ opens up an additional con-
undrum: the Universal Studios’ incarnations of Dracula, Frankenstein, The
Mummy, The Invisible Man, etc. have been continually licensed in various forms,
both before and after 1959, including comic adaptations, tie-in books and noveli-
zations, confectionary, board games, model-kits, toys, and other objects and
apparel. Following Johnson’s logic, the implication is that the Universal Monsters
may in fact be (re)constituted through the concept of franchising after that date,
but not before (which would surely be equally anachronistic).1
In contradistinction to Johnson, Matthew Freeman emphasizes that the lan-
guage of franchising emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in relation to the
‘phenomenon of transportation sectors utilized exclusively for extending roads,
tram lines and railways across the country,’ and during the 1920s, ‘quickly expan-
ded to include food and retail establishments,’ including the Coca Cola Company
and the Fredericks hair salon (2016, 114–115). By 1930, ‘the exploits of a national
theatre company were newsworthy for representing “another step ahead in the
production stride toward stage-show entertainment” when the company “verified
the franchise which includes the development of branches all over Los Angeles”’
(121). Freeman argues that ‘while Johnson indicates (perhaps rightly) that “only
after World War II did franchising move to the center of corporate strategy” (2016,
41–46), the start of the 1930s actually represented the true beginnings of what
would now be called media franchising’ (2016, 121, my italics). While this scaven-
ging for origins is freighted with complication—‘true beginnings’ are always
rooted in antecedent and ancestry, indicating that claims about the discovery and
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-2
30 William Proctor
location of a transcendental source is bound to activate an endless chain of genea-
logical ‘moments’ that pinball throughout the historical record—it nonetheless
seems more than reasonable to categorize the various Universal Monsters film
series as franchise properties, as ‘multiplication across productions in a single
medium or institutional context’ (Johnson 2013, 45). Although Johnson’s cau-
tionary note should undoubtedly be heeded, it also runs the risk of establishing a
binary between franchising and non-franchising, one that constructs a firm divid-
ing line in our understanding of media histories and instantiations, mostly as a
consequence of terminology rather than practice. As Avi Santo emphasizes, ‘it
would be a mistake to think that such concepts do not find their genealogical roots
in earlier moments’ (2015, 10).
Although there is plenty of academic work on the Universal Monsters, especially
on Todd Browning’s Dracula (1931) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)—
both of which can be considered twin pillars of the horror ‘talkie’— there does
appear to be less sustained interest in the sequels that developed the various prop-
erties into commercial franchises. Whereas Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is
often viewed as the crown jewel of Universal horror, which in many accounts
began in 1931 with the release of Dracula and culminated in 1936 with Lambert
Hillyer’s sequel, Dracula’s Daughter, most of the later installments that were pro-
duced between 1939 and 1944—what I am describing in this chapter as the fran-
chise cycle—have been largely dismissed as qualitatively inferior products, as
cranked out ‘soulless spectacles, recycled versions of earlier successes’ (Hitchcock
2007, 198) undergirded by ‘dwindling budgets,’ poor scripts, and diminished box
office returns (Friedman and Kavey 2016, 126). As Peter Hutchings argues, ‘this
negative perception of sequel-heavy 1940s Universal horror is often intertwined
with a prejudice against the sequel itself as a particular cinematic format, with the
sequelisation process seeming to mark the moment where innovation ends and
exploitation begins’ (2004, 20).
In response, this chapter explores the franchise cycle that, I argue, began with
James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula’s Daughter in 1935 and 1936
respectively, as opposed to identifying Son of Frankenstein as the debut film of a
second cycle. Given that this third installment in the Frankenstein series was
scheduled to enter production in 1936, after Dracula’s Daughter and before
Charles Rogers took over from Carl Laemmle, Jr. as Universal’s head of produc-
tion and decreed a halt in horror film production. As such, I suggest that this
enforced three-year interregnum period did not strictly telegraph the demise of the
first horror cycle in that Son of Frankenstein picked up where Dracula’s Daughter
left off by continuing and, throughout the early to mid 1940s, accelerating Uni-
versal’s novel experiments with transfictional storytelling. As conceptualized by
Richard Saint-Gelais, ‘two (or more) texts exhibit a transfictional relationship
where they share elements, such as characters, imaginary locations, and fictional
worlds’ (Saint-Gelais 2005, 612). Rather than mobilize the concept of inter-
textuality to explain narrative associations spread across serialized installments,
Saint-Gelais’ transfictionality serves as a clearer way to detail what elements
‘count’ as the building blocks to imaginary world construction. Although
Building imaginary horror worlds 31
Universal’s Frankenstein films enter into dialogue with Mary Shelley’s novel and
other intertexts, such as the Hammer franchise films, they do not exist along the
same transfictional axis; or, put differently, they are neither compatible nor ‘com-
possible’ with each other in diegetic terms (the term ‘compossible’ is drawn from
Lubomir Doležel [1998]). Following Colin B. Harvey, an adaptation’s primary
purpose is to ‘forget that the story has been told before and present itself as
the first telling,’ an example of ‘vertical memory which travels only one way’
(2015, 91); whereas transfictional storytelling is centered on narrative continuity,
or ‘horizontal memory,’ meaning that each installment should diegetically
‘remember’ other installments as a way to construct a narrative sequence or ima-
ginary world. From this perspective, there is no such thing as a singular Franken-
stein imaginary world, but rather, an imaginary network, a matrix comprised of
multiple transfictional continuities that are often incompatible with one another in
terms of story; incompatible narratives that are, on the one hand, always inter-
textually related to one another along the vertical memory axis, but, on the other,
should not be taken as part of a coherent and horizontal transfictional ‘remem-
bering.’ While there have been academic studies on fictional world-building in
recent years, these have generally focused on other popular genres such as fantasy
and science fiction, whereas horror media seems to be hitherto excluded from the
topic of imaginary worlds.
In what follows, I first address the historical and industrial context within which
the Universal horror franchises arrived in order to describe, in the broadest terms,
the way in which serialization emerged in the nineteenth century—in literature,
comic strips, magazines, and pulp fiction—to become ‘an ideal form of narrative
under capitalism’ (Hagedorn 1995, 69). I then discuss a few early examples of film
series, serials, and sequels to illustrate how these inter-related modes functioned
narratively before moving onto the Universal Monster franchise(s). Here, I examine
the way that various sequels operate diegetically through transfictional storytelling,
seeking to understand the operations of film seriality through the lens of continuity
and discontinuity, self-containment and augmentation. Building upon Stuart Hen-
derson’s concepts of ‘series with continuity’ and ‘“the series film” proper’ (2014, 32),
I am particularly interested in detailing how the Universal Monster franchises might
or might not work as imaginary worlds to explore the idea that, as Lester D. Fried-
man and Allison B. Kavey argue, ‘the Universal film monsters know and interact
with each other,’ that ‘they inhabit the same fictional and timeless universe’ (2016,
105). I conclude this chapter by looking at the monsters’ ‘afterlives’ on TV, in
comics, tie-in novels, toys, and other franchised expressions.
Series, serials, sequels

Although the complaint that contemporary franchising signifies nothing more than
creative bankruptcy, ‘studio film production has long featured serial entertain-
ments’ (Fleury et al. 2020, 4). It was not cinema, however, that pioneered serial
entertainment: audiences were already well-versed ‘in the consumption of long-
form narratives,’ and film seriality ‘marked less a break from earlier practices than
32 William Proctor
the refinement of a strategy that had been in place in publishing since the 1840s’
(Henderson 2014, 13). As Carolyn Jess-Cooke explains, ‘[a] major reason for the
early practice of film serialization lies in the proliferation of serials in the literary
world’ (2010, 16–17). In this context, cinematic serial entertainment came about as
the result of dialogic relationships with emergent and established media platforms
of the day: from literature and comic strips to boy’s story papers and fiction
magazines to penny dreadfuls (in the UK) and dime novels (in the US), to cheaply
printed adventure and science fiction publications (commonly described through
the umbrella term ‘pulp fiction’). Although serial publication had existed for cen-
turies, it was during the Victorian era that ‘instalment fiction’ (Hughes and Lund
2015) became ‘a product of the first age of mass communication’ (Altick 1974, 69).
In most accounts, it was the part-issue publication of Charles Dickens’ The Post-
humous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published from March 1836 to November
1837, that precipitated an explosion in serial fiction, an unprecedented phenom-
enon in the history of literature that also triggered a ‘global culture of seriality’
that became key to the way in which media industries began to operate (Turner
2019, 196).
It is worth noting that Dickens and his contemporaries were not seen as authors
of ‘proper’ literature at the time, but, rather, as immoral dealers in ‘addictive’
storytelling, a ‘particularly insidious’ form of narrative, a ‘laudanum-like drug’
that was ‘distilled drop by drop in the brain’ (Hayward 1997, 27). As a ‘product of
mass manufacture’, serial fiction was initially ‘highly suspect’ (Rose 2011, 92), and
it is this commercial aspect that has proved difficult for Dickens with regards to his
inclusion in the canon of English literature (John 2010, 18–19). It appears that
serialization, in whatever its form, has attracted a lion’s share of critical oppro-
brium almost since the beginnings of media capitalism, with anxieties related to
intellectual impoverishment and commercialization, moral panics and behavioural
‘effects’ being common motifs. Echoing David Bordwell and Robin Wood’s com-
plaints that blockbuster, franchised entertainment of the 1970s and 1980s, as
shown in the introduction to this volume, is akin to a virulent pathogen, nine-
teenth-century literary serials have been discursively framed during the period as a
substance addiction.
Although many scholars argue that the heyday of serial publication had more
or less faded by the 1860s, the culture of seriality continued apace in other
media. Comic strip characters like Richard Outcault’s The Yellow Kid in the
United States (Meyer 2019) and Ally Sloper in Britain (Sabin 2003) became
transmedia superstars spread promiscuously across media platforms of the day.
The serial lives of both characters were supported by an array of branded
merchandise, adaptations, and appropriations, which implies that the practices
and principles of contemporary franchising can be mapped back to, at least, the
late nineteenth century avant la lettre (pace Freeman 2016 and Johnson 2013).
In cinematic terms, the influence of serialization was felt as early as the turn of
the century, a key marker ‘in the history of the sequel, because it was hugely
instructive from a commercial standpoint’ (Henderson 2014, 15). Film serials rose
in prominence ‘as a way to present a narrative over more than one film’, drawing
the use of cliffhangers from serial fiction with ‘the intent of keeping audiences
coming back for more’ (Jess-Cooke 2010, 29). According to Jared Gardner, it was
comic strips and early comic books that provided much inspiration for burgeoning
filmmakers, that ‘the newspaper syndicates found audiences increasingly capti-
vated by the threads of continuing narrative, sequential plotting, and conventional
character development’ (2012, 27). Gardner’s argument is supported by a number
of serials that drew upon existing and successful characters from the medium,
including several films based on Frederick Burr Hopper’s popular comic strips,
Alphone and Gastone and Happy Hooligan. The latter, appropriated for film
serialization in 1900 with Happy Hooligan Assists the Magician, would be ‘the
first of around two dozen Happy Hooligan films produced by Edison and its rival
Biograph, a franchise on which several of the pioneers of the American film
worked between 1900 and 1903’ (2012, 19; see also Davis 2017, 1–13). Other
properties were mined for film serials in the silent era, ‘some of the earliest exam-
ples of recurring characters (as opposed to character types) in cinema’ (Henderson
2014, 20, italics in original), including adaptations of Outcault’s comic strip Buster
Brown and, from dime novels and story papers, private detective Nick Carter.
Although more akin to a film series than a serial, in that there was little sense of
narrative continuity working across the films, the idea that branded intellectual
properties could ‘bind the spectator to a particular mode of entertainment, to
make going to the cinema a habit’ was in the ascendancy (Elsaesser 1998, 145). As
production began to include feature-length films, the first of these to be billed as a
sequel did not begin to emerge until after 1915 (Henderson 2014, 15), such as The
Fall of a Nation (1916). Although this was designated a sequel to D.W. Griffiths’
Birth of a Nation by writer-director Thomas Dixon, the relationship was a disin-
genuous marketing strategy in that there was no sense of narrative connection to
either Griffith’s film or Dixon’s own novel, The Clansman: A Historical Romance
of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), upon which Birth of a Nation was based.
In 1918, the first feature film based on Edgar Rice Burrough’s pulp adventure,
Tarzan, was distributed by First National, which aimed to exploit the character’s
popularity in print and on Broadway through ‘an extensive exploitation campaign’
that included ‘the publication of “Tarzan” stories in 5,000 newspapers and
magazines,’ among other promotional strategies that worked to position the film
as ‘a major event’ (Henderson 2014, 19; see also Freeman 2016, 108–145). Tarzan
was quickly followed by a sequel the same year, The Romance of Tarzan,
and follow-ups to properties like The Mark of Zorro and The Shiek (1921)—
respectively, Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925) and The Son of Shiek (1926)—arrived in
the 1920s. Film series started to appear more regularly in the 1930s, which Hen-
derson describes as ‘the first film franchises’ (2014, 31). In the Mr Moto series, for
example, eight of which were produced between 1937 and 1939, the films were
designed largely as ‘discrete narrative units, with no carry over from case to case’
(32). (The same logic would equally apply to the Andy Hardy or Charlie Chan film
series.) Although film sequels were on the rise, they were in no way as prominent
as film serials, which, as Jess-Cooke emphasizes, ‘formed the chief mode of pro-
duction’ between 1906 and 1936 (2010, 16). In the 1930s, film serials based on pulp
34 William Proctor
and science fiction properties became popular with younger audiences who had
perhaps enjoyed their adventures first of all in print, including Flash Gordon,
Popeye, Little Orphan Annie, The Lone Ranger, and Buck Rogers, each of which
‘tended to appear less often in feature films than in formats with lower production
budgets, such as film and radio serials’ (Fleury et al. 2020, 4).
By the time Universal Studios moved toward sequel production in 1935 with
Bride of Frankenstein, the most commonly employed mode of sequelization in a
feature film context would be what Henderson describes as ‘“the series film”
proper’, by which he means that characters may be carried over from film to film,
‘often into similar, repetitive situations, but within discrete narrative units’
(2014, 32). In other words, each film in a franchise tended to be self-contained in
that they did not adopt a serial/sequel approach underwritten by continuity logics
(the term ‘sequel’ being defined by an ‘acknowledgement of a chronological rela-
tionship with a prior installment’ [Henderson 2014, 3]). It is in this context that the
Universal Monster sequels engaged with ‘the least prevalent type’ of seriality, that
is, ‘the series with continuity,’ within which there would exist ‘an acknowledged
chronology’ whereby:
overt reference might be made to events, relationships and characters from

earlier films; and characters’ lives will in some sense develop … Prior events
may have little direct bearing on the events of the new episode, but their pas-
sing will not be forgotten or go entirely unmentioned.
(Henderson 2014, 3)
Whereas contemporary franchises are more than likely to follow continuity logics
to a greater or lesser degree, ‘the idea of making a film that in some way followed
on chronologically from a previous film, as opposed to a film that simply followed
a returning character, was a novel one’ (Hutchings 2004, 17). In many ways, then,
Universal pioneered the idea that film series could work more like serials by
experimenting with transfictional storytelling at a time when other studios pre-
ferred the series film.
Mapping continuity in imaginary horror worlds

Although Universal produced a range of diverse horror films between 1931 and
1935 (see Peirse 2013), including a trilogy of films based loosely on Edgar Allen Poe
stories—Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934), and The Raven
(1935)—as well as the first mainstream werewolf film, The Werewolf of London
(1935), there are only four films from the period that have been retrospectively
branded as belonging to the Universal Monsters category, those being Dracula,
Frankenstein, The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933), all of which
received sequels between 1935 and 1944. This perhaps suggests that the Universal
Monster grouping is, for the most part, a franchise brand, a point supported by
recent DVD/Blu-ray collections distributed through the umbrella banner, ‘The
Complete Legacy Collection,’ of which Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and
The Invisible Man all have dedicated box-sets, as do series from the 1940s and
1950s, such as The Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Abbott
and Costello parody films. I would argue that it is on the basis of ‘reproduction
and multiplicity’ (Johnson 2013, 45) that has led to the construction of the Uni-
versal Monsters brand as one characterized by franchising.
As the first sequel in the Universal Monsters canon, Bride of Frankenstein, came
four years after Whale’s first installment was released, it is worth considering the
reasons why it took the studio so long to capitalize on the success of both Fran-
kenstein and Dracula. ‘By contemporary standards,’ Hutchings explains,
Universal was slow of the mark in producing sequels to these four films
[Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Invisible Man]. Nowadays, if
a film, and especially a horror film, is commercially successful, one can expect
to see a sequel in 1–2 years—perhaps a little longer if it was a big-budget film.
By contrast, the first Frankenstein sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, appeared in
1935, four years after the original, and the second, Son of Frankenstein, in
1939, while Dracula’s Daughter (in which Dracula only appears as a briefly
glimpsed corpse) came out in 1936, five years after Dracula, and Dracula
himself would not be seen in another Universal film until the 1940s. Horror
fans would have to wait even longer for another Mummy or werewolf film,
with The Mummy’s Hand appearing in 1940 and The Wolf Man in 1941, and
in any event both of these proved to be reworkings of the mummy and wer-
ewolf stories rather than sequels to the 1930s films (although they themselves
subsequently generated several sequels).
(Hutchings 2004, 17)
For Hutchings, the distance between a first film and its sequel can be explained by
‘an absence in the 1930s of what might be termed an established “sequel culture”,’
whereas film serials ‘were a popular part of the cinema-going experience’ (2004, 17).
With this in mind, however, Universal appeared to recognize the commercial value
of sequelization immediately after Frankenstein indicated that Dracula was not
merely a flash-in-the-pan. In fact, Robert Florey wrote a sequel treatment in
December 1931 as Frankenstein was released in theaters, and up through 1934, the
script passed through multiple authors. In 1932, head of production Carl ‘Junior’
Laemmle commissioned Tom Reed to prepare a treatment for what was initially
titled The Return of Frankenstein, but the project failed to move forward, primarily
because James Whale was not interested in directing it (Henderson 2014, 42; Hitch-
cock 2007, 171). The fact that Laemmle did not proceed with a Frankenstein sequel
by offering it to a different director is perhaps ‘some measure of the respect [Whale]
commanded, or rather a sign that of the studio’s faith in his ability to deliver com-
mercial results’ (Henderson 2014, 43). After Whale directed The Invisible Man for
the studio, Universal financed One More River (1934), a pet project for the director,
and afterwards, he agreed to direct the Frankenstein sequel the same year.
It is likely that the critical and commercial success of Bride of Frankenstein
led Junior Laemmle to move ahead with Dracula’s Daughter as the studio had
36 William Proctor
managed to obtain the rights to Stoker’s short story, ‘Dracula’s Guest’, from
David O. Selznick in September 1933 (Henderson 2014, 43). The stage seemed
to be set for other sequels to follow—the third Frankenstein film was originally
scheduled to follow Dracula’s Daughter—but by the time the film was released
theatrically in May 1936, Universal’s economic health had deteriorated enor-
mously. As Farran Smith Nehme explains (2016),
instead of trimming back and showing more caution, Junior blew on the
dice and rolled, staking everything on a film version of the musical version
of Showboat, James Whale’s prestigious remake that cost the studio more
than anticipated, forcing Universal to borrow $750,000 from the Standard
Chartered Bank.
Consequently, the bank had to foreclose on the loan, and the studio’s stock was
claimed as collateral. Thus, the Standard Capital Corporation assumed control of
Universal studios on March 14, 1936, with Junior Laemmle ousted as head of
production and replaced by tycoon Charles Rogers who, as noted above, decreed
an end to the production of horror films. Although James Neibaur claims that
Rogers’ decision was mostly based on his distaste for horror cinema (2017, 56),
Alex Naylor contends that the reasons that lay behind the moratorium came about
because of ‘active campaigning and dissuasion of studios from horror production,
on the part of the Production Code Administration (PCA), run by the Motion
Picture Producers’ and Distributors Association (MPPDA)’ (2011, 9). In response,
Rogers sought to cut costs by turning to other genres, especially musicals and
comedies, yet this ‘New Universal’ would be rapidly confronted with economic
misfortunes of their own, partly as a consequence of jettisoning their gothic
output. The 1937–1938 season proved to be financially catastrophic, indicating that
Rogers’ cost-cutting strategies did not yield noticeable results, and control of the
studio passed to new hands once again. As a consequence, Rogers was replaced by
Cliff Work as head of production in 1938.
What is interesting about Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula’s Daughter is that,
in narrative terms, both films begin where their predecessors left off, which estab-
lishes them as ‘series with continuity.’ Hence, Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula’s
Daughter can be viewed as ‘transfictions,’ the two sequels functioning as compos-
sible serialized texts that extend and augment an imaginary world through the
principle of continuity. Although in Frankenstein, viewers do not witness the
demise of Karloff’s monster, the penultimate scene of the film shows the character
trapped in a burning windmill, giving viewers the impression that he perishes in
flames. The original script had Henry Frankenstein die after he was thrown from
the windmill by the monster, the final scene depicting his family mourning his
demise and thus offering a satisfactory moral conclusion to the havoc wreaked by
his playing god. However, the studio demanded that this ending be revised on a
more optimistic note, and so a new scene ended up concluding the film whereby
Henry’s father is shown outside bed-chambers where his son is in fact convalescing
inside, alive and well.
Bride of Frankenstein begins with an introductory prologue featuring Mary
Shelley, her husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron reminiscing on the creation of
Frankenstein. Mary then proceeds to tell the tale of ‘what happened next,’ that
being Bride of Frankenstein (which is of course a complete historical fabrication).
The film then returns to the windmill scene where we learn that the monster did
not burn in flames after all, but remained ‘alive,’ struggling to escape the con-
flagration. This perhaps indicates that the studio was not quite certain how they
could resurrect the monster for a sequel, that
the problem confronting Universal, therefore, was how to bring back a

profitable monster, and the solutions it devised to this has informed horror
film production ever since … either by retrospectively finding a loophole in
the plot of the original film that enables the film-makers to claim that the
monster did not die really, or by actually resurrecting the dead monster.
Bride of Frankenstein exemplifies this approach. In this film, it turns out
that the monster was not destroyed by the fire that apparently consumed
him at the end of the 1931 Frankenstein film but is merely walking in the
ruins of the old mill for the next film to begin.
(Hutchings 2004, 18)
The retrospective ‘finding a loophole’ that Hutchings points toward is illustrated by

the ending of Frankenstein as it is not clear if the monster dies or not, which would
seem to provide a relatively open route to sequelization. It follows, therefore, that
Universal was wrestling with ‘working through’ what a horror sequel could be in the
1930s; to address the apparently irresolvable contradictions involved in ensuring that
the monster would die, while simultaneously recognizing ‘the commercial imperative
dictating that the monster must survive’ (Hutchings 2004, 18). Although it would not
be until the 1960s that it was acceptable that a monster could be left alive by a film’s
end, Universal’s novel experiments with continuity established a set of codes and
conventions that have since become ingrained in more contemporary horror film
franchises (the Friday the 13th films, the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, the Hal-
loween franchise, Child’s Play, Saw, and so on).
Dracula’s Daughter approaches, and perhaps resolves, this problem by taking a
different tack in that the monster does not return at all. Instead, the film introduces
a new character, Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), who adopts the
antagonist role as one of Dracula’s vampiric offspring. Narratively, the film begins
immediately after Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) stakes Dracula (Bela Lugosi)
at the end of Browning’s original film as he is confronted by two police officers and
openly confesses his actions. Once he is taken into custody, Van Helsing briefly
articulates the plot of the first film to the police chief, a synopsis that works to re-
acclimate audiences who would not have been able to return to the original film to
refresh their memory, and also, for those who may not have seen Browning’s
Dracula.
The successful theatrical re-issue of Frankenstein and Dracula in 1938 con-
vinced Universal’s new production head, Cliff Work, that there was life in the
38 William Proctor
old monsters yet. Proving that monsters always rise from the grave, Universal
swiftly moved to capitalize on the theatrical re-releases and produced a third
Frankenstein installment, Son of Frankenstein, a film that was, as mentioned
earlier, originally scheduled to follow Dracula’s Daughter in 1936, but ended up
being cancelled due to the hiatus on horror films. It would be the Frankenstein
films that were more or less developed as a ‘series with continuity’ across a
number of installments—Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Franken-
stein, Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1944),
and the ‘monster rally’ films, House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dra-
cula (1945).
In Son of Frankenstein, an undisclosed period of time has passed since the
climax of Bride—Henry Frankenstein has passed on, and, as signified by the title,
the film focuses on his son, Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, who continues his
father’s legacy. Yet the story consistently ‘remembers’ the 1931 film most of all,
perhaps because the film’s theatrical re-release in 1938 would have been the most
familiar Frankenstein film to audiences at the time. Indeed, it was the re-issue of
Frankenstein, double-billed with Dracula, that indicated to Universal that horror
cinema remained a prize asset that would be more than capable of re-capturing
box office lightning; and in response, Universal rapidly moved Son of Frankenstein
into production, scheduling its release for January 1939. As a result of the closer
release proximity between the third and first installments, it appears that the
memory of Bride of Frankenstein mainly flows in one direction, back toward
Whale’s 1931 film, an odd situation considering the place of the film in the annals
of canonical horror cinema. Although Bride is ‘remembered’ in Son by harkening
back to the climax of its predecessor and referencing the ruins of Frankenstein’s
laboratory, there are no reminders that would remind viewers of that film’s
story—the creation of the creature’s titular bride, for instance, or new characters
like Doctor Pretorius.
More striking is that the creature’s newfound ability to speak gained in Bride is
suddenly lost in Son; he reverts to speechless grunts and groans as if the previous
film did not ‘really’ occur, a revision that contemporary fan audiences would
recognize as a form of retroactive continuity (or, in the vernacular, ‘ret-conning’)
which refers to:
a narrative process wherein the creator(s) and/ or producer(s) of a fictional

narrative/ world … deliberately alter the history of that narrative/ world such
that, going forward, future stories reflect this new history, completely ignoring
the old as it had never happened.
(Friedenthal 2017, ‘Introduction’)
Although retcons like this can destabilize an imaginary world, I am not suggesting
that Bride is not ‘in continuity’ with the rest of the franchise films: Son may not
appear to substantively ‘remember’ Bride, but the latter does ‘remember’ the 1931
film, and should nevertheless be viewed as a ‘micro-narrative’ that exists within the
Frankenstein ‘macro-structure’ (Ryan 1992, 373). That Bride and Son both
reference the 1931 film suggests a network of interconnections that build the
storyworld through dialogic relationships, each reference pinballing throughout
the network to offer an illusion of stability and coherence. What this does imply,
however, is that the first Frankenstein film may be viewed as the diegetic core of
the imaginary world, the core being constructed and strengthened through retro-
spective narrative threads and repetitive associations.
The films that comes after Son would more or less closely adhere to an
acknowledged chronology. The next installment, Ghost of Frankenstein, begins
with a brief synopsis of the previous film, a transfictional memory jogger 2
vocalized by the town’s mayor, who states: ‘You know as well as I do that the
monster died in the sulphur pit under Frankenstein’s tower; and that Ygor, his
familiar, was riddled with bullets from the gun of Baron Frankenstein himself.’
In the next scene, however, as the villagers march on Frankenstein’s castle, Ygor
is shown to be alive and well, hurtling obstacles from the castle’s turret to pre-
vent the villagers from planting dynamite in their quest to rid the land of ‘the
curse of Frankenstein.’ He fails to do so, however, and the resulting explosion
shakes the monster free from his prison within the sulphur pit, one of Hutchings’
loopholes that shows that this ‘death’ was only temporary. As Ygor explains in
this scene, the sulphur pit in fact preserved the monster.
Ghost introduces a new heir to the Frankenstein legacy, a second son of Henry
Frankenstein and brother to Wolf, Ludwig Frankenstein, a medical doctor who
treats ‘diseases of the mind.’ Although Ludwig is not referred to in previous
films, he appears to be known to Ygor—perhaps another instance of retroactive
continuity—while other references harken back to earlier installments and
strengthen the imaginary world’s ‘ontological realm’ (Wolf 2012). Again, the
1931 film is presented as the diegetic core of the Frankenstein imaginary world:
Ludwig’s wife, Elsa Frankenstein, is portrayed leafing through Henry’s diaries,
accompanied by ‘flashbacks’ to the first film that quote scenes and images fea-
turing Henry and his assistant Fritz (Dwight Fry) ransacking a graveyard for
body parts, as well as showing the famous creation scene in his laboratory, albeit
with Karloff replaced (or retconned) by Lon Chaney playing the monster in order
to align it with Ghost. By the end of the film, Ygor has his brain transplanted
into the creature’s, preparing the way for Lugosi himself to take over the role in
the next installment, Frankenstein Versus the Wolf Man, which I shall return to
in the next section.
Although the Frankenstein series may be characterized as a ‘series with con-
tinuity,’ each installment also works, perhaps contradictorily, as a ‘series film
proper’ in that they provide relatively self-contained narratives at the same time
that they offer narrative threads that strengthen continuity bonds across films.
Unlike film serials, none of the Frankenstein films end in a state of ‘dis-
equilibrium,’ as Tzvetan Todorov would put it (1977, 111), in that there are
ordinarily no unresolved plot threads (or ‘cliffhangers’) to entice audiences to
clamor for closure, for a sequel to resolve dangling narrative elements. Invari-
ably, the monster is vanquished by each film’s conclusion, as explained above,
and the story is complete in and of itself. It is therefore perhaps more valuable to
40 William Proctor
view ‘the series with continuity’ and the film series ‘proper’ not as opposites, but
as a cinematic variation on what Robin Nelson (1997) terms, in relation to con-
temporary television, ‘a flexi-narrative,’ by which he means a serial narrative that
functions doubly as self-contained and ‘episodic,’ yet also fulfills the logics of
transfictional storytelling through narrative continuity. Contemporary horror
film franchises (and film franchises more generally) also typically work in this
manner by juggling self-containment with transfictionality to better capture a
wider demographic, a coalition audience who may not be as fluent in the lan-
guage of continuity as seasoned fans. As Sarah Kozloff argues (again in the con-
text of television), ‘the line between the series and serial may have been blurry to
begin with,’ that ‘the distinction … should be seen more as a continuum than as
an either/ or situation’ (1992, 92).
Although like the Frankenstein films, Dracula and Dracula’s Daughter are
clearly part of the same transfictional world, the next film in the franchise, Curt
Siodmak’s Son of Dracula (1943), makes no attempt to reference or ‘remember’
either film. As such, it is impossible to ascertain if Lon Chaney, Jr.’s iteration of
the character is meant to be transfictionally connected to Bela Lugosi’s perfor-
mance in the first Dracula film; or if, as the title implies, Chaney is his literal
scion (like Countess Zaleska from Dracula’s Daughter, this may be less about
biological procreation and more about being bitten and ‘turned’ into a vampire).
As there is no mention of Dracula having a son in the Browning film, and no
narrative information provided in Son of Dracula to construct a transfictional
relationship through the logics of continuity, the film appears to operate as a self-
contained film that is neither diegetically anchored to the first two films in the
franchise nor to the later films, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula.
Perhaps the reason for this is that Universal deemed that the seven-year gap
between Dracula’s Daughter and Son of Dracula was too lengthy (it had also
been five years since the theatrical re-issue of the first film and 12 years since
Browning’s Dracula was originally released). Equally, however, it would have
been possible to supply references to the earlier films in order to sow what Mark
J.P. Wolf describes as ‘narrative threads,’ that is, a ‘series of causally-linked
events, which usually revolves around a character, object, or location, giving a
sense of what happens to it over time’ (2012, 379). Although Wolf emphasizes
that audiences ‘will have some expectation that narrative threads will lead
somewhere, with some endpoint providing closure’ (2012, 379), narrative threads
can also work retrospectively through what I have termed elsewhere ‘repetitive
associations,’ references that activate a transfictional relationship with previous
installments to ‘ontologically thicken the imaginary world’ (Proctor 2018, 106).
Unlike the Frankenstein sequels, there are no ‘repetitive associations’ or ‘narra-
tive threads’ to establish continuity bonds between Son of Dracula and its pre-
decessors, suggesting that the imaginary world is ontologically ‘thinned’ in the
process (or perhaps dissolved altogether). Taken together, the Dracula films
function peculiarly as a combination of ‘series with continuity’ (Dracula and
Dracula’s Daughter); a single self-contained film that exists outside of transfic-
tional continuity (Son of Dracula); with the twin monster rally films, House of
Frankenstein and House of Dracula, appearing to occupy a discrete imaginary
world that includes Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. Taken as one, Universal’s
Dracula franchise is a composite comprising different modes of film seriality—
the series with continuity and the series film proper—implying that there are
alternative or parallel incarnations existing within an umbrella franchise; that
they arguably belong to three separate series.
It might be tempting to argue that Dracula is played by three different actors
(Lugosi, Chaney Jr., and John Carradine) which suggests that these are also
different iterations in narrative terms (that is, they inhabit different diegetic
levels). Yet Frankenstein’s monster has also been played by several actors—
Karloff, Lugosi, Chaney Jr., and Glenn Strange—without discarding transfic-
tional continuity, prefiguring more contemporary franchises such as James
Bond, Doctor Who, Batman, and so forth in that each have had new actors
replace their predecessors within the same transfictional space; unless they have
been rebooted from scratch as with the Bond film Casino Royale and Christo-
pher Nolan’s Batman Begins (see Proctor 2022). Unlike the Frankenstein films,
the Dracula films are sequentially fragmented, discontinuous, and in the case of
Dracula and Dracula’s Daughter, chronologically incompatible with films from
the 1940s. Thus, Son of Dracula is not a sequel film, in that it does not follow
an acknowledged sequence as the term implies, and neither is House of Fran-
kenstein (although the latter functions as what might be described as a twin-
sequel to both Ghost of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man).
The Mummy films also function as cinematic flexi-narratives, as fusions of epi-
sode and serial, but intriguingly, this does not include the first (and seminal) film in
the series that stars Boris Karloff as the Egyptian Prince, Imhotep. The second film,
The Mummy’s Hand, arrived in 1940, eight years after the first, but there is no
evidence from the text to confirm that it is a sequel to the Karloff incarnation—the
Mummy of the title is named Kharis, not Imhotep, and the monster’s origin story
replicates elements of the Karloff incarnation, even to the point of re-using the
same footage at times. The next three installments, The Mummy’s Tomb (1942),
The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and The Mummy Curse (1944), all follow transfic-
tional storytelling logics, which, like the Frankenstein films, more or less continue
the story with a new ‘episode.’ And like the Frankenstein films, each installment
provides a brief synopsis for audiences to either refresh their memories or to ensure
that casual audiences are at least provided with some diegetic information to
understand what is going on in the story (Dracula’s Daughter should also be
included in this context). This is not to say that there are no continuity ‘snarls’
between installments. For instance, the end of The Mummy’s Ghost does not align
neatly with the next film, The Mummy’s Curse, as James L. Neibaur explains:
While The Mummy’s Curse is careful to take up where The Mummy’s Ghost
left off, suddenly we are in Louisiana, whereas the swamp in the previous
movie was set in Massachusetts. Also, a couple of films earlier, The Mummy’s
Tomb was set 30 years after the events of its immediate predecessor The
Mummy’s Hand, making it 1970. Then The Mummy’s Ghost was set around
42 William Proctor
that same time. But The Mummy’s Curse is 20 years later. So it is around
1990. Nothing about the manner of dress, for example, makes any attempt to
bring the episode outside of 1944, when it was filmed and released
(2017, 136–137)
Similar problems occur in The Invisible Man franchise. Consisting of five films—
The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman (1940),
The Invisible Agent (1942), and The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944)—the franchise
mainly works as a film series, but also establishes transfictional relationships across
some of the entries. For instance, James Whale’s Invisible Man introduces Dr. Jack
Griffin (Claude Rains), whose experiments have accidentally caused him to become
the invisible man of the title, and in the tradition of resolution and closure, he is dead
by the end of the story. The next film, which arrived seven years after the first, fea-
tures Jack’s brother, Frank Griffin, coincidentally also a scientist who agrees to inject
his friend Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe (Vincent Price) with the invisibility serum. In an
early scene, Frank briefly relays the plot of the first film by providing a transfictional
memory jogger; and like Son of Frankenstein, Ghost of Frankenstein, Dracula’s
Daughter, and Son of Dracula, the theme of family relationships, of heirs and scions,
are mobilized in ways that provide continuity threads across installments. For the
most part, the franchise may be characterized as a family saga comprised of self-
contained episodes, with these familial ties being used as continuity bonds to suggest
an impression of transfictionality without requiring that audiences are required to
understand the films specifically as continuations. Yet while the protagonist of The
Invisible Agent is Jack Griffin’s grandson, following on from The Invisible Man
Returns, the third installment, The Invisible Woman, provides no diegetic informa-
tion to establish the film as being in continuity with the rest of the series. Moreover,
the final chapter, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, introduces Robert Griffin, but does
not attempt to construct narrative threads with other films (we do not learn if
Robert is a legitimate part of the Griffin family tree other than his birth name).
With all these examples in mind, then, Universal appeared to be experimenting
with transfictional storytelling by applying it to the film series, but these experi-
ments were not always conducted as carefully or as thoroughly as audiences,
especially fans, would expect in contemporary terms. It follows, then, that Uni-
versal were ‘working through’ not only what a sequel could be at a time when
series and serial films dominated feature film production, but that they were also
playing at building horror worlds by utilizing continuity logics adopted and adap-
ted from serial entertainments of that time. Perhaps Universal’s grandest experi-
ments with transfictional storytelling came with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf
Man, the first crossover in film history, and the ensemble films that established the
first cinematic universe, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula.
Crossing over
In 1941, Universal introduced The Wolf Man, a werewolf film directed by
George Waggoner that, as previously explained, was not a sequel to The
Werewolf of London, but a new, diegetically independent incarnation. The
success of the former led Universal to produce a sequel that ‘pulled’ The Wolf
Man into the diegetic orbit of Frankenstein, a conceit that audiences would
understand today as a crossover, meaning
beings or things that appear in two or more universes or worlds, suggesting

a linkage, and ‘retroactive linkages’ are what we might call the connections
between two worlds which were conceived and made separately, and not
originally intended to be connected.
(Wolf 2012, 216)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man therefore operates as a sequel to two films—
Ghost of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man—the combination of two discrete
properties illustrating that the characters, from this point onwards, inhabit the
same transfictional plane.
Crossovers in superhero comics arrived during the same period that Franken-
stein Meets the Wolf Man was released: Timely comics (who would be rebranded
Marvel in 1961) had Captain America, the Sub-Mariner and the first iteration of
The Torch appeared together in Marvel Mystery Comics #8 from June 1940; and
National Comics (later DC) introduced the Justice Society of America in All-Star
Comics #3 in December the same year. These examples, however, were quite
exceptional at the time. Batman and Superman would not meet in diegetic space
until 1954; and it was in the 1960s, with the rise of Marvel, that crossovers became
a common trope in superhero comics. Of course, crossovers have a longer history
than superhero comics, with ‘transnarrative’ characters wandering between stories
‘in the pre-mass media age,’ examples of which include Greek mythology, or in
literature, Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (1799–1850) and Anthony
Trollope’s novels (Harvey 2015, 50–51). Crossovers have become much more
common in today’s film franchises, especially those belonging to the superhero
genre—the DC Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, for instance—
but in 1942, this was a new idea for film.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was successful at the box office, and Uni-
versal experimented even further with the next two films in the cycle, House of
Frankenstein and House of Dracula, by including more transnarrative characters,
as the original theatrical poster declared: ‘All Together! Frankenstein’s Monster!
Wolf Man! Dracula! Hunchback! Mad Doctor!’ Although House of Frankenstein
works as a sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, as explored above, there
are no narrative threads or repetitive associations to align John Carradine’s por-
trayal of Dracula with either the 1931 film or Son of Dracula. In fact, Son of Dra-
cula ends with the vampire being killed by sunlight, whereas the Dracula in House
of Frankenstein is revived when a stake is withdrawn from his corpse. This may
suggest that Lugosi’s incarnation is the one being resurrected in the film—he was
staked by Van Helsing in Browning’s original film—but there is no diegetic evi-
dence supplied in House of Frankenstein to indicate that this is the case. From a
world-building perspective, then, the idea that ‘the Universal film monsters know
44 William Proctor
and interact with each other,’ that ‘they inhabit the same fictional and timeless
universe’ is problematic. Leaving the Dracula ‘issue’ to one side, the Invisible Man
and the Mummy franchises are not retroactively linked to either of the monster
rally films, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. Further, the inclusion of
‘Mad Doctor’ and ‘Hunchback’ are not transnarrative characters in this situation,
but intertextual riffs on Henderson’s ‘character-types,’ with the ‘Mad Doctor’
sharing family resemblances with the original Dr Henry Frankenstein, and
‘Hunchback’ with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the latter being related to Uni-
versal’s silent film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name, which
starred Lon ‘the Man with a Thousand Faces’ Chaney (1923). My argument in this
chapter is therefore that the only Universal Monster characters that actually
‘inhabit the same fictional and timeless world’ developed through transfictional
storytelling are Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, with Dracula located in liminal
(continuity) space. As such, the crossover films—Frankenstein Meets the Wolf
Man, House of Frankenstein, and House of Dracula—are best viewed as transfic-
tions existing within the Frankenstein imaginary world, not as a coherent macro-
structure which comprises and interconnects the various Universal Monster fran-
chises into a single diegetic framework.
In 1948, three years after House of Dracula, Universal’s ‘big three,’ Dracula,
Frankenstein’s monster, and the Wolf Man, would return in the parody film Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a film that includes Bela Lugosi’s second (and final)
performance as Dracula for Universal.3 Glenn Strange and Lon Chaney, Jr. would
also reprise their roles as Frankenstein’s monster and Larry Talbot/Wolf Man,
respectively, implying that this film serves as a sequel to House of Dracula (and
perhaps lending weight to the ‘imaginary monster world’ hypothesis). In transfic-
tional contexts, however, the Abbott and Costello films are not continuations, in
that they are not diegetically anchored to its predecessors, but parody or spoof films
that, I would argue, exist outside of continuity (or more accurately, exist as a sub-
world within the imaginary network). This is supported by further installments in
the ‘Abbott and Costello Meets …’ series, in which they also meet the Invisible Man
(1951), and the Mummy (1955), but they do not ‘remember’ their other confronta-
tions with classic monsters (and, by extension, other characters from the series like
Captain Kidd, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the Keystone Cops, etc.). That is to say,
the Abbott and Costello parody films do not belong to a ‘series with continuity,’ but
work as series films ‘proper’—there are no narrative threads to imply that these films
should be viewed as transfictions given that each film begins as a tabula rasa, as if
Abbott and Costello have not had other experiences meeting icons of classic horror
cinema. In fact, the duo play different characters in each of these films.
Admittedly, this is a matter of interpretation. As Jim Knipfel, writing for Den of
Geek, argues, there is no reason that Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein
should not be taken as a legitimate installment in the Universal Horror World. It
does appear that Knipfel, however, is out to castigate fan audiences for caring
about continuity, claiming that this is a ‘very sad debate’ that ‘has raged among
very sad people who either have no problems of their own or far too many to face’
(2019). Perhaps this ‘continuity problem’ is therefore more of a contemporary
game played by ‘textual conservationist’ fans who, as Matt Hills explains, ‘expect
adherence to established tenets, characterisations, and narrative “back stories,”
which production teams thus revise at their peril, disrupting the trust which is
placed in the continuity of a detailed narrative world’ (2002, 28). Unfortunately, it
is no longer possible to conduct research on audiences from the 1930s and 1940s to
explore how viewers negotiated and navigated the logics of continuity and trans-
fictionality across the various Universal franchises (or if, indeed, they cared at all).
Although this chapter has explored the concepts of transfictional storytelling and
world-building by using the Universal Monsters as case study, it is likely that my
approach here should include caveats that, like Johnson’s concerns highlighted in
the introduction, advise scholars to be careful not to examine film viewership
through contemporaneous lenses, most notably regarding the way in which these
films may have been understood by audiences at the time of their original theatrical
exhibition. Yet, as Knipfel’s articles contends, contemporary fans appear to be
haggling over what elements ‘count’ within Universal’s imaginary monster world
(s), illustrating that these properties remain sites of contestation, interpretation,
and analysis more than 80 years or so after they were first released. Clearly, then,
the monsters continue to live on in the twenty-first century.
Conclusion: monster culture

The Abbott and Costello films were not the last gasp for Universal Horror. In 1954,
a new breed of monster emerged with the Gill-Man from Creature from the Black
Lagoon, a film that was originally released in the then-new 3-D format, a hybrid of
horror and science fiction that corresponded with a generic shift occurring in the
cultural marketplace. The Gill-Man would return in two films in as many years,
Revenge of the Creature (1955), also shot in 3-D, and The Creature Walks Among
Us (1956). It seems that Universal were keen to produce sequels on a regular basis,
unlike the belated installments from the 1930s and 1940s, and much more like con-
temporary film franchises like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Saw, and
Paranormal Activity, and so on (see the introduction to this volume).
Still, the monsters would not go gently into that good night. In 1957, the British
studio, Hammer, picked up the baton from Universal and released Terrence Fish-
er’s The Curse of Frankenstein starring Peter Cushing, who would return as the
Baron in six of the Hammer franchise films; although the Hammer series was a
diegetically independent sequence, what I would describe as a public domain
reboot of the Universal iterations. That Frankenstein had been in the public
domain for some time allowed Hammer to proceed without worrying about
copyright, although Universal ensured that Jack Pearce’s legendary make-up for
Frankenstein’s monster would be granted protection under existing copyright leg-
islation. The following year, Hammer’s Dracula followed, also directed by Fisher,
and gave Christopher Lee his most instantly recognizable role (Lee would return as
the character in six films released by Hammer between 1966 and 1973). And in
1959, Hammer produced The Mummy, also starring Lee, a remake that re-assem-
bled a few elements taken from the Universal sequels, The Mummy’s Hand, The
46 William Proctor
Mummy’s Tomb, and The Mummy’s Ghost, while also interrogating aspects of
British imperialism and ‘troubled masculinity’ (Hutchings 1993, 71). Hammer’s
Mummy would feature in three more installments, namely, The Curse of the
Mummy’s Tomb (1964), The Mummy’s Shroud (1966), and Blood of the
Mummy’s Tomb (1967).
For Universal, their monster franchises would be given a new lease of life not in
film, but on television. In 1957, the same year that Hammer released The Curse of
Frankenstein, the syndication arm of Universal Pictures, Screen Gems, sold its
‘Shock Theater’ package of 52 horror and thriller movies to TV broadcasters in
Philadelphia, New York, and ‘other large metropolitan markets’, effectively re-cir-
culating ‘a catalogue of films from Universal’s golden age of horror’ (Rehak 2012,
30) that, according to Mark Voger, became an overnight sensation that saw network
ratings increase between 38 and 1,125 percent (2015, 15). The Universal Monsters
were well represented—Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Invisible
Man were included, as were a few sequel films—Dracula’s Daughter, Son of Fran-
kenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy’s Hand, The Wolf Man, The
Mummy’s Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Son of Dracula, and The
Mummy’s Ghost (Voger 2015). New audiences, especially adolescents and teenagers,
caught onto what would become a veritable ‘monster craze,’ and many companies
sought to tap into the phenomenon by unleashing a tsunami of paratextual and
merchandised expressions. On February 24, 1959, horror and sci-fi fan, Forest K.
Ackerman, launched Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine published by James
Warren that ran for 191 issues until it was cancelled in 1983 (it was relaunched in
1993 and lasted until 2008). Within its pages, the magazine ran features on the classic
monsters, servicing an audience of baby-boomers for whom the Shock TV package
would have been their first experiences of classic cinematic horror. In a sense,
Famous Monsters of Filmland constructed a paratextual relay that reverberated
between television broadcasts and critical, fannish appreciation, with each pointing
toward one another to complicate relationships between text and paratext.
In the 1960s, an armada of merchandise hit the market and foreshadowed the
licensing bonanza of the late 1970s and 1980s, predating George Lucas’ Star Wars
(1977) by 15 years or so. Dracula merchandise was usually branded with the image
of Bela Lugosi as Universal had made no attempt to license the images of Carra-
dine and Lon Chaney, Jr. (Skal 2004, 253). It seemed that there was
almost no kind of consumer product or novelty that could not be enhanced by

Lugosi’s presence as the vampire. Among the licensed items featuring Lugosi’s
screen image of Dracula were children’s phonograph records, plastic toy
pencil sharpeners, greeting cards, and talking greeting cards, plastic model
figures, T-shirts, sweatshirts and patches, rings and pins, monster old-maid
card games, soap and detergent products, Halloween costumes and masks,
enlargograph sets and kits, target games, picture puzzles, mechanical walking
toys, ink-on transfers, trading cards, Halloween candy and gum, comic books,
self-erasing magic slates, cutout paper dolls and books, ‘monster mansion’
vehicles, wax figurines, candy dispensers, transparencies, kites, calendars and
prints, sliding-square puzzle games, children’s and ladies’ jewelry, belts and
belt buckles, wall plaques, wallets, juvenile luggage … junior high-school
English textbooks, five-cent candy … and hors d’oeuvres accessories.
(Skal 1993, 253)
In the fall of 1962, Aurora Plastics of Hempstead, Long Island, released a new line
of plastic model kits that they aimed at young male hobbyists, ‘rigid plastic simu-
lacra of the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s monster, and Dracula, their images officially
licensed by Universal Pictures’ (Skal 1993, 274). The Aurora model-kits swiftly
became a phenomenon in and of themselves, what Bob Rehak describes as ‘object
practices’ that heralded fannish participatory cultures as explored by Henry Jen-
kins in the seminal Textual Poachers (1992). While Aurora’s model-kits originally
featured several of Universal’s monsters—Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, The
Wolf Man, and the Bride of Frankenstein all came in a first wave—other famous
monsters of filmland became available over time. By 1968, King Kong and Godzilla
would join the cavalcade of Aurora’s monstrous model-kits.
In the 1970s, UK editor Piers Dudgeon had acquired the rights to develop a series
of novelizations based on six Universal Monster films, three of which were written
by British horror author, Ramsey Campbell (under the pen name, Carl Dreadstone).
Published in 1978 by W.H. Allen and Co., Campbell was initially asked to write all
six of the novels, but he chose three: The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein, and The
Wolf Man. While film novelizations became popular during the 1960s and 1970s—
Alan Dean Foster’s adaptations of Star Wars and Alien, and Gene Roddenberry’s
Star Trek: The Motion Picture sold millions of copies prior to the inception of home
video—there had been a few film novelizations in the 1930s. One of the first from the
sound era was King Kong in 1933, but Universal also dallied with the form.
Although not a novelization per se, Grosset and Dunlap published a new edition of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as part of its series of ‘photoplay’ editions, the jacket
design bearing the image of Boris Karloff as the monster along ‘with film stills of
scenes that never occurred in her original’ (Hitchcock 2007, 165–166). In 1939, Son of
Frankenstein was adapted into a comic strip (Davis 2017, 73); and both Bride of
Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon were novelized, respectively,
by Michael Egremont and Vago Statten (John Russell Fearn) at the time of their
original theatrical exhibition. Between 2006 and 2007, a series of licensed novels
from Dark Horse publishing appeared that ‘reimagined’ or continued classic Uni-
versal Monster films, including Dracula: Asylum by Paul Witcover; The Shadow of
Frankenstein by Stefan Pehrucha; The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride by
Elizabeth Hand; Michael Jan Friedman’s The Wolf Man: Hunter’s Moon; Michael
Paine’s The Mummy: Dark Resurrection; and The Creature from the Black Lagoon:
Time’s Black Lagoon by Paul de Filippo. Dark Horse Comics also published Uni-
versal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horror in 2006, a graphic novel that adapted Fran-
kenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon into
comics form. For films that would have been between 50 and 70 years old at that
point, it is quite remarkable that the Universal Monsters continue to live on across a
range of transfictional and transmedia locales.
48 William Proctor
More recently, Universal Pictures have started remaking, re-imagining, and
rebooting their catalogue of classic monster films. In 2010, Joe Johnston direc-
ted The Wolf Man starring Benicio del Toro, and in 2014, Universal hired Alex
Kutzman and Chris Morgan to oversee the creation of an expanded universe of
monster films. Branded as the ‘Dark Universe,’ the first two films, Dracula
Untold (2014) and The Mummy (2017), failed to generate enough box office
revenues to proceed with plans, yet in 2020, Universal’s partnership with
Blumhouse led to James Whannell’s The Invisible Man, which was successful in
both critical and commercial spheres (see Todd Platts’ chapter on Blumhouse in
this volume [Chapter 6]). Although the idea of a shared ‘Dark Universe’ may be
dead for the time being, one thing appears to be certain at the time of writing.
The Universal Monsters will rise from the grave once more (if they’ve ever
been truly dead at all).
Notes
1 The same logic would also seem to apply to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in that it is
often described as the first science fiction novel, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula being cate-
gorized as horror literature, considering that those terms were not in use at the time of
their publication. What is more, the term ‘horror’ was not used to describe Tod Brown-
ing’s Dracula, the first film in the horror cycle of the 1930s—it was termed a ‘vampire
thriller’ on cinema posters at time—implying that the film should not be understood as
horror cinema, at least if we accept should Johnson’s discursive bracketing.
2 I adapt the term ‘transfictional memory jogger’ from John Fiske’s ‘intertextual
memory jogger’ presented in Television Culture (1987, 109).
3 Bela Lugosi did, however, star as a thinly-veiled Dracula analogue in Lew Landers’
Return of the Vampire for Columbia in 1943.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Ramsey Campbell for sharing an unpublished essay about his role as
Carl Dreadstone and the 1970s novelizations of Universal Monsters.
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Part I
Slasher and post-slashers
2 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
A ‘peculiar, erratic’ franchise
Mark Bernard
In 1973, Texas-based director Tobe Hooper, together with co-writer Kim Henkel
and a host of young filmmakers in the Austin area, produced The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre (TCSM),1 a low-budget horror film that Hooper hoped would get him
noticed in Hollywood (Bloom 2004). Released in 1974 by independent distributor
Bryanston Pictures, TCSM scored at the box office and foreshadowed a shift in the
Hollywood film industry as the major studios modified their release patterns to the
saturation model utilized by exploitation distributors, simultaneously releasing films
in all markets with aggressive marketing campaigns. Saturation booking was once
best employed for ‘picture[s] of poor quality to skim off the curious before bad
reviews or negative word-of-mouth took effect’ (Balio 1987, 211). However, major
studios began to use it as ‘a way of signaling [a film’s] importance’ (Cook 2007, 134).
These ‘blockbuster’ films took on ‘particular importance,’ often ‘for the simple
reason that they announce[d] themselves as such’ (Stringer 2003, 5). The studios
intended that these blockbusters serve as ‘the spearhead for numerous concurrent
revenue streams’ and ‘prove sufficiently popular to inaugurate a “franchise”—a
series of sequels whose shelf life could extend for decades’ (Cook 2007, 134). This
change affected every level of the American film industry. Major studios sought out
‘high concept’ films with easily summarized plots and cross-promotional potential
(see Wyatt 1994), while independents looked for low budget versions of high concept
blockbusters that could attract a wide audience, hopefully with major studio dis-
tribution, and in the process, spawn franchises.
For a brief period, independents found a formula suited for ‘sequelization’ in
the so-called slasher film, a sub-genre that Carolyn Jess-Cooke has argued is
successful partially because of its ability to satisfy audiences’ ‘compulsion to
repeat’ (2009, 9). A hybrid of horror and youth cinema, slashers feature the for-
mula of ‘a blade-wielding killer preying on a group of young people’ (Nowell
2011, 16). According to Jess-Cooke, the slasher and the sequel have a symbiotic
relationship as the slasher ‘both exploits and contributes to the sequel’s (per-
ceived) function as mode of cannibalizing old stories,’ and the sequel enables
‘genre conventions and imperatives’ essential to slashers (2009, 53, 55). Films like
Halloween (1978), about babysitters terrorized by a masked killer, and Friday the
13th (1980), about teenagers stalked by a murderer at summer camp, proved
exploitable and launched franchises. With its story of five youths stalked by a
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-4
54 Mark Bernard
cannibal family, TCSM prefigured these slashers, arriving several years before
with its deliriously exploitable title and a hard-sell saturation release by an
independent distributor, just as the majors were nicking these tactics for the
blockbuster. But a sequel to TCSM did not arrive until 1986, even though the
film was enjoying success in both theatrical and home video markets in the early
1980s (Nowell 2011, 59; Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1991, 290). While the origi-
nal film shares some characteristics with the slasher film, Richard Nowell has
argued that it bears ‘only tangential similarities to teen slashers’ (2011, 58), per-
haps making the film something more difficult to replicate than a more run-of-
the-mill slasher. Looking back on the franchise in 2017, Dennis Harvey observed
that: ‘[c]onsidering the game-changing stature of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original in
the annals of horror cinema, it’s odd that “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” has
had such a peculiar, erratic life in franchise terms’ (Harvey 2017).
This chapter examines factors that led to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s
‘peculiar, erratic life’ as a franchise. While it is true that disputes over ownership
and other legalities have sometimes complicated the franchise, other roadblocks
are more difficult to identify. Discourses of authenticity and mythology created a
nearly impenetrable forcefield around the first film that defied sequelization. The
film’s legend and reputation made the source text unstable and difficult to repro-
duce, foreshadowing challenges the franchise would face once sequels and remakes
emerged. While ‘world-building’ is a crucial practice for making a franchise, with
each episode building upon the past and offering audiences multiple points of entry
into a cohesive shared universe (Parody 2011, 214), entries in TCM franchise often
do not world-build, but rather, world-destroy, ignoring or challenging past entries.
The TCM franchise is unwieldy, demonstrating that building a franchise can
sometimes be as difficult as herding humans for slaughter.
‘A curiously isolated phenomenon’

Any filmmaker daring to make a sequel to TCSM faced an uphill battle, partly
because the film so effectively emphasized its reality. The film claims to be based
on actual events, but these events were fabricated, being based very loosely on the
crimes of notorious grave-robber Ed Gein. The film’s opening scroll informs the
audience they are about to witness the ‘mad and macabre’ details of ‘one of the
most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history.’ Cynical audiences could
have more easily dismissed this warning if the film’s grainy, saturated doc-
umentary-style images—signaling ‘authenticity’—had not followed it.
More difficult than reproducing the authenticity on display in front of the camera,
however, was the perceived authenticity behind it. Some believed the challenging
circumstances of the film’s production imbued it with unique power. Danny Peary
proclaims that ‘the mysterious ingredient’ responsible for TCSM’s effect is ‘realism
transferred from the set to the screen’ (1981, 350). As John Caldwell argues, in the
entertainment industry, ‘behind-the-scenes’ stories usually fall into different ‘trade
genres’ to ‘make sense’ of ‘specific work worlds’ for laborers in various work sectors
(2008, 38). The mythos surrounding the making of TCSM contains plenty of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 55
examples of what Caldwell calls ‘war stories’ that demonstrate the ‘related ability’
of the filmmakers to ‘make art or creatively innovate with few temporal or financial
resources and support’ (Caldwell 2008, 41). Stories about the film’s hellish produc-
tion became the stuff of legend: temperatures on location reaching triple digits;
rapidly decomposing dead animals used as set decoration; cast and crew members
vomiting; actress Marilyn Burns being struck with prop weapons until bleeding; all
stories that can be used not only to give the film’s crew a ‘mystique of technical
mastery’ (Caldwell 2008, 47), but also to bolster the film’s sense of authenticity. In
cinematic discourses, there is already a ‘prejudice against the sequel’ that denigrates
them as inauthentic cash-grabs (Hutchings 2013, 20), and for a film as discursively
steeped in authenticity as TCSM, a sequel seemed unthinkable. For years after its
release, TCSM ‘remained a curiously isolated phenomenon’ (Bloom 2004) until
Hooper was cajoled into making a sequel.
Parodic apocalypse: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

After the success of Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), Menahem Golan and Yoram
Globus, heads of mini-major Cannon Films, signed Hooper to a three-picture deal,
promising to finance two big budget films if Hooper agreed to direct a TCSM
sequel (Jaworzyn 2003, 138). After Hooper’s first two films with Cannon—Life-
force (1985) and Invaders from Mars (1986)—flopped, Cannon secured sequel
rights for TCSM from all its rights-holders. Hooper was reluctant to direct the
sequel and planned to only produce it, but he ended up helming the film, titled The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (TCM 2).
For the sequel, Hooper amplified two elements: gore and dark humor. Even
though the original film was relatively bloodless, it was nevertheless labeled a ‘gore’
film (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1991, 289). For the sequel, Hooper decided to live
up to this reputation and employed Tom Savini, a rock star in the world of splattery
special effects. Savini assured one journalist that the film was ‘not going to pull back’
when it came to graphic violence (quoted in McDonnell 1986, 15). Hooper also
wanted more humour in the sequel, saying he was frustrated about ‘the comedy in
the first film not being appreciated’ (quoted in Muir 2002, 38). This black comedy
mostly stems from the cannibal family’s violent bickering, as the Cook (Jim Siedow),
the eldest of the brothers who runs their human-flesh-serving store, screams out-
rageous epithets at his brothers—the Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) and Leatherface
(Gunnar Hansen)—and swats them with a stick. Hooper featured more of the
family’s antics in TCM 2; Jim Siedow reprised his role as the Cook, Bill Johnson
returned as Leatherface, and the Hitchhiker was replaced by his brother Chop-Top,
played by Bill Moseley. The family moves to the city and turns cannibalism into big
business by serving human flesh to unsuspecting football fans, leading to interpreta-
tions of the film as a dark satire of Reagan-era capitalism. The absurdity is heigh-
tened when Lefty Enright (Dennis Hooper), a demented Texas ranger whose niece
and nephew were victims of the family, invades the family’s underground lair,
brandishing a chainsaw, while sporting two mini-chainsaws holstered to his hips like
six-shooters, and seeking revenge like a twisted action hero.
56 Mark Bernard
Perhaps Hooper felt that parody was the only direction in which he could take
the family’s story after nearly a decade of slasher films forced him to build a TCM
franchise using well-worn conventions. Nevertheless, TCM 2 effectively employs
imagery in ways that draw from the original film’s legacy but also offers moments
of reflexive satire, with one example being the chainsaw itself. By the mid-1980s,
the chainsaw had become a generic marker of the horror genre, popping up in
‘spoofs’ as a cult sight gag that ‘signals a moment of pasticcio, of simultaneously
acknowledging a solid place in a generic tradition started by [TCSM], yet also
pulling it out of this narrow generification’ (Mathijs and Sexton 2011, 228). Films
containing chainsaws and other objects of cult pasticcio often incorporate ‘a
number of references to, or quotations from, heterogeneous works, creating a
multivocal play of competing textualities’ (Mathijs and Sexton 2011, 227).
TCM 2 embraces the pasticcio of the chainsaw and competing textualities,
creating a postmodern landscape of what Cynthia Freeland calls ‘Texasisms’:
‘Texas as the Wild West … now the site only of cliched references to a chilli
cook-off, college football, the Alamo, Texas Rangers, and six-shooters’
(2000, 248). In this context, the chainsaw becomes a signifier for ‘Texas’, and ripe
for postmodern parody. Hooper offers scenarios in which the chainsaw overtly
becomes, rather than a fearsome instrument of death, a symbol of phallic tri-
umph and/or failure (Freeland 2000, 249). When Leatherface attacks Stretch
(Caroline Williams), the female protagonist, his desire for her gives him pause.
He attempts to use his chainsaw as a phallus, but its failure as an object of
pleasure sends Leatherface into an impotent rage. Eventually, Stretch effectively
wields the chainsaw, standing triumphantly atop the Matterhorn of an aban-
doned theme park, a parody of the Final Girl’s phallic triumph in slasher films
(see Clover 1992). All told, TCM 2 illustrates how the sequel can function as
fertile ground for playful deconstruction.
Yet, TCM 2 proved to be infertile ground for growing a franchise. Ostensibly,
there are ways in which TCM 2 resembles a ‘proper’ sequel that shows the evo-
lution of characters, but beyond that, TCM 2 erodes, rather than complements,
the original film’s authority as a source text. Parody and satire are certainly not
always detrimental to franchise development (Parody 2011, 212), but they may be
when one text deconstructs another as vigorously as TCM 2 does its predecessor.
As Freeland claims, TCM 2 ‘recreates the scenes of [the first film] as demon-
strable fakes through the use of grotesque parody’ (2000, 250), and the film does
not further the narrative of the cannibal family as much as it provides an exces-
sively gory send-up of the original film and slasher films that followed. Indeed,
the film was too gory for an R rating, so Cannon, working with a tight deadline
to get the film into pre-sold territories on time, released the film unrated, ham-
pering its commercial potential. Although Cannon would see a return on the
relatively cheap $5 million movie, the film received a lukewarm reception from
critics and fans. In one review, Jami Bernard declared: ‘If you don’t like slasher
movies, you won’t like [TCM 2]—it’s too gruesome. And if you do like slasher
movies, you won’t like [TCM 2] either—it’s too funny’ (quoted in Muir 2002, 113).
TCM 2’s attempt to mix horror with humor therefore came up flat.
World-building: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III
Three years later, New Line Cinema released Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre III (TCM 3). The studio had made a fortune with the Nightmare on Elm
Street franchise, but by 1989, interest in the Nightmare franchise was waning. New
Line had the rights to the Leatherface character after distributing the original film, so
they decided to make TCM 3 the jumping-off point for a new series. They secured the
rights to use the TCM name from the rights-holders and hired Jeff Burr to direct
because he had just finished a sequel, The Stepfather II (1989), a direct-to-video film
upgraded to theatrical release after strong advance screenings. Horror novelist David
J. Schow, who was part of the then cutting-edge ‘Splatterpunk’ movement in horror
fiction, was commissioned to write the screenplay, with the edict to avoid the ‘camp’
approach of TCM 2 (‘Filmmaker Commentary’ 2003). With rights in hand, a director
with sequel-making experience, and a hot author scripting, New Line aimed to build
a franchise.
The makers of TCM 3 practiced world-building, an activity that Parody identifies
as integral to creating an entertainment franchise (2011, 214). World-building
involves creating a fully realized narrative world full of ‘detail and diegetic fact’ that
strengthens the brand and offers multiple points of entry for audiences (2011, 214).
Schow ornamented the story with details that would both link the film to the original
and act as trademark-ready ‘hooks’. One such detail is a brace made out of human
bones for Leatherface’s leg that he injured when dropping his chainsaw on it in the
first film (Schow 1989, 38). New Line loved Schow’s addition of Leatherface’s ‘“terror
truck” with a hood bra made out of tanned human flesh’ (quoted in Jaworzyn
2003, 190), while Leatherface also gets a chrome-plated chainsaw with an extended
blade emblazed with logline-ready phrase ‘The Saw Is Family’. These details would
be relished by a company that released an entire line of Nightmare merchandise,
items that facilitate ‘a prolonged, multitextual, multimedia experience’ with a fran-
chise (Parody 2011, 211).
However, there were other complications. One was the first draft of Schow’s
screenplay, which Burr called ‘a gore-a-thon … purely gore for gore’s sake’
(quoted in Warren 1990, 19). Burr scaled back Schow’s script, although Schow
disapproved, suggesting that a sequel to the original film would need to up the
ante, yet New Line’s mantra was to use the first film as a template, retaining its
lack of gore and tense atmosphere. Burr was in New Line’s camp, until he realized
their vision was tamer than his, which he saw as already modest. New Line
demanded cuts to the film’s gore and story changes, like having one protagonist
(Ken Foree) survive because execs wanted him in a sequel. Then, the Motion Pic-
ture Association of America (MPAA) demanded cuts that were so extensive that
the film could not make its original release date. When the R-rated cut of the film
limped into theaters, box office performance was tepid, and fan reception ranged
from mixed to negative. Chas Balun summed up the frustrated fan reaction in his
review: ‘Reportedly, little of splattermeister David Schow’s original script made it
to the screen, deemed by reactionary, chicken-shit New Line execs as “too violent.”
Yo, listen up, dorks! It’s supposed to be a massacre, not a fuckin’ picnic’ (1995, 50).
58 Mark Bernard
Balun’s reaction and the competing visions of New Line, Burr, and Schow reveal
another difficulty in franchising TCM: the source text had become unstable. When a
‘source text is successful and established enough,’ adaptations of the source text can
‘[ensure] a consumer base will follow a franchise’ (Parody 2011, 211). The original
film was successful, but the mythos surrounding the film, the notorious connotations
of the film’s title, and its reputation destabilized what TCM’s ‘true’ semantic ele-
ments were. Parody notes that all franchise multitexts are ‘characteristically diffuse
and unstable’ (2011, 211), but there is perhaps only so much instability that a source
text can handle. For New Line, the marketability of the title was paramount, but
there was also an effort to recreate the atmosphere of the original. Burr’s vision
aligned with New Line’s, but he felt the violence should be more graphic, in keeping
with audience expectations and the generic contexts of the time. For Schow, gory
violence was essential. He was aware of New Line’s edict to avoid any echoes of
TCM 2, but at the same time, his first draft retained its graphic gore. Overall, the
original’s elusive aura of ‘authenticity’ seemed difficult to capture most of all. Sequels
are ‘haunted by the spectre of the commercial and hegemonic anxieties about the
commodification of art and entertainment’ (Parody 2011, 216), and suspicion that
TCM 3 was trying to blithely reproduce the ‘artistic achievement’ of the first film
hovered over the production. Actor William Butler would later recall: ‘[New Line]
knew that by making [the film] sorta commercial, there was a gamble they were going
to take away some of the visceralness of it, and it turns out they were right’ (‘Saw Is
Family’ 2003).
For a film that was meant to strengthen TCM as a brand name, TCM 3 was
inadequate and confusing, as it seemed unmoored from the continuity of both
TCSM and TCM 2. Sequels typically ‘attempt to continue and feed into fan
cultures generated by a recent film installment’ (Jess-Cooke 2009, 10), but by
avoiding allusions to TCM 2, TCM 3 made little effort to capitalize off that
recent release. Perhaps the most significant way TCM 3 distanced itself from its
immediate predecessor was the creation of an all-new cannibal family for Lea-
therface with no explanation of what happened to his family at the end of
TCM 2. Since that family was the same family as the first film, TCM 3 did not
follow continuity logics of the first film either.
While TCM 3’s relationship with the past was uncertain, what New Line envi-
sioned for the series was clear. The film had what Jess-Cooke calls ‘sequel logic,’ a
narrative with opportunities for sequels to be ‘built in’ (2009, 10). The makers of
TCM 3 had an eye toward sequelization, keeping Leatherface and two protagonists
alive at the end, and definitively killing off only one member of the new cannibal
family. But after the film’s poor performance, New Line abandoned the franchise.
World-destroying: The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre

In 1993, another TCM film went into production that would further muddy the
waters by resembling both a sequel and remake. The Return of the Texas Chain-
saw Massacre (TCM 4) was written and directed by Kim Henkel, the co-screen-
writer of the original film, and produced independently on a budget of around half
a million dollars (Jaworzyn 2003, 198). After a complicated legal process, Henkel
and attorney Bob Kuhn, one of the investors of the original film, ended up owning
almost all of TCM rights (Wooley 1994). Henkel and Kuhn raised money them-
selves, insisting that they completely control the film in order to correct the mis-
takes of the film’s sequels (Wooley 1995, 51). Kuhn explained: ‘[T]he last [sequel]
was so bad … I wanted to go back to the original’ (quoted in Wooley 1994).
Henkel concurred that the failures of the two sequels were a ‘major motivation’ to
make TCM 4 (quoted in Wooley 1995, 49).
The discourse surrounding TCM 4 foregrounds two dimensions of franchising
that can be applied to the TCM franchise as a whole; that ‘adaptations that
implicitly or explicitly engage more than one specific text’ are ‘the rule, rather
than the exception’ in franchises (Parody 2011, 212). Texts in franchise story-
telling do not simply adapt a central text; franchises are instead made up of an
array of texts in conversation and sequence. In the case of the TCM franchise,
these conversations are not always harmonious. Franchise ‘narratives and
worldbuilding frequently spill over into liminal texts like creator interviews or
authorized guides’ (Parody 2011, 212), with these paratextual materials framing
audience reception. Amidst discourse surrounding the TCM franchise exists a
significant amount of liminal texts that seek to delegitimize other texts in the
franchise. Kuhn’s and Henkel’s comments about TCM 4 provide an example of
these strategies, as they attempt to position their film as the true successor of the
original. TCM 3 used similar discourses to distance itself from TCM 2.
To create a legitimate TCM film, then, Henkel adhered so closely to the original
film that it resembles a remake more than sequel, although there was a difference
that Henkel thought would open up possibilities for the franchise moving forward.
Henkel explains that ‘because of what happened with the sequels, the series needed
to be revitalized. So I went back to the original. The structure is very similar’
(quoted in Wooley 1995, 49). Henkel banked the franchise’s future on the intro-
duction of an enigmatic businessman, Rothman (James Gale), who has a myster-
ious connection with the Chainsaw family. Rothman arrives at the family’s house,
via limo, in the middle of their torture of Jenny (Renee Zellweger). He takes aside
Vilmer, the family’s leader (Matthew McConaughey), and castigates him: ‘What is
this? This is appalling. You’re here for one reason. I want these people to know the
meaning of horror.’ He then licks Jenny’s face and departs. He reappears after
Jenny escapes the family, picking her up in his limo, apologizing about the
experience, and offering to take her to the hospital.
Henkel identified Rothman as the crucial element of his world-building, but the
execution undermines the effort. ‘What I’ve done is open new doors,’ proclaimed
Henkel. ‘Rothman represents a whole new world’ (quoted in Wooley 1995, 51).
The film hints that Rothman belongs to a secret society that profits from fear cre-
ated by the family. Henkel possibly envisioned sequels depicting the family carry-
ing out future atrocities for Rothman and his associates, but Rothman’s dialogue
undercuts the possibility of these stories being worth watching. Rothman’s words
to Jenny after her struggle read like an apology to the audience for the film they
just watched: ‘This … all this … it’s been an abomination. You really must accept
60 Mark Bernard
my sincere apologies … I can’t tell you how disappointed I am. Perhaps it’s dis-
appointment that keeps us going.’ (Rothman may be read as a surrogate for the
disappointed spectator, hardly inspiring confidence in future stories.)
At the hospital, Jenny locks eyes with a traumatized woman wheeled by on a
gurney. The woman is Marilyn Burns, who played Sally, the sole survivor of the
first film. A police officer (John Dugan) tells Jenny, ‘this isn’t the first time some-
thing like this has happened. This is not the end of it,’ perhaps foregrounding the
repetitive nature of sequelization, Rothman’s weary words suggesting a fatigue
with franchised entertainment. The family in TCM 4 are not cannibals, so
moments like Leatherface hanging a victim on a meat hook are mere routine. The
film was picked up for distribution by Columbia Tri-Star, but they buried it in
1997, releasing it in only a handful of theaters under the title Texas Chainsaw
Massacre: The Next Generation, as if to suggest a new beginning to the franchise.
However, the circumstances of its release felt like anything but.
Reinventing the steel: twenty-first-century chainsaw

November 2001 saw the birth of Platinum Dunes, a studio founded by Michael Bay
and his business partners, and their inaugural production was a remake of TCSM,
titled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM). At the time, ‘research [showed] that
90% of the film’s core, males-under-25 audience knew the title of Hooper’s film,
but had never seen it’ (Foundas 2003). Platinum Dunes’ choice to proceed with this
remake lends credence to Thomas Leitch’s claim that ‘remakes typically invoke the
aura of their originals rather than their memory’ (2001, 44). Everything aligned at
the box office, and the film, which cost $9.5 million to produce, grossed $80.5
million in the United States, making it the first in a wave of horror remakes that
dominated the US film market for the rest of the decade.
Some of the film’s success may be attributable to the way that it balances inviting
fans of the original back to theaters as well as audiences with little knowledge of
Hopper’s film or the series as a whole. According to Leitch, remakes must ‘provid[e]
different pleasures to audiences who have different kinds of knowledge and interest
in the original film’ (2001, 43), and TCM entices both fans and more indiscriminate
viewers from the beginning. The film opens with grainy, black and white footage of
bodies being wheeled into an ambulance. Somber narration introduces the crime
scene as bulbs make a distorted clicking noise, an aural intertextual linchpin with the
opening of Hooper’s original. The narrator is John Larroquette, who also narrated
the original film’s opening scroll, and the accompanying narration’s opening words
and bizarre flashbulb noises both match the original, but there are new pleasures and
variations as well. Shaky, hand-held footage depicts a police officer doing a walk-
through of the crime scene, an opening that appeals to non-fan audiences by appro-
priating ‘found footage’ techniques of The Blair Witch Project (1999), a huge hit a
few years before (Worland 2007, 225).
While there are similarities with the original film, the differences outnumber
them. The premise is the same—a group of five young people run afoul of a
violent family in the countryside— and set pieces from the original are
replayed: Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) dispatches a victim (Eric Balfour)
with a sledgehammer and hangs another (Mike Vogel) on a meat hook, among
other intertextual relays. Beyond that, the film differs significantly. While Lea-
therface remains a main threat, another member of the family, Sheriff Hoyt (R.
Lee Emrey), equally terrorizes the victims. Also, cannibalism is absent from the
film. Reportedly, distributor New Line was uncomfortable with cannibalism
and instructed the filmmakers to de-emphasize it; instead, the family keeps
children of past victims. Beyond that, the film offers no motivation for their
actions. It could be argued that these differences are emblematic of an effort to
avoid the franchise’s past. Director Marcus Nispel explained that he ‘looked at
the original story that Texas Chainsaw [sic] Massacre was based on the Ed
Gein case’ and decided to go ‘much deeper into that’ (quoted in Allen 2003, 8).
Nispel’s strategy falls in line with many filmmakers who ‘describe the various
ways in which they have transformed [an original] property for a contemporary
audience’ (Verevis 2005, 133).
While it would be easy to bemoan how contemporary audiences enjoy rehashed
entertainment by way of artistically bankrupt remakes, a more compelling question
may be why the most successful of a franchise’s entries is one that least resembles the
original, and thus challenges arguments about aura and authenticity. These ques-
tions about the franchise grow more complicated with the franchise’s next film, The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (TCM: TB), released in 2006.
TCM: TB adheres more closely to the original and attempts to epitomize every-
thing the franchise represents in popular culture. Serving as a prequel to the remake,
suggesting that the latter also served to reboot the franchise (see Proctor 2020)—
another sign of the franchise’s difficulty with sequelization—the film reveals the
beginnings of the family’s killing spree. Cannibalism returns in full force; an early
scene depicts Hoyt murdering the town sheriff (Lew Temple) and serving him to the
family. The film is the franchise’s goriest since TCM 2, and director Jonathan Lie-
besman employs frenetic, handheld camerawork that gives the film a documentary
tone and tenor. Thus, this film brings together the franchise’s reputation for blood-
letting with stylistic elements from the original and looks backward at the franchise’s
history, resurrecting tropes dating back to the original film. Intriguingly, however,
despite summoning the legacy of the original, TCM: TB did not connect with audi-
ences as much as the remake did, grossing only about half of the previous film’s take
at the box office in the US. Many factors could possibly account for the decrease in
revenue, but it is possible that the success of the remake, compared to the under-
performance of its prequel, demonstrates that audiences were intrigued by the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre title but were not particularly seeking a film like the original. For
whatever reason, Platinum Dunes announced in January 2007 that they were not
making a third TCM film.
In 2008, producer Carl Mazzocone bought the franchise rights and struck a
distribution deal with Lionsgate, aiming to make seven new films with Texas
Chainsaw 3D (TC 3D) being the first. Lionsgate rejected the original story idea
for TC 3D because they disapproved on its focus on cannibalism, echoing New
Line’s aversion to cannibalism in the 2003 remake. While New Line attempted
62 Mark Bernard
to cut ties with the franchise’s past, TC 3D takes great pains to reconnect with
it. TC 3D’s first scene takes place moments after the original film’s ending,
establishing the film as a direct sequel to the original. For this scene, the film’s
crew built an elaborate reproduction of the cannibal family’s house. The film
further establishes its kinship with the past by featuring franchise alumni Mar-
ilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen, and Bill Moseley in small roles. In the film, a
young woman named Heather (Alexandra Daddario) learns she was adopted
and that her original family are the Sawyers, a clan of criminals and murderers
who are killed when a lynch mob burns down their house. The death of an aunt
leads her back home to discover that her cousin, Leatherface (Dan Yeager),
survived the family’s lynching and has been under the care of her aunt. Heather
teams up with Leatherface to take down the townspeople who lynched their
family. Savvy marketing on Lionsgate’s part, combined with inflated prices for
3D tickets, helped the film grab the number one spot for its opening weekend.
Even though the film’s box office was frontloaded and quickly dropped off, its
opening weekend success was enough to convince the film’s producers and
Lionsgate to develop a follow-up.
For reasons apparently having to do with squabbles over film rights, pre-produc-
tion for the follow-up stalled. In mid-2014, screenwriter Seth M. Sherwood and
directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo were hired to helm the project. The
film, titled Leatherface (2017), acts as a prequel to the original, telling the story of Jed
Sawyer (Sam Strike), a boy placed in a mental institution as a pre-adolescent. During
a riot, a now-teenaged Jed escapes with a small group of other inmates. At first, Jed
seems like a gentle, misunderstood soul, but after the police shoot and kill one of his
friends, Jed violently murders the officer responsible and is shot in the face by another
officer. Disfigured and consumed by madness, Jed embraces his destiny as Leatherface
and begins dispatching victims with a chainsaw. As such, Leatherface fits in with a
trend of slasher remakes, like Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), that give the killer an
origin story involving some sort of childhood trauma (Nelson 2010). This update to
Leatherface’s character must have underwhelmed executives at Lionsgate, however,
as the distributor shelved the film upon completion in 2016, although the film even-
tually surfaced in late 2017, receiving a video-on demand (VOD) release and a limited
theatrical release that grossed under $1 million. After the release of Leatherface, one
of the film’s producers tweeted that, due to the delay between TCM 3D and Lea-
therface, they had lost the rights and would not be producing any further TCM films.
Nevertheless, it appears that the world-building—and world-destroying—in the
TCM franchise will continue in the future. In 2018, the rights to the franchise were
acquired by Legendary Pictures, a deal that led to much excitement given the com-
pany’s strong track record, including fan-favorite hits such as Christopher Nolan’s
Dark Knight trilogy and Warner Bros.’ MonsterVerse films featuring Godzilla and
King Kong (Miska 2018). While few plot details are known for certain as of this
writing, the new film purportedly acts as a direct sequel to Hooper’s original film,
taking place around 40 years after TCSM and following the exploits of a 60-year-old
Leatherface (Timberlake 2020). This story direction is, no doubt, influenced by the
box office success of 2018’s Halloween, a sequel that ignored all the other films in the
Halloween franchise and acted as a direct sequel to the original (see Ochonicky 2020;
see also Chapter 3 in this volume), but it is unclear if this formula will be as successful
in the volatile world of TCM; after all, the franchise already attempted a similar reset
with TC 3D to limited success and tepid reaction. Even worse, production of the new
film is off to an inauspicious start. Brothers Ryan and Andy Tohill were tapped to
direct after their first feature film, The Dig (2018), had a strong festival debut. One of
the producers on the new Chainsaw film proclaimed that ‘The Tohill’s [sic] vision is
exactly what the fans want’ (Kroll 2020). However, the brothers’ vision of the world
of TCM apparently did not coincide with others involved with the film, as the two
left the production in August 2020 after only one week of shooting due to ‘creative
differences’ (Fleming 2020). This turbulence suggests that another muddled entry in
an erratic franchise may be on the horizon due to confusion about what exactly a
‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ should look like.
Conclusion
Uncertainty surrounding the core-film is clearly one reason for the franchise’s
‘peculiar and erratic life.’ With a title that had audiences cringing before they
entered the theater, the original film tricked many into thinking they had witnessed
more bloodshed than they actually had, in a similar way that Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho (1960) continues to do. As the film’s reputation grew, Hooper complicated
the original’s legacy further with a comedic sequel soaked in viscera. The third film
aimed to recover what made the original work, but there were opposing opinions
as to what exactly this was; while the fourth film pronounced both sequels as
failures and attempted to return to the franchise’s roots, but by doing so, ironically
drifted so far afield that the one connective tissue between the first three films
(cannibalism) disappeared entirely. The franchise’s only unqualified commercial
success besides the original was the remake, which was incredibly dissimilar from
the original. Rather than continuing this success, however, the franchise resumed
the uncertain task of locating what it is that made the original work, journeying
further into the franchise’s past. Ironically, gore is now considered a key compo-
nent of the core-film’s appeal, yet another sign of confusion over Hooper’s first
film. Perhaps the original film’s atmosphere and aura—emanating, as some attest,
from the film’s production circumstances—may have been what shook the origi-
nal’s audiences, but ‘atmosphere’ and ‘aura’ are as difficult to reproduce as they are
tough to theorize and discuss. This examination of the TCM franchise may lead
one to consider if any other franchise-launching horror films share TCSM’s
apparently irreproducible aura. If so, have their sequels, remakes, and spin-offs
come closer to reproducing this aura? Regardless of the answers to such questions,
the TCM franchise remains a curious heteroglossia among horror film franchises.
Note
1 The title of Hooper’s film is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, not The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre. The unusual spelling of chainsaw was not retained for any of the sequels. In
64 Mark Bernard
the interest of accuracy, I will identify Hooper’s 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Mas-
sacre and abbreviate it as TCSM. When referring to the franchise as a whole, I will call it
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and abbreviate it as TCM.
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Wooley, John. 1995. ‘Saw Man’. Fangoria, 147: 48–51.
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versity of Texas Press.
3 If I were a carpenter
Prestige and authorship in the Halloween
franchise
Murray Leeder
During a Q&A at the New York Film Academy in April 2016, John Carpenter was
asked about an interview Rob Zombie had given, in which he claimed that Car-
penter reacted coldly when he called to let him know that he was going to direct the
remake of Halloween (1978; remake 2007).1 Carpenter disputed Zombie’s account,
characterizing Zombie as a ‘piece of shit’ in the process. Though Carpenter was
initially reticent to dispense criticism of Zombie’s Halloween films, he then stated
that Zombie ‘took away the mystique of the story by explaining too much about
[Michael Myers] … He’s supposed to be a force of nature’ (Pulver 2016).
This widely reported ‘feud’ among Halloween directors lasted mere days before
Zombie and Carpenter made it known that they had reconciled (Kielty 2016).
Tempest in a teapot though it may have been (Carpenter’s public persona could be
summed up as ‘an erudite curmudgeon with a soft streak’), this spat speaks to the
competing authorial discourses operating around Halloween. Despite countless
books and essays on the first Halloween film, there are few treatments of the fran-
chise as a whole, although a recent article by Adam Ochonicky is encouraging
(2020). This chapter will examine how the original Halloween film and Carpenter’s
auteur status has held primacy over the franchise when he had relatively little to do
with it, even as it has incorporated other authorial voices—including Kevin Wil-
liamson, Zombie, Jason Blum, and David Gordon Green—with various levels of
tension.
Who was that masked man? The Halloween franchise from

Carpenter to Zombie
For me, Halloween was always plural, always a franchise. In fact, I distinctly recall
the first time I ever heard of it, outside a general store in my father’s hometown in
rural Ontario. An older child was looking for specific videos displayed in the
window: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) perhaps, rather than
Halloween II (1981) or Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). I looked at these
mask-covered VHS covers, discerning little more than that they involved the
eponymous holiday, that they were scary and there were a bunch of them. How-
ever, it did not take long for a budding horror fan to recognize the primacy—what
Tompkins (2014b) calls ‘the canonical legacy’ (384)—of a single text, the original
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-5
If I were a carpenter 67
film, which operates as the lynchpin for the entire franchise, at least far as ‘legiti-
macy’ is concerned, in part because of its provenance with a canonized genre
auteur, John Carpenter.
Even writing this chapter, I strain to think of how to label that first film.
Simply calling it Halloween seems inadequate: two other films in its franchise
bear that name, and Halloween could refer to the franchise rather than any
individual film. Halloween ’78? Carpenter’s Halloween? The original Hallow-
een? Halloween 1? Rather like how the film initially called simply Star Wars
(1977) needed to be rebranded as Episode IV: A New Hope in 1980, that original
Halloween now has now been inescapably reconfigured in relation to its sequels.2
As a measure of its canonicity, the original 1978 film has been added to the
Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. The story of its production has
become legend: the hip young director Carpenter, coming off the critical if not
commercial success of Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), was recruited to direct a low-
budget independent horror film. Though the premise was conceived by producer
Irwin Yablans as ‘The Babysitter Murders’, Carpenter was granted relative crea-
tive autonomy provided he could deliver cheaply and quickly, assembling a close-
knit circle of collaborators, including co-writer and producer Debra Hill, cinema-
tographer Dean Cundey, and art director/editor Tommy Lee Wallace. They
assembled a lean, effective horror film, built around three characters who meet
only in the final scene: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the bookish but resour-
ceful teenage girl; Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), the driven and vaguely
unhinged psychiatrist/vigilante; and Michael Myers (Nick Castle), the silent,
masked, and mysterious killer. The film was also aided enormously by Carpenter’s
iconic, minimalist score. Released in October 1978 with the striking ad campaign
built around the figure of a pumpkin transforming into a knife, Halloween built an
audience slowly but became a classic sleeper hit, aided by strong word of mouth
and some sympathetic reviews, including by Tom Allen (1978) in the Village Voice
and Dave Kehr (2011) in the Chicago Reader. Halloween became a cultural event
and a money-maker far beyond the modest expectations of its makers.
Halloween was also widely imitated, becoming the ur-text of the cycle of pro-
duction generally known as the ‘slasher film’. The legitimation of the original
Halloween has often been achieved by placing distance between it and its maligned
legacy. In 1980, Chicago-based critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert devoted a full
episode of their PBS show Sneak Previews to decrying the new cycle of what they
called ‘Women in Danger’ films. Siskel and Ebert, who both praised Carpenter’s
film two years prior, carefully position Halloween as quite unlike the ‘scumbucket
films’ they lambasted. Thirty years later, the BBC documentary series A History of
Horror (2010) finds Mark Gatiss asserting that, ‘Halloween is the consummate
slasher film [but] I’m not so enthusiastic about its legacy. A slough of lower-qual-
ity, increasingly gory serial killer outings that would overwhelm the genre for years
to come, like horror’s equivalent of Dutch Elm Disease.’ Very often, Halloween
has been held at a distance from its successors both direct (its sequels) and indirect
(the slasher film more broadly), as if needing to be quarantined from them. Their
lousiness, the argument seems to run, throws Halloween’s greatness into relief.
68 Murray Leeder
Even though Halloween was designed as a standalone work and its open ending
was not an intentional ‘sequel hook,’ it ended up spawning an extensive and
enduring multimedia franchise. That said, Halloween has never been especially
successful at franchising beyond cinema. Despite a short-lived line of young adult
novels,3 a few close-ended comic book series and a critically panned 1983 video
game, its brand is overwhelmingly cinematic. It is hard to imagine what a Hal-
loween TV spin-off would be, even though both the Elm Street and Friday the 13th
franchises had anthology television series, Freddy’s Nightmares (1988–1990) and
Friday the 13th: The Series (1987–1990), respectively. But even within the confines
of a film franchise it is a confusing and branching tangle, ‘the “Choose Your Own
Adventure” of movie franchises’ (Mendelson 2018). Multiple articles on popu-
lar culture websites offer attempts to parse Halloween’s confusing continuities
(see for example McNabb 2017), and a meme that circulated in 2018 also borrowed
from the Choose Your Own Adventure series —YA novels written in the second
person that allow ‘you’ to navigate through a series of branching possibilities with
different conclusions—to chart the Halloween franchise’s many iterations (see
Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 A meme parodying the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Courtesy of
Marcus Hart
Ironically, the longevity of the Halloween franchise is not particularly due to
John Carpenter. He told me that if he had his way, there would only have been one
film (Leeder 2014, 18). For decades he would keep his distance from the franchise,
only (partially) returning to the fold decades later with David Gordon-Green’s
2018 Halloween. Rather, the key figures in keeping the franchise alive were the
Syrian-American director-producer Moustapha Akkad, and subsequent to his
tragic death in 2005, his son Malek Akkad; their company, Trancas International
Films (the successor to Compass International Pictures), would produce the Hal-
loween films from 1988 to present.4 Carpenter was initially compelled to stay with
the franchise as writer and producer for monetary reasons, though he has since
done much to disavow his involvement with Halloween II (1981), especially the
revelation that Michael Myers and Laurie Strode are secretly brother and sister. He
would later decry this twist as ‘just silly [and] foolish’ (Leeder 2014, 12–13). At the
same time, he shot new footage to pad out the NBC television cut of the first film,
a version itself later released on DVD. Carpenter also famously re-edited the first
cut of Halloween II, prepared by director Rick Rosenthal. The resulting film is far
bloodier and more explicit than its comparative slow and atmospheric predecessor.
For much of the history of Halloween, individual directors like Rosenthal, who
was reportedly unhappy with Carpenter’s interference (Muir 2000, 24), would be
thoroughly secondary authorial presences in what has principally been a producer-
driven franchise.
Carpenter and his collaborators then tried something different for Halloween
III: Season of the Witch, which jettisons Myers entirely for an unrelated seasonal
story about an evil mask-maker scheming to commit genocide against children on
Halloween night. An airing of the 1978 film is even a plot point. There are traces of
a kind of thematic continuity between Halloween III and the earlier films, how-
ever, most notably around Celtic mysticism and then-trendy exploration of the
Irish roots of Halloween (flirted with in Halloween II and later on). A certain
aesthetic continuity is also maintained, thanks to key production personnel staying
intact. Though it has become a cult favorite in its own right, Halloween III
underperformed and failed to launch the series of anthology-style Halloween-
based horror films its makers hoped for (see Chapter 10 in this volume).
With the box office failure of Halloween III, the producers insisted that the
franchise needed to continue with Myers. In an intriguing road not taken, Car-
penter and Hill commissioned a screenplay from novelist Dennis Etchison, who
had previously written novelizations of several of their films. Etchison’s treatment,
based around the children from the first film, went unused (Artz 2017), and Car-
penter and Hill divested themselves of the franchise, which was now firmly under
Akkad’s control. The following loose trilogy—Halloween 4: The Return of
Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), and
sixth installment, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)—all have titles
that trumpet Myers’s centrality. While Halloween II was solidly within the initial
cycle of the slasher film, these later films belong to a second cycle triggered by the
success of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and dominated by sequels. They are
built around a new character, Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris, J.C. Brandy), the
70 Murray Leeder
young daughter of Laurie Strode, whom we are told died in a car crash, but also
prominently feature Dr. Loomis providing continuity with both Carpenter’s film
and Halloween II, and included more overt supernatural elements, more ‘post-
slasher’ than slasher per se (Conrich 2015).
Halloween 4 ends with an elaborate homage to the POV long-take opening of
the first film as young Jamie, who shares a telepathic link with her uncle,
commits a murder while wearing a clown costume. The positioning of Jamie as
the franchise’s new villain, however, is quickly undone at the beginning of
Halloween 5 suggesting that, as with Halloween III, any departure from the
established format is soon clawed back.
The belated third entry in this triad, Halloween 6, is a particularly anomalous
film with a strange production and release history. It bizarrely reveals (following
up on the twist ending of the prior film) that a secret cult of neo-druids running
Smith’s Grove Sanitarium has been behind Myers’ killings the entire time. This is
likely one of the films in reference when Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) in Scream
(1996) says that, ‘I don’t really believe in motives … It’s scarier when there’s no
motive.’ Halloween 6 has its own pluralities, since it had extensive reshoots after a
test screening, each version ending with a slightly different cliffhanger, neither
which would ever be resolved. The original cut, dubbed ‘The Producer’s Cut,’ long
circulated among fans and tended to be preferred, ultimately being released on Blu-
ray in 2014.
Plans were made to continue the Halloween brand as a straight-to-video fran-
chise, akin to what Hellraiser (1987–) would soon become. But soon the state of
the American horror film would change, and the Halloween franchise would be
redrawn yet again. The year after Halloween 6 was released, its distributor,
Dimension Films, scored a major coup with the success of Scream (1996). It made a
rare celebrity screenwriter of Kevin Williamson (see Schneider 1999), who was
then tasked with reviving the Halloween franchise with Halloween H20: 20 Years
Later (1998).5 The title keeps the tradition of numbered sequels (technically jet-
tisoned with the prior film), but refuses the status as ‘just another sequel.’ Though
advance publicity reported that it would tie in nominally with Halloweens 4–6,
with a high school student’s book reports covering those events, it ultimately
makes only indirect reference to them if at all, and jettisons the wonky world-
building tied to the Cult of Thorn. Instead, via retconning (retroactive continuity),
it wipes the slate back as far as Halloween II, asserting that Michael Myers has
been missing since the destruction of Haddonfield Memorial Hospital at the end of
that film (on retroactive continuity see Friedenthal 2017; Proctor 2017).
Instead, H20 returns to Laurie Strode, whom we now find living under an
assumed name as the alcoholic headmistress of a private high school. We are told
that her death was faked (an almost palimpsestic trace of Halloween 4’s backs-
tory). The return of Jamie Lee Curtis allows a reconnection with the original film
and its personnel that casts the prior three films into a space of shadowy (and
non-canonical) illegitimacy. Andrew Patrick Nelson aptly describes H20 as less ‘a
straightforward example of the late-1990s slasher [than] an attempt to mediate
between the competing influences of the Halloween franchise and the self-
conscious neo-slasher cycle of horror films exemplified by Scream’ (2015, 90).
Doses of humour (much from L.L. Cool J.’s erotica-writing security guard) that
would have felt out of place in an earlier Halloween film reflect the generic trends
of the time, but H20 also holds short of the extravagant metafictional conceits of
the Scream franchise. Yet unlike the previous three entries, H20 was shot in the
1:235 aspect ratio of the original film, and is replete with audio-visual reference
to the original film, and with the coup of Curtis’s return, it self-consciously
positions itself as the original film’s legitimate descendant. In the documentary
Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest (2003), Hill identifies it as ‘the one that is
closest to Halloween 1,’ and that Carpenter passed on directing it because he
simply wasn’t interested in directing a sequel, but it has elsewhere been claimed
that he declined over a pay dispute with Akkad (‘Halloween H20’). Whatever the
truth, the film’s attempts to balance signifiers of the original and Carpenter’s
authorship with the hip cynicism of the 1990s makes for a mixed bag: two dec-
ades later, H20 seems like a relic of its time as well, a glossy, well-budgeted ‘neo-
slasher’ without Scream’s metafictional gestures.
In a franchise of open endings, H20 contains one of its most definitive conclu-
sions of any Halloween film: a fight between Laurie and Michael that ends with an
almost sympathetic Laurie beheading her villainous brother. It has been claimed
that this climax provoked a major tangle in pre-production: Akkad had made it
contractually impossible to kill Michael, but Curtis threatened to walk if it were
left out. In the end, it transpires that the beheaded man was actually a paramedic
who switched places with Michael (although there is no sense of this until the
sequel). H20’s success ensured the production of Halloween: Resurrection (2002),
which like the titles of 4–6, seems to assert that Michael will return, despite his
putative death. Resurrection was directed by Halloween II’s Rick Rosenthal, the
first director to helm multiple entries in the series. Where H20 slotted into the neo-
slasher cycle, Resurrection is the franchise’s attempt at the found footage sub-
genre, as well as exploiting the reality television zeitgeist of the early 2000s. After
dispatching Laurie, now herself confined to a mental institution, Michael returns
to Haddonfield, where a reality show is being shot in his childhood home. Replete
with ‘franchise fatigue,’ Resurrection is thought to be one of the silliest entries in
the franchise, including the notorious scene where a character played by Busta
Rhymes uses his karate moves against Michael. It nonetheless has an intriguing
subtext about Michael trying to ‘reclaim’ his legacy from media capitalists looking
to exploit it.
Michael Myers walked with a Zombie

The franchise lay fallow for another five years, the longest gap since the fifth
and sixth installments. It was revived in 2007 in the form long anticipated (and
dreaded): a remake. The new Halloween arrived during a cycle of horror
remakes, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), When a Stranger Calls
(2006), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Friday the 13th (2009), My Bloody Valen-
tine (2009), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), etc., and the establishment of a
72 Murray Leeder
loose circle of new horror auteurs dubbed the ‘splat pack,’ including James
Wan, Eli Roth, Alexandre Aja, Leigh Whannel, Darren Lynn Bousman, and
Rob Zombie (see Tompkins 2014a; Bernard 2015). This group often positioned
their work as an antidote to the glossier and more popular neo-slashers, citing
the horror auteurs of the 1970s (Carpenter, George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper,
Wes Craven, and Larry Cohen) as role models (see the Introduction to this
volume).
Zombie was a relative elder statesman in this group, firmly established as the
front-man of the heavy metal group White Zombie (the band’s name is bor-
rowed from the 1934 classic horror film by the same name starring Bela ‘Dra-
cula’ Lugosi). Having already directed a few music videos, he directed his first
film in 2000, the low-budget 1970s exploitation horror pastiche House of 1000
Corpses, which went unreleased until 2003. House of 1000 Corpses was well
received enough to warrant a sequel with The Devil’s Rejects (2005), with a
third installment, 3 From Hell, released in 2019. Subsequently, he was approa-
ched by Bob Weinstein to direct the remake of Halloween for Dimension Films,
with the intention being to reboot the franchise from the beginning again by
wiping the slate clean, including Carpenter’s original (see Proctor 2020).
The disputed exchange between Carpenter and Zombie that opened this chapter
is symptomatic of the remake’s strange status. When I interviewed Carpenter in
2012, he raised the Zombie remake without prompting, stating that it was ‘anti-
thetical’ to his intentions for Michael Myers—‘to explain him, to motivate him’—
whereas Carpenter’s intention ‘was to do nothingness, to drain him of character.’
Zombie’s version is indeed a decidedly ‘infidelitous’ remake—Zombie himself has
preferred to call it a ‘re-imagining’—which develops the central concept in quite
different ways. The opening few minutes of Carpenter’s Halloween that establish
Michael Myers’ backstory balloon to around 40 minutes in Zombie’s, turning the
inexplicable crime of the murder of Judith Myers into the result of an elaborate
tapestry of child abuse and humiliation.
For better or worse, Zombie imposes an idiosyncratic auteurist sensibility onto
his Halloween: it is ‘Halloween Zombie Style’ in the vein of 1970s ‘hixploitation’
horror, turning Carpenter’s middle-class Haddonfield into a prototypical ‘hick
town’. Indeed, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is Zombie’s
favourite film and an aesthetic he taps into frequently across his work. Much of
Zombie’s Halloween is an origin story for Myers, leaving the more proper
‘remake’ material relatively little screen time. Zombie’s version of Laurie (Scout
Taylor-Compton) is less virginal and conservative in her manner than Laurie
Strode, and the traditionally slight Michael Myers is now played by two-meter-tall
wrestler/actor Tyler Mane. The mask, in Carpenter’s film stark white and newly
stolen from a hardware store, is now dirty and worn with age. Conversely, Zom-
bie’s version of Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is decidedly more humane and
sincerely driven to help Michael than the mildly unhinged doom-prophet of the
original (McDowell’s Loomis purchases a gun mid-narrative while Pleasence’s
Loomis seems to carry one as a matter of course). The Zombie film’s overall ten-
dency is opposed to the vaguely cosmic evil than Carpenter designed for the
original film in favor of a Halloween more grounded in psychological and eco-
nomic realities, yet in a way that plays more as genre pastiche than any coherent
statement. It is worth noting that Zombie’s version retains, and in fact expands
upon, the fact that Michael and Laurie are siblings, as established in the film that
we must now refer to as ‘the first Halloween II.’
If the first Zombie Halloween film is an uneasy mix of origin story, remake
(retaining Carpenter’s original score as well), and auteurist ‘re-imagining,’ its own
sequel, the second Halloween II (2009), is a Zombie film through and through. It
provides a large role for Michael’s and Laurie’s mother, played by Zombie’s wife
Sheri Moon Zombie, who is now a ghost appearing to her children in baroque
hallucinations (including the much-mocked ‘white horse’ symbolism). The film
explores the sibling dynamic between Michael and Laurie more thoroughly than
any other film, culminating in a daring finale where Michael kills Loomis and
Laurie stabs Michael to death before donning his mask herself, drawn by trauma
into the same well of psychosis that claimed her brother.6 It is a chilling, even
oddly touching ending, echoing the end of Halloween 4 in positioning a female
relative as succeeding Michael. For better or worse, Halloween II is the product of
an auteur who, as Wheeler Winston Dixon reports,
no longer felt any obligation to adhere to the original concept of the series,
saying that he felt no need to help any ‘John Carpenterness’ in the new film
and that he could do ‘whatever’ he wanted with the Halloween franchise.
(2010, 133)
But the second Halloween II underperformed, and plans for a third Zombie Hal-
loween film were shelved, ironically leaving Halloween II with one of the more
satisfyingly definitive endings in the series. The ‘Zombie era’ stands as a strange,
grimy interregnum within the Halloween filmography, and would soon be ignored,
if not outright countered, by what followed. Nonetheless, the Zombie Halloweens
are ripe for critical re-evaluation and are beginning to receive it (Newby 2018).
Halloween in the house of Blum

For all that separates the line from Halloween 6 to Zombie’s duology, there was a
common production framework from Miramax’s label Dimension Films. Dimen-
sion made a final attempt to maintain the franchise in 2015, announcing a new
project implausibly called Halloween Returns, reported to be about two teenagers,
one the child of one of Michael’s victims, attending his execution and witnessing
his escape, and that it was specifically neither a remake nor a sequel to the Zombie
films (Miska 2015). That project (called a ‘recalibration,’ adding to the ungainly
mess of ‘re-’ prefixed franchise movies) was cancelled yet the theme of generational
succession persisted in the next iteration of Halloween to arrive.
The franchise would languish for another nine years, the largest gap in its his-
tory. But early in 2016, it was announced that a deal had been struck for a new
Halloween film co-produced by no fewer than four companies: Miramax, Trancas
74 Murray Leeder
International Films (represented by Malek Akkad) and two new players, Rough
House Pictures and Blumhouse Productions. Blumhouse was by now such a name
that it is featured in the trailer with the same prominence as John Carpenter. Run
by former Miramax executive Jason Blum, perhaps the most significant force for
US horror cinema in the 2010s, Blumhouse has been responsible for profitable low-
or ‘micro-budget’ franchises like Paranormal Activity (2007, 2010, 2011, 2012,
2014, 2015), Insidious (2010, 2013), Ouija (2014, 2016), Sinister (2012, 2015), and
The Purge (2013, 2014, 2016, 2018), Unfriended (2014, 2018), and Happy Death
Day (2017, 2019); and also scored a major success with Jordan Peele’s Oscar-win-
ning Get Out (2017) (see Chapter 6 on Blumhouse and Chapter 7 on The Purge in
this volume). Keen on founding its own franchises, Blumhouse has largely steered
clear of the remakes so prominent in recent horror. Its turn to Halloween is thus
remarkable, marking the product with a certain ‘specialness’ and exceptionality.7
Blumhouse recruited David Gordon Green, who entered the arthouse/indepen-
dent scene with the acclaimed drama George Washington (2000) and has since
navigated a curious path between indie dramas and more mainstream products.
His Pineapple Express (2008) remarkably blends the commercial formula of a
stoner comedy and a more ‘indie’ aesthetic; and he has alternated between more
commercial fare, like the comedies Your Highness (2011) and The Sitter (2011),
and smaller festival dramas like Snow Angels (2007) and Manglehorn (2014).
Green had not yet made a horror film when he was attached to a new film called,
for the third time, Halloween (2018), apparently handpicked by Blum in a move
reminiscent of the ‘costume horror’ cycle of the early 1990s, when directors like
Francis Ford Coppola, Kenneth Branagh, Stephen Frears, Neil Jordan, and Mike
Nichols lent their prestige to horror projects. Green co-wrote the film with actor-
writer Danny McBride, his long-time collaborator (they also co-produced the
comic series Eastbound and Down [2009–2013]), under their Rough Pictures label.
The film’s title seems calculated to refute any implication that it is just another
sequel (set off by a number or a subtitle), but rather is the ‘official’ and ‘legitimate’
successor to Carpenter’s original, much more so than Zombie’s remake.
To that end, McBride and Green strive to create a sequel with no baggage—
not even the original Halloween II is treated as ‘canon’ to this version. Conse-
quently, this version of Michael and Laurie are not brother and sister, expelling
the twist Carpenter conceived of, but later recanted. There is a ‘back-to-basics’
quality to the Blum/Green Halloween. It lacks supernatural elements, and
where Halloween 6 characterizes Michael as ‘the most brutal mass murderer in
history,’ Green’s film actively downplays the severity of his past crimes: ‘All
things considered, there’s a lot of worse stuff that’s happening today.’ Dialogue
that established that the sibling dynamic is just a rumor in-narrative even pre-
figured in the film’s trailer, a strategy to disassociate this Halloween from the
nine films that preceded it. At the same time, however, it carefully works in
numerous intertextual and intradiegetic homages (‘Easter Eggs’) to those films it
has ‘de-canonized,’8 such as children trick-or-treating in the three masks from
Halloween III and a gas station that looks like the one in Halloween 4. Green
and his collaborators thus manage a certain double address: to the audience at
large, it provides a simplified Halloween, stripped of decades’ worth of con-
tinuity baggage; yet for Halloween fans it is full of nods and winks to the same
films it seeks to displace. Following Jonathan Gray (2003), it thus sells itself
both to fans, those with an intense investment in the franchise, and to non-fans,
that larger group that might occasionally watch a Halloween film but needs
added incentives like good reviews, word of mouth or notable casting.
To rally ‘specialness’ on the level of casting, Halloween restores Jamie Lee
Curtis as Laurie Strode, and even brings back fan favourite Nick Castle, the ori-
ginal actor who played Michael Myers (an example of ‘fan service’ that is not
distracting to the general audience). Curtis, the fabled ‘scream queen’ who has
nonetheless mostly managed a career removed from the horror genre, is also listed
as an executive producer. Richard Nowell has shown how Curtis’ persona perso-
nifies ‘the notion that innocuous horror films, the institution of Hollywood, and
the figure of the individualistic, self-employed female or “neo-feminist” could
coexist harmoniously’ (2014, 143), to which we can now add the potential of aging
naturally in an industry obsessed with youth and fakery, which might be read as
feminist commentary articulated through the politics of the Halloween franchise.
The perception is that because Curtis is not dependent on the horror genre that she
‘outgrew’ early in her career, returning to it takes place on her own terms, and that
as producer she had a role in shaping the new presentation of the character she has
lived with for four decades (she had of course previously ‘returned’ to horror in
TV series Scream Queens [2015–2016]).
The Blum/Green Halloween’s biggest draw is of course John Carpenter himself,
returning to the Halloween fold in an official capacity for the first time since Hal-
loween III. The podcast Halloween Unmasked details how Blum courted the
famous curmudgeon with promises of creative influence and also leveraged Blum-
house’s status as an auteurist production company (Nicholson 2018). In addition
to bearing an executive producer credit, Carpenter also scored this Halloween,
following his albums Lost Themes (2015) and Lost Themes II (2016), and several
extensive tours. Blumhouse thus shrewdly incorporated Carpenter’s authorship for
its legitimizing value in a way that does not seem to actively run counter to Green
and his collaborators (again, much unlike the sharp contrast between Carpenter
and Zombie’s authorial visions).
Like H20, Green’s Halloween is replete with visual references to Carpenter’s
film and sometimes its technique, notably in the bravura POV tracking shot of
Michael stalking his way through Haddonfield once again, but does not in the
main seem like an homage to Carpenter’s formal style; especially in its fondness
for gauzy soft focus, it feels very much like it belongs within Green’s filmo-
graphy. It bears comparison to other recent continuations of long-running
franchises, notably Star Trek (2009)—a conscious effort to court a broader
audience by divesting itself of decades’ worth of continuity—Star Wars: The
Force Awakens (2015)—a generational saga that positions a young woman as
the successor to an aging hero—and Logan (2017)—a story of late-life reckon-
ing. But it also seems conscious of the franchise’s own brand identity, not
lacking for horny teenagers or gratuitous murders.
76 Murray Leeder
In addition to nostalgia, Green’s Halloween also rallies a sense of what has
lately been termed ‘wokeness,’ positioning itself as a commentary on generational
trauma and the resiliency of women against the forces of patriarchy. It treats itself
as a kind of #MeToo-era Halloween (in her first scene, Laurie conspicuously says
‘Time’s up’). In the run-up to its release numerous articles took up this angle (e.g.,
Joho 2018), with Curtis particularly pressing it further (Nyren 2018). In interview,
Blum asserted that the tradition of socially conscious horror that his company has
lately embraced (‘The Purge is about gun control, Get Out is about racism’) is in
Carpenter’s tradition: ‘The person who was best at it was John Carpenter, right?
So he looms very, very large at Blumhouse … especially after Get Out, everyone is
pitching us a social thriller—like John Carpenter! Everyone, everyone says it.’9
Blum identifies his Halloween as a ‘female empowerment movie’ (Nicholson 2018).
In providing a world where every male character ranges from feckless to mon-
strous and where three generations of women (Laurie, her daughter Karen [Judy
Greer] and granddaughter Allyson [Andi Matichak]) must reconcile to defeat
Michael Myers, it strives to defray or correct some of its franchise’s mixed record
on gender. Its level of success at this task is debatable, as is how novel it is. Tor-
onto feminist Steph Guthrie argues that it is actually less successful than H20 at
representing Laurie’s trauma and allowing her to ‘take her power back by killing
her murderous brother’ (Guthrie 2018). What is different, however, is that this new
Halloween makes several bids to be viewed as politically ‘feminist’. With perhaps
the exception of the critique of reality television in Halloween Resurrection, social
commentary is almost alien to the Halloween franchise, so this positioning as
topicality represents a bid for cultural prestige.
An interesting side effect of the prioritizing of Laurie and other female char-
acters is that this Halloween seems remarkably uninterested in Michael himself,
lacking either the mythical and supernatural affinities of Carpenter’s original or
any psychological grounding, such as Zombie provided. He is more of a prop in a
narrative firmly focused on its female characters. The fact that the film’s pod-
casters, whose dialogue helps provide exposition and backstory for any uninitiated
viewers, are brutally punished for sympathizing with and over-psychologizing
Michael may even be understood as a rebuke to Zombie’s films.
Despite some talk of this being the ‘last’ Halloween film, the franchise has
always been very market-sensitive and resistant to closure. For this Halloween was
a rousing success financially, not only becoming the highest grossing Halloween
film (although second to the original when adjusted for inflation), it set several new
records, including the highest grossing film with a female lead over the age of 55
(Berger 2018). No small part of that success would seem to be due to its harnessing
the canonical legacy that has been retrospectively bestowed upon Carpenter’s ori-
ginal. And sure enough, two more sequels have been commissioned, retaining the
creative team of Green and McBride. They are called Halloween Kills (2021) and
Halloween Ends (2022),10 and despite the title of the latter, Carpenter, still on
board as executive producer and composer, has said that he doesn’t think it will be
the end of the franchise: ‘As long as there’s money in this, I wouldn’t count on an
ending’ (Chichizola 2019). Money talks, and Michael Myers walks. But it will be
interesting to see if these sequels will have the effect of reducing the 2018 Hallow-
een’s carefully managed prestige, turning it into just another franchise entry.
Conclusion: you can’t kill the boogeyman

One could speak of still more Halloweens. The 1979 novelization provides a differ-
ent explanation for Michael (he is the reincarnation of an ancient Celt). 2011 saw
two different pornographic parodies, Halloween XXX Parody (by Smash Pictures)
and Official Halloween Parody (Zero Tolerance). Both use the basic plotline and
iconographies of the original film as a clothesline on which to hang stock porno-
graphic scenarios. There are also numerous Halloween fan films, among them Hal-
loween: The Death of Michael Myers (2007), Halloween: Into the Dark (2012),
Halloween: One Good Scare (2013), Halloween H30 (2008), and Halloween H35
(2013). Some of these follow up on the abandoned Cult of Thorn plotline from
Halloween 6. Though beyond the scope of this chapter, that would be another pro-
ductive angle of inquiry: the way fans have kept alive the storylines ‘abandoned’ by
officialdom. In this forking franchise, the paths not taken—the Etchison Halloween
IV, a third Rob Zombie film, Halloween Returns—seem almost as significant as
those taken. Indeed, there is now a fan-oriented book devoted solely to chronicling
‘The Lost Halloween Sequels’ (McNeill and Mullins 2020).
It seems almost too easy a rhetorical gesture to connect to the franchise’s long-
evity to Michael Myers’s own penchant for surviving and returning. It has charted
a history of American horror in the last 40 years, slotting into several cycles of the
slasher film, the neo-slasher, found-footage horror, the remake/reboot craze of the
mid-2000s, and then into the contemporary franchise landscape. Of all the long-
running horror franchises, however, it might be the most tethered to the cultural
authority of a single filmmaker, even during Carpenter’s long absence from, or
even antipathy to, the property he launched. Though I have not spoken much
about music specifically, the Halloween theme is of course one of the series’ most
significant through-lines, as iconic as the mask itself, always carrying a signifier of
‘Carpenterness’ even in films where Carpenter had no other role. Carpenter, in
what one tempted to call a post-phase of his directorial career, has only seen his
authorial presence and reputation grow (Collis 2014). In addition to the new
incarnation of Halloween, he lends his name to video games like F.E.A.R. 3 (2010)
and to comic books like Asylum (2013). Such gestures resemble imprimaturs;
maybe Carpenter is not so much the Master of Horror as its Pope.
Notes
1 The question presumably references the documentary Halloween: The Inside Story
(2010).
2 As film franchises spread across the decades and become increasingly complicated,
fans often use ‘off-label’ titles, like ‘Star Trek ‘09’ or ‘Abramstrek’ for the film
technically just called ‘Star Trek.’
3 The Scream Factory (1997), The Old Myers Place (1997), and The Mad House
(1998), all authored by Kelly O’Rourke.
78 Murray Leeder
4 Along with his daughter Rima, Moustapha Akkad was killed in the bombing of the
Grand Hyatt Hotel in Amman, Syria on November 9, 2005.
5 Williamson is credited as a co-executive producer but not as a screenwriter due to a
WGA dispute by Robert Zappia and Matt Greenberg, who wrote an earlier draft for
a seventh Halloween film with elements retained for H20.
6 Laurie herself dies in Zombie’s director’s cut. The ‘splat pack’ benefited enormously
from DVD’s potential for multiple cuts with different ratings (Bernard 2015, 70–93),
and Zombie’s alternate cuts add to the proliferations of version of Halloween films.
7 The lone exception was prior to Halloween was the straight-to-streaming Amityville:
The Awakening (2017). Blumhouse subsequently produced the name-only remake of
Black Christmas (2019) and Leigh Whannel’s reworking of The Invisible Man (2020).
8 For a thorough list, see ‘Mythology Gag.’
9 Halloween Unmasked leans on They Live (1988) to establish Carpenter as a socially
conscious filmmaker, a harder claim to apply to Halloween.
10 These films were initially scheduled 2020 and 2021 but have been delayed due to the
global COVID-19 pandemic.
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Over 55’. Women and Hollywood, October 22. https://womenandhollywood.com/ha
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80 Murray Leeder
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380–399.
4 If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming
The Elm Street series as recurring nightmare
Steve Jones
Consisting of nine films to date, the A Nightmare on Elm Street series (hereafter,
Elm Street) has grossed over $448 million at the box office worldwide (‘Box Office
History for Nightmare on Elm Street Movies,’ 2018).1 This financial success led
some to dub the 1980s ‘the decade of Freddy Krueger’ (Lewis 1997, 251). The series’
cultural impact is demonstrated via vernacular references in unexpected arenas,
including sports commentary2 and computing.3 Given this scale, it is surprising that
so little sustained scholarship is devoted to the series. That relative inattention
arguably stems from the fact that the property is mainly comprised of sequels, and
seriality has only recently attracted significant scholarly attention. Historically,
sequels have been perceived as yielding diminishing returns in terms of both profit
and quality (see Jess-Cooke 2009, 53–54). Contra to the latter, the Elm Street sequels
are not simply ‘inferior’ addendums to an original standalone text.
This chapter will examine Elm Street as a multipart text. I begin by delineating
the series’ reputation for yielding diminishing returns. That attitude has been pro-
liferated by Elm Street’s creative staff, who express contempt about the series’
‘inconsistencies.’ Chief among these ostensible failings is Elm Street’s supposedly
haphazard approach to dreaming. As I will outline, long-standing producer Robert
Shaye and creator Wes Craven both assert that the series’ storyworld is governed
by a firm separation between waking and dreaming. They propose that these two
states adhere to discrete ontological rules (Ryan 2017), with Elm Street’s waking-
world conforming to the laws of space, time, geography, and physics, while the
dream-world defies those laws. This distinction between waking and dreaming
parallels our non-filmic, real-world experiences of those states (see Hobson et al.
2011, 2). However, Elm Street’s core premise confounds that distinction. In the
series, being harmed in one’s dream results in damage to the dreamer’s physical
body in the waking-world. The boundary between waking and dreaming realms
supposedly becomes looser as Elm Street progresses, thereby purportedly weaken-
ing the series. However, I contend that even the first film fails to establish a firm
boundary between waking and dreaming. Indeed, Elm Street’s narrative is more
satisfying when viewed as a recurring nightmare, based around persistent motifs
and patterns. As such, the series is dream-like (oneiric) rather than realistic.
Elm Street flourishes as an oneiric text because it is comprised of multiple
parts that riff on a core narrative shape. Various directors and writers
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-6
82 Steve Jones
contribute to the installments, each adding new elements as they retroactively
develop the ongoing story. Although Freddy is Elm Street’s only consistent
character, the series’ unifying motifs prevent it from merely being nine tangen-
tially related tales. These motifs build because of the series’ multipart structure.
The narrative’s focus on collective experiences (such as shared dreams)
encourages one to engage with the series collectively, as a meta-text, rather than
as isolated chapters. Moreover, Elm Street’s oneiric qualities provide opportu-
nities for innovation without abandoning narrative comprehensibility. As such,
Elm Street’s sequels do not exhibit diminishing narrative returns. Despite its
critical reputation, Elm Street’s seriality is, I would argue, its key strength.
Bad reputation: ‘diminishing returns’ versus oneiric qualities

Sequels are broadly treated with disdain. The notion that film series consist of
increasingly diluted iterations of original texts was concretized by multi-sequel
‘slasher’ series in the 1980s (see Tudor 2002, 106), and Elm Street is illustrative of
this trend. The ‘general consensus’ among critics is that the series ‘deteriorated’
after several sequels (Schoell and Spencer 1992, 116), and that ‘the formula that
made [Elm Street] so successful … severely mutated’ as the series progressed
(Menell 1991). Thus, Wyrick claims that Elm Street’s ‘relentless sequels’ offer little
more than ‘repetition’ and ‘pleasure in unoriginality’ (Wyrick 1998, 122–124),
while Freeland proposes that Elm Street’s ‘seemingly endless sequels’ are unin-
teresting because (she alleges) they offer ‘mainly physical and not psychological’
horror (2000, 243–244).
Elm Street’s creative personnel corroborate this stance. Returning star Robert
Englund repeatedly indicated that the series (or his involvement in it) would soon
end (see interviews in D’Angelo 1986, 32; Shapiro 1987, 39; Shapiro 1988, 68),
implying that, despite its profitability, the series had become creatively moribund.
The ‘increased frequency of the sequels’ release dates and … condensed production
periods’ (Nutman 1989, 53) did not help the filmmakers to maintain quality. Elm
Street producer Bob Shaye retrospectively admits that the sequels suffered from
several ‘bad idea[s]’ (Never Sleep Again). Screenplay writer and producer of the
sixth installment Michael de Luca contended that ‘horror sequels are the worst’ (in
Shapiro 1992, 54), which is apt given that Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare
(1991) is arguably the series’ weakest entry. Original creator Wes Craven also
theorized that ‘the series tended to wander’ as it progressed, mainly because wri-
ters were hired ‘to knock out a script’ rather than bringing a ‘distinctive vision’ to
Elm Street (in Shapiro 1994, 35).
Each sequel differs because each was helmed by new directors and/or writers
who were tasked with keeping the series fresh. For example, Sara Risher avers that
New Line was ‘trying to do something different … original’ with the second film,
Freddy’s Revenge (1985); Renny Harlin declares that he sought to ‘reinvent’ Freddy
with the fourth entry The Dream Master (1988); and Bob Shaye suggests that the
team sought to ‘revive’ the series with Freddy’s Dead, the sixth installment (see
Never Sleep Again). Simultaneously, innovations were constrained by the need to
If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming 83
maintain the series’ established ideas. New Line were likely mindful of con-
temporaneous major slasher serials faltering when they deviated from their for-
mulae: both Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) and Friday the 13th Part V
(1985) suffered critically and financially because those installments forsook their
core antagonists. Yet, as each new crew built upon the previous teams’ develop-
ments, Elm Street’s established premises transformed. For example, A Nightmare
on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors (1987) explicitly introduces the notion that
protagonists can collaborate in their dreams. This is heralded as protagonist Kris-
ten’s unique ‘gift’ (her dream skill). By the sixth installment, Freddy’s Dead, pro-
tagonist John is simply knocked out and enters Spencer’s dream. The skill is no
longer a ‘very special talent’ belonging to Kristen: it becomes part of the series’
lore, applying to all characters therein.
The writers themselves refer to such developments as being illogical. For exam-
ple, when asked how he would bridge from Part 2 into Part 3, Craven bluntly
posited ‘I’m ignoring it’ (in Goldberg and McDonnell 1986, 52), and later stated
that he could not write a direct sixth sequel with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
(1994) because he ‘looked at all the other films’ and could not ‘make any sense of
[the series]’ (Never Sleep Again). From the writer’s perspective, the series’ incon-
sistencies are problems to overcome. Critics also characterize Elm Street’s varia-
tions as evidence of deterioration. For instance, James (1987) claims that Part 3
‘loses direction’ by spiralling into ‘supernatural nonsense,’ while Harrington (1989)
describes Part 5’s plot as ‘more confusing than ever,’ making ‘no sense at all.’
However, such complaints fail to account for the Elm Street series’ distinguish-
ing characteristic: its oneiric qualities. Although central to the series, dreaming has
been overlooked in the scholarly literature on Elm Street. 4 This is unsurprising
given that scholarship on oneiric film typically focuses on art film rather than
popular culture (see, for example, Botz-Bornstein 2008; Andrews 2004). Moreover,
Elm Street’s creators disparage the series’ approach to dreaming. Rachel Talalay—
production manager, producer, storywriter, and director on various Elm Street
installments—bemoans producer Bob Shaye’s fixation on ‘the rules’ of dreaming;
of showing protagonists falling asleep, of what could and could not happen in the
dream-world (in Schoell and Spencer 1992, 148).
Regardless, those rules are applied inconsistently across the series. No one
appears to be asleep when Schneider is killed or a pet parakeet explodes in Part 2.
In Part 3, Will witnesses that Phillip is ‘wide awake’ when he dies, even though
Phillip is meant to be dreaming. Alice is asleep when Sheila is killed in Part 4, but it
is unclear whether Sheila is also asleep, whether she somehow enters the dream
because Alice is asleep, or whether the whole dream belongs only to Alice (i.e.,
Sheila does not experience the encounter with Freddy that Alice dreams about).
Freddy can walk on the ceiling when he is supposedly brought into waking reality
in Freddy’s Dead, and unless protagonist Maggie harbors a hidden talent, her
unexpected knife-throwing proficiency indicates that the waking/dreaming dis-
tinction has collapsed.
Craven characterized such waking-world/dream-world blurring as a bas-
tardization of his original material, criticizing the first sequel’s script for
84 Steve Jones
allowing Freddy to crossover into the waking-world (in Gire 1988). However,
writer David Chaskin contends that the series’ ‘rules’ about waking and
dreaming were not established ‘at the time’ because the series did not yet exist
(Never Sleep Again). Chaskin’s observation vindicates director Jack Sholder’s
admission that he did not have a grasp on Elm Street’s ontological rules while
making Part 2 (in Schoell and Spencer 1992, 35). The unwritten ‘rules’ demar-
cating waking and dreaming as distinct yet interrelated states only became
visible retrospectively, when unspoken assumptions about the boundaries
between these realms were disrupted by new writers and directors.
The ontological distinctions between dream and waking realms were not firmly
established in Craven’s initial film. As several critics have noted, the first film is
unsettling precisely because the waking/dreaming boundary is blurry (see Rathgeb
1991, 40; Paul 1994, 401–403; Robb 1998, 73).5 To illustrate, Tina is pinned by
Freddy in her garden during the series’ first fatal nightmare sequence. A blue
blanket is present on the garden floor, and Tina pulls it over herself. The film then
cuts to the bedroom, where she thrashes, asleep, under the same blue blanket. The
blanket provides a transition between the two locales even though it is incongruous
to the dream’s garden setting. This fuzziness is pervasive. The later sequence in
which a tongue protrudes from Nancy’s telephone blurs the real-world/dream-
world boundary in the same way later sequels do. Here, Nancy is supposedly
awake, and the narrative viewpoint is ostensibly located in the waking-world. The
film’s murder sequences are equally problematic: as Hise observes, Rod appears to
be awake when he is hanged by a bedsheet (1988, 17). Although one might argue
that Rod is dreaming, Freddy’s absence (or invisibility) suggests otherwise, since
the camera’s perspective is redolent of the earlier sequence in which Rod witnesses
Tina’s slaughter. Tina is asleep and Rod is awake, so Tina can see Freddy but Rod
cannot. If Rod were asleep when murdered, he ought also to see Freddy, or else
ought not to appear to be awake. More overtly, Glen’s mother witnesses 80 gallons
of gravity-defying blood erupting from her son’s bed in a display that must be
unreal, even though she is ostensibly awake. It is thus telling that Langenkamp’s
on-set requests for clarification about such occurrences were typically met with
Craven’s response: ‘I can’t explain it, it’s just a dream’ (Never Sleep Again). The
sequels may have erred toward a more permeable border between waking/dream-
ing, but Craven mischaracterizes his original film when criticizing other creators’
approaches to the storyworld’s ontological rules.
Yet, I would suggest that this ‘looseness’ is Elm Street’s core strength. Craven
posits that the series is contextualized by a culture that valorizes ‘control, structure,
and rationalism’ (Freddy Speaks). Craven’s view is echoed by Elm Street’s adults
who continually delegitimize the teens’ concerns. For example, in Part 3, Dr Gordon
initially places his faith in science, but he eventually realizes that, within his ration-
alist worldview, ‘nothing [happening to the teens] makes any sense.’ In Part 4,
Kristen’s mother dismisses her daughter’s anxiety over Freddy by proclaiming ‘we
went over this in therapy!’. Kristen’s mother exerts control by dosing her daughter
with sleeping pills, but Kristen’s proclamation, ‘you just murdered me,’ is borne out
by the film. The narratives thus confirm the teens’ fears and reject their guardians’
calls to rationalism and attempts to control the situation. Moreover, because dreams
are frequently non-rational and structurally fluid, Elm Street’s playfulness with the
dreaming/waking boundary undercuts the culture of ‘control, structure, and ration-
alism’ that Craven refers to. The non-extant is experienced as if it is real in dreams.
When awake, individuals can exert some autonomous control because the sur-
rounding conditions and physical laws are stable and predictable; that is, reasoned
choices are facilitated by the waking-world’s structures and are problematized by the
dream-realm’s relative instability. Dreams are not always outright ‘bizarre,’ but they
are typically ‘non-logical’ because they lack a stable ‘space-time structure’ (Hobson
et al. 2011, 12). That dreams sometimes appear to adhere to real-world physical laws
makes it difficult to decipher between the realms, and the Elm Street series plays with
that ambiguity. For example, in Part 3, the protagonists attempt to enter a shared
dream-space via group hypnosis; they believe the hypnosis has failed until a perpe-
tual motion toy in the therapy room spontaneously fragments and the pieces float
away, defying gravity. They only realize they are in the dream-realm when they
perceive that waking-world physical laws do not hold, and, at that point, Will rea-
lizes he can leave his wheelchair and Taryn suddenly transforms into a ‘beautiful and
bad’ leather-clad punk.
Pace Freeland (2000, 244), then, Elm Street’s horror is distinctly psychologi-
cal. The series is not simply about one’s physical vulnerability to attack while
asleep. Elm Street’s horror is rooted in protagonists’ struggle for control as they
wrestle to understand what is happening to them, to function in the dream-
world despite its instability, and to distinguish between waking/dreaming states.
The sequels increasingly blur these boundaries, thereby amplifying its psycho-
logical horror. Thus, the sequels enrich rather than dilute the original’s premise,
and the series’ richness is most apparent when viewed as a multipart text.
Caught in a dream: Elm Street as recurring nightmare

Elm Street mimics the feel of a recurring nightmare. To establish that premise, it is
necessary to re-evaluate the initial film, viewing it as a section of a multipart text.
When scholars refer to the first film’s climax, they typically cast the final scene as a
coda (in which Freddy ‘reappears’ as a car bearing his sweater’s trademark red and
green stripes). The sequence is understood as a hook for a sequel—a generic
trait—tacked on to a story that finished with Nancy defeating Freddy (see Ken-
drick 2009, 29; Shary 2005, 60, for example). This view corroborates Craven’s
assertions that ‘artistically … the first film was … intact, whole,’ and that Freddy’s
implied reappearance undermines Nancy’s victory (in Gire 1988). Both for Craven,
and writers like Kendrick and Shary, the final scene and subsequent sequels are
unnecessary addendums that disrupt an otherwise self-contained and complete
story. Such a reading perceives the original as a standalone entity (as it was when
first released), but since the sequels now exist, they should inform our interpreta-
tions of Elm Street’s story.
Pace Craven’s assertions, it is unclear whether Nancy defeated Freddy. Her
ostensible victory is signaled by her declaration to Freddy in the penultimate scene:
86 Steve Jones
‘I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing.’ Here, she follows
advice offered by her mother (Marge) and her boyfriend (Glen), who both suggest
that Nancy has been fueling her fears with her attention.6 However, both Marge
and Glen deny that Freddy poses a threat, and both subsequently die. The advice
does not protect them, and as a consequence, it is unclear why the same advice
should save Nancy. Indeed, Nancy herself demonstrates that their advice is inef-
fective: earlier in the film, Nancy tries telling herself ‘this is just a dream, he isn’t
real,’ only to be attacked by Freddy (in front of a snoozing Glen, no less).
In this light, it is worth reconsidering Nancy’s strategy for defeating Freddy:
pulling him out of her dream into the waking-world, thereby shifting the power
balance between them. While asleep, she is physically vulnerable, whereas Freddy
is not. He demonstrates his physical imperviousness by severing his own fingers to
taunt Tina and slicing open his abdomen to intimidate Nancy. She presumes that
the waking-world is stable (whereas the dream-realm is not), and so Nancy seeks
to comprehend her situation by gathering information about the waking-world.
She eventually comes to understand Freddy by piecing together his history, and
consequently, his motives. Yet, she neglects how much information she gathers
about Freddy within her dreams (including his appearance and name). By con-
textualizing Freddy against the supposedly stable waking-world context, Nancy
concludes that in order to defeat him, she should bring him into the waking-world,
making him tangible so that he will be susceptible to injury (as she is). Alas, her
gambit fails. After seemingly pulling Freddy out of her dream, Nancy tries to harm
him using various booby traps (including a sledgehammer rigged to hit him in the
abdomen), but he remains invulnerable. Although set ablaze, he still attacks
Nancy’s mother, Marge, and the pair vanish into her bed.
Instead of bringing Freddy from the dream-world into the waking-world, Nancy
further disrupts the boundary between those realms: rather than making him more
real, she becomes less real, along with her waking-world. In their final exchange,
Freddy and Nancy reach a stalemate. Thus, he dissolves when trying to attack her
physically, falling through her. She verbally denies that he is real, but she does not
fully rescind her fear; she cannot help looking back over her shoulder to check that
he has gone. In the climax, the waking-world/dream-world boundary finally col-
lapses, but it has been eroding throughout the film. When Freddy’s tongue appears
from Nancy’s telephone even though she is awake, or when a hyperbolic torrent of
gravity-defying blood signals Glen’s death, these are not failures to adhere to
ontological rules. These incidents indicate that the dream/reality boundary is frac-
turing, especially after Nancy brings Freddy’s hat ‘out of [her] dream.’
The ‘coda’ represents a further shift. Having reached stalemate, Nancy steps
through her bedroom door into daylight. Her mother and friends are seemingly
alive, and so it initially appears as if Nancy has a fresh start. However, this is a
new hybrid dream-reality context, and having already mastered the dream-
realm, Freddy has significant advantage in this new environment. He demon-
strates his mutability early in the film, taunting Tina by elongating his arms at
will, and Freddy adapts that same malleability to the coda’s new hybrid con-
text. He manifests as the car that traps Nancy and her friends, and his arm
simultaneously appears from within 1428 Elm Street to attack Marge. In con-
trast, Nancy remains limited to her corporeal form because she has not yet
mastered the dream-skills Freddy utilizes. The car driving away does not verify
Freddy’s victory; rather, it signals that Freddy has an advantage in a struggle
that will continue beyond the first film’s limits.
When Nancy reappears in Part 3, protagonist Kristen asks, ‘the man in my
dreams … he’s real, isn’t he?’, to which Nancy flatly replies, ‘he’s real.’ Her
response indicates that—as per the later scene in which the protagonists believe the
group hypnosis to have failed—Nancy does not yet realize that she is in a hybrid
dream/reality context. She clings to her prior understanding that dream and reality
are separate states. Part 3 thus concludes in another stalemate: Freddy stabs
Nancy, then Nancy pierces Freddy with his own claw. Both ‘die,’ only to return
again in another form. They reach their next major transition point in the seventh
film, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which reflexively blurs the lines between
storyworld and real-world by depicting Elm Street’s creative personnel making a
new sequel; Craven plays himself as writer-director, Langenkamp plays herself (an
actor asked to return as Nancy), and so forth. Mimicking real-world events (see
Robb 1998, 156), Langenkamp is depicted as being stalked by an Elm Street fana-
tic. As New Nightmare progresses, the borders between fiction and (the narrative
version of) reality erode. Eventually, the line between Langenkamp and Nancy
dissolves, and she faces Freddy again. This ontological shift follows from the first
film’s conclusion. Having traversed the dream/waking boundary, the next phase of
Nancy and Freddy’s battle is to disrupt the lines between fiction and fact. This
trajectory elucidates the series’ undergirding mechanisms. Following Nancy’s
failed gambit in the first film, the waking-world and dream-world are no longer
separate realms with discrete ontological rules. Elm Street’s hybrid waking/
dreaming context is characterized by ‘waking states’ that sometimes exhibit oneiric
qualities.
When she returns in Part 3, Nancy is a ‘grad school superstar’ who is ‘doing
ground-breaking research on pattern nightmares,’ and the latter aptly describes the
Elm Street sequels. The terminology ‘pattern nightmare’ is not typically employed
within psychological literature about dreaming, but the phrase captures the sense
that recurring nightmares are formulated around ‘a script … a typical sequence of
events [or images]’ (Spoormaker 2008, 16). Elm Street stands accused of being
repetitive or prioritizing spectacle over substance, but recurring nightmares them-
selves are ‘composed of … repetitive and perseverative content … vivid sensory
imagery … intense emotional expression’ [and] ‘unrelenting threat’ (Carr et al.
2016, 81). Elm Street’s horror is oneiric in the purest sense, mimicking the feel of
recurring nightmares.
Thus, the series’ continuing ‘pattern nightmare’ is characterized by persistent
motifs, which transform over time. Elm Street’s key recurring motif, of course, is
Freddy himself; Markovitz (2000, 215) refers to Freddy as ‘an ordering principle’
rather than a character per se. As a symbolic conduit, Freddy’s physicality is
mutable: he morphs into various shapes, transitioning between hyper-muscular
and foetus forms in Part 5, or a worm-like creature, an attractive nurse, and a
88 Steve Jones
television/Freddy amalgam in Part 3. Even in his standard form, his appearance
(usually) remains scarred, but his visage changes with each film. Obviously, there
are industrial reasons for these changes—different make-up artists are employed, a
different actor takes over the role in the 2010 remake7—but these amendments
enhance the series’ dreamlike feel. Moreover, the films’ colour schemes are marked
by the red/green of Freddy’s sweater. Craven claims to have designed the sweater
as a motif so that Freddy could shapeshift and still be recognized (in Hutson 2014,
95). Yet Freddy’s presence (signaled by this color combination) permeates the set-
design. From 1428 Elm Street’s exterior décor (its rose trellis, or its red door and
green panelling in sequels) and the red/green of Kincaid’s dartboard or Joey’s
stereo volume monitors in Part 4, to the anaglyph 3D utilized in the crescendo of
Freddy’s Dead, the distinctive color combination makes it seem as if Freddy is
omnipresent whether the teens are nominally awake or asleep. This color motif
also ties Elm Street together, providing ontological and oneiric coherence.
Aside from the more obvious recurring motifs such as the boiler room location,
1428 Elm Street, little girls in white dresses skipping in slow motion, or the infa-
mous nursery rhyme (‘1, 2, Freddy’s coming for you’), numerous other echoes
provide a feeling of unity across the series, even where new story elements and
characters are introduced. For instance, snakes appear in several films—Parts 1, 2,
New Nightmare and Freddy vs Jason (2003)—and Freddy transforms into a snake
shape in Part 3 (effects designer Kevin Yagher refers to the form as the ‘Freddy-
Snake’ [Nightmare Series Encyclopedia]). Robert Shaye himself is something of a
leitmotif: he cameos in five Elm Street films, prefiguring the appearances of Stan
Lee in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his voice is heard as a KRGR radio
announcer in the first movie. Other recurrences are behavioral; Nancy asks Glen to
‘stand … guard’ while she sleeps and to ‘wake [her] up’ if she appears to be ‘having
a bad dream.’ Jesse similarly asks Grady to ‘watch me and if anything starts to
happen … don’t let me leave … and don’t fall asleep’ in Part 2. Alice requests the
same favor from Mark in Part 5 (‘I want you to stay awake and watch me’).
Elsewhere the echoes are less direct, mutating as the series progresses. In Part 3,
it is revealed that Amanda is Freddy’s mother. In Part 5, we see a nightmare ver-
sion of Freddy’s birth, then it is revealed that Alice is pregnant, and Freddy uses the
baby as a gateway to new victims. Alice’s trait of daydreaming—her distinguishing
characteristic in Part 4—is transferred to her foetus in Part 5 where it is noted that
her unborn baby ‘can spend up to 70% of its day in a dream-state.’ Freddy’s face
appears in Alice’s uterine wall during an ultrasound, and he declares that he is
feeding the spirits of her deceased friends to the foetus, intimating his paternal
interest in the baby (‘soul food for my boy’). In Freddy’s Dead, it is revealed that
Freddy had a child (Maggie) while alive. The series’ retroactive continuity is dis-
tinctly oneiric: an idea (here, about parenthood) is introduced and then morphs,
applying to different individuals as the narrative develops. Freddy’s conception is
referred to, then he is depicted as a foetus, then he interacts with a foetus as a semi-
parental figure, and then he is revealed to be a parent. In these regards, the series
captures dreaming’s mutable quality whereby core conceptual or thematic threads
provide a semblance of coherence, while persons, locations, and events unfold and
merge in unexpected ways. Elm Street’s recurring motifs provide the bedrock that
allows new creative personnel to innovate without alienating the returning
audience.
We dream the same dream

Elm Street’s recurrent motifs chime with its ongoing story, which is based around
characters and their shared experiences. The root story is that a band of parents
conspired to kill Freddy, and a group of teenagers (in Springwood and, later,
beyond) are targeted by and then collectively seek to vanquish Freddy. The series
begins with Nancy revealing the community’s shared secrets, and then being
slowly isolated from her friends as they are slain. The sequels unveil a population
of ‘Elm Street children’, including those (such as Jesse and Dan) who move into the
area long after Freddy’s (initial) demise. From Part 3 onwards, Freddy’s targets
share dreams; as a corrective to Dr Gordon’s assertion that the dreams are a
‘group delusion,’ Nancy clarifies that ‘the nightmares are the common thread’ that
bring the teens together.
Here, one individual’s experience is not distinctly separated from another’s. Just
as the boundaries between waking/dreaming are indistinct in the series, so too are
the borders between individual and communal. This approach may seem counter-
intuitive inasmuch as dreaming is typically considered a private phenomenon.
However, dreams are also ‘often shared with others’ verbally upon awakening
(Schredl et al. 2016, 64). This is particularly true of nightmares, because a dream’s
‘emotional intensity … increases the probability’ of recounting the experience
(Schredl et al. 2016, 65). Moreover, other studies indicate that lucid dreams are
socially oriented insofar as the ‘self-other … distinction is obliterated’ under those
conditions (Stumbrys and Erlacher 2017, 41).
Since the series is based on shared experiences, it is also beneficial to envisage the
films as a collective whole. Viewed as a multipart text, Elm Street is created by
multiple contributors. The series even reflects on those conditions by including
creative personnel within Freddy’s target-base in the meta-sequel New Nightmare.
Stepping back further still, Robert Englund posits that ‘the appeal of this whole
series’ is rooted in dreaming’s universality, since ‘everybody has a bad dream or
nightmare in common’ (in Blair 1989). Film viewing itself has been conceived of as
a collective experience—a shared delusion—that has dreamlike qualities (see Ebert
1997; Metz 1982; Cook 2011). Craven concurs, theorizing that there is ‘very little
difference between nightmares and … horror movies’, inasmuch as both are based
in fantastical perceptual experiences.8 That it is commonplace for viewers to have
nightmares after watching horror (see Hoekstra et al. 1999, 125–126) anchors the
connection between horror film and dreaming. Indeed, Schagen et al.’s definition of
nightmares as ‘complex and story-like series of dream images that inflict dysphoric
emotion’ (2017, 65) could be just as readily applied to the Elm Street series. The
continuing Elm Street story does not simply mimic a recurring nightmare via its
oneiric qualities and multipart structure, then. These elements underscore that it is
beneficial to account for the films as a collection, rather than as isolated chapters.
90 Steve Jones
In conclusion, Elm Street is a prime example of serial filmmaking. The series
has been received as exhibiting serial film’s worst aspects, epitomizing the sup-
posed law of diminishing returns. However, Elm Street is formidably lucrative
and culturally impactful, and the sequels were integral to its success on those
fronts. Moreover, when taken seriously (rather than summarily dismissed), the
sequels enrich the story that began with the initial movie. As is typical of serial
texts (see Proctor 2017, 233), the ongoing storyline is revised to account for
Freddy being vanquished then returning in the next sequel. An uncharitable
reading might suggest that the series is repetitive, and that neither audiences nor
creators are concerned with the ongoing story’s cohesiveness or its in-universe
ontological rules—Freddy being resurrected by flaming dog urine in Part 4 cer-
tainly implies a degree of irreverence, for example. That Part 4 is the series’
second-highest grossing entry (adjusted, ‘Franchises: Nightmare on Elm Street,’
2018) indicates that audiences were not put off by the seemingly bizarre plot
point. Rather than exemplifying ‘diminishing returns’ however, this incident
highlights that the dream premise permits enormous creative freedom. Recur-
ring nightmares are based within a ‘repetitive storyline’ that provides space for
‘continuous presentation of novel and unexpected elements’ (Spoormaker 2008,
15–16), and Elm Street revels in the creative freedom its oneiric setting provides.
Inconsistencies may be perceived as flaws from a critical perspective, but they
can also provide pleasurable surprises for returning audiences. Craven and
Shaye may have envisaged particular ontological rules as the basis for con-
sistency in the series, but dreaming itself naturalizes the kinds of discontinuity
that are inherent to serial properties. More broadly, new creative personnel
‘retcon’ the ongoing story, introducing fresh ideas that expand upon the estab-
lished premises. As Elm Street demonstrates, the multipart text’s storyworld
and its ontological rules are built during this process, not just by the original
film in isolation.
Notes
1 The original six-part series (1984–1991) followed by three additional films: Wes Cra-
ven’s New Nightmare (1994), the Friday the 13th collaboration Freddy vs Jason
(2003), and the 2010 remake of the original.
2 The title denotes severe defeats (see Wilbon 1988; Ryan 1990).
3 A form of spyware (‘Kruegerware’) was named after the series’ villain Freddy Krueger
(see McFedries 2005, 72).
4 Scholarly textual interpretations of the series are typically rooted in psychoanalysis,
focusing on gendered power rather than dreams (see Heba 1995; Humphries 2002;
DeGraffenreid 2011).
5 Scholars have mainly ignored the sequels. Where they have been discussed, the same
characteristic is observed (see Trencansky 2001, 70, for example).
6 The literature on lucid dreaming seems to support their advice (see Jenkins 2012, 3;
Harb et al. 2016, 239; Stumbrys and Erlacher 2017, 44).
7 Borrowing from the series’ established threads but being uncannily different in its
aesthetics and characterization, the remake is the ultimate echo.
8 In commentary for the 1999 New Line Home Video release of New Nightmare.
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5 Allowing ‘us just to LIVE there’
Atmosphere and audience evaluations of the
Alien film series
Kate Egan
In 1999, Will Brooker explored the sequels and licensed spin-offs associated with
Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), and Alien (1979), and the ways in which
they were evaluated within emergent internet fan communities of the time. In this
regard, Brooker noted the distinctiveness of the Alien film franchise, each install-
ment having been ‘under the command not just of a different director but of a
different auteur; each with a highly distinctive personal style,’ meant that the Alien
series exhibited a marked ‘openness to diverse authorial styles’ (1999, 62, 64). As
fans observed Ripley being ‘flung’ across the series ‘from one aesthetic and generic
universe to another,’ they therefore evaluated the Alien franchise in a particularly
open and flexible manner, with the ‘respective qualities’ of each film in the series,
as well as its transmedia spin-offs, being ‘entirely open to debate’ (1999, 53, 63).
However, findings from the 2012–2015 Alien Audiences international audience
project complicate this notion that audience evaluations of the Alien series are
always as open and flexible as Brooker’s analysis suggests. The primary focus of
the Alien Audiences project (designed and conducted by Martin Barker, Tom
Phillips, Sarah Ralph, and myself) was to gather people’s memories of the original
1979 film as its fortieth anniversary drew near. We were interested in asking audi-
ences about ‘how they found meanings in the film, and how they constructed those
meanings,’ what ‘different kinds of viewers notice and attend to in the film, what
kind of a film’ they ‘believe it to be,’ but also—crucially, for the purposes of this
chapter—what ‘they relate and compare it to’ (Barker et al. 2015, 9).
In order to try to garner responses that could shed light on this latter issue, we
asked the following two questions in our project’s online questionnaire: first,
‘which of the other Alien-connected films have you watched? And how would you
rate each of them in comparison with the original film?’ [multiple choice/quanti-
tative question]; and, second, ‘can you say what lies behind the comparisons
you’ve just made?’ [free text/qualitative question]. The film options given included
the two Alien vs. Predator films, and Ridley Scott’s return to the Alien storyworld,
Prometheus (2012). At the time the project was conducted, Alien: Covenant (2017)
was yet to be released. The results, from the 1,125 people who completed our
project questionnaire are shown in Figure 5.1.
In Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie, the book
based on our overall project findings, we only had space to note the main and most
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-7
Allowing ‘us just to LIVE there’ 95
Ratings for each film in comparison to Alien
700
600
500
Number of respondents
400
300
200
100
0
ALIENS ALIEN 3 ALIEN ALIEN VS ALIEN VS PROMETHEUS
RESURRECTION PREDATOR PREDATOR
REQUIEM
Film Title
MUCH BETTER BETTER AS GOOD WORSE MUCH WORSE
Figure 5.1 Rating for each film in comparison to Alien
obvious reading of these results, that there is ‘in general a descending scale of rat-
ings of the other films in the franchise’ (Barker et al. 2015, 14). While there are a
substantial number of respondents (264 people, 23 percent) who rated Aliens
(1986) more highly than the original film, and another 562 people (50 percent) who
rated Aliens as being ‘as good as’ Alien, there is a ‘steady decline in ratings’ across
the other five films in the series (Barker et al. 2015, 14).
By going back to these findings, however, I wanted to consider on what basis such
ratings were being made, particularly in light of the fact that, Aliens aside, these
results and quantitative patterns seemed to contradict Brooker’s 1999 findings that
fans of the series were more flexible and open when assessing the ‘respective quali-
ties’ of each film in the franchise. In order to do so, I began to explore respondent
answers to Question 9 in the project questionnaire, the qualitative question which
asked, ‘can you say what lies behind the comparisons you’ve just made?’ This
exploration was informed by two issues, in particular. First, and as outlined in the
Alien Audiences book, the rationale behind our use of paired quantitative and qua-
litative questions in the questionnaire was to allow us ‘to discover patterns, connec-
tions, separations and oppositions’ within audience responses, while ‘getting people
to flesh out their distinctive involvements in their own preferred terms’ (Barker et al.
2015, 10, my emphasis). Consequently, I wanted to explore further what specific
preferred terms, concepts, and discursive frameworks were being employed by
audiences to evaluate the other films in the Alien series in relation to the original
Alien film. Was the focus on the extent to which the rest of the Alien series could be
perceived to be part of the canonical Alien story, as it was for the fans analyzed in
Brooker’s account; or were other criteria also being employed and foregrounded in
these audience evaluations? Second, when first reading through respondent answers
to Question 9, I had been struck that some respondents had challenged the range of
96 Kate Egan
terms we had used (in particular, the terms ‘worse’ and ‘much worse’) for the mul-
tiple-choice options to Question 8, the quantitative question asking for ratings of the
sequels in comparison to the original film. For instance, respondents remarked, in
their answers to Question 9, that: ‘I don’t like the term “worse”. Although I don’t
think they [the other Alien films] are as atmospheric and cinematographically beau-
tiful, I still love them very much’; and ‘I don’t think the other films are “worse” than
the original, just different in tone and ultimately not as good’ (#393, female, 26–35;
#136, male, 16–25, my emphasis). For me, this seemed to shed light on the ways in
which respondents might distinguish the rating ‘worse’—selected by 54 percent of
respondents as their comparative rating of Alien 3 (1992), for instance—from the
alternative option, ‘much worse,’ particularly when thinking, relatively, about the
extremely high esteem in which the majority of our respondents held Alien, with 82
percent of our overall project respondents having rated the original film as either a
‘masterpiece’ or ‘excellent.’
As illustrated in the two Question 9 responses given above, an element that
seemed to reoccur across a substantial number of responses (91 people, 8 percent
of responses) were references to atmosphere, mood, or tone when comparatively
evaluating the Alien sequels in relation to the original 1979 film. It should be noted
that, while the overall project dataset had far more male than female responses (76
percent male as opposed to 24 percent female), this was even more pronounced
amongst this group of 91 responses (86 percent male as opposed to 14 percent
female), suggesting that this form of appreciation and evaluation of Alien may be
particularly prevalent amongst male fans of the series (or at least, prevalent within
the dataset). In addition, and as illustrated in Figure 5.2, there were significantly
higher numbers of younger respondents in this group, with, for instance, 28
Breakdown of Age in the Atmosphere Group

45
39
40
34
35
% of respondents
30 28
26
25
20
20 18
16
15 12
10
4
5
1
0
16-25 26-35 36-45 46-55 56-65
Age Categories
WHOLE DATABASE ATMOSPHERE GROUP
Figure 5.2 Breakdown of age in the atmosphere group

percent of this ‘atmosphere group’ being between the ages of 16 and 25 at the time
of data-gathering (10 percent higher than the dataset as a whole) and 39 percent
being 26–35 (5 percent higher than the dataset as a whole), a finding that I will
return to later in this chapter.
For Julian Hanich and Robert Spadoni—two key scholars who have critically
analyzed ‘atmosphere’ and its employment, particularly in horror films—film aca-
demics have critically neglected the term atmosphere, the way in which it has been
historically employed in film criticism to evaluate horror films, and its status as a
key formal element employed within horror cinema across its history. As Spadoni
argues, ‘[w]hat the word means has been mostly taken for granted, and what it has
to teach us about how horror films cohere and how they affect viewers remains
poorly understood’ (2014a, 152). Through an analysis of how audiences draw
upon and understand cinematic atmosphere across these 91 responses, this chapter
will focus on this last element identified by Spadoni, that is, the affect and impact
of atmosphere on audiences, but it will also significantly expand on his arguments,
by exploring how audiences (rather than the film critics Spadoni analyzes) employ
a term like atmosphere and related terms such as ‘mood’ and ‘tone’ as a key eva-
luative criterion to measure continuity, as well as difference and distinctiveness,
across the Alien film series. The chapter will, in particular, explore two key ways
in which atmosphere is seen, by these respondents, to be used effectively across the
series (and particularly in the original film)—first, to generate dread, tension, and
unease; and, second, to support and sustain an immersive storyworld. Through-
out, the chapter will draw on Julian Hanich and Robert Spadoni’s analysis of the
textual employment of atmosphere within particular horror films, as well as key
arguments from Mark J.P. Wolf on world-building, in order to consider how this
critically prized, but ‘nebulous’, ‘thing we call atmosphere’ (Spadoni 2014b, 111)
can serve as a key anchor for invested audiences of the Alien series, allowing them
to foreground evaluative criteria which connects to the original Alien film’s rela-
tionship with highbrow horror production.
The Alien series and atmosphere

The primary way in which the term atmosphere is employed in responses to
Question 9 is as a key evaluative measure which represents the exceptionality of
Alien, a standard against which all the Alien sequels—even, in many cases,
Aliens—is seen to be lacking. As respondents note, for instance:
Only Aliens and Prometheus really come close to the original, but even they
lack the suspenseful atmosphere of the original Alien.
(#1065, male, 26–35)
In the latter films the atmosphere and suspense that made the first one so
good is lacking dramatically.
(#204, male, 26–35)
98 Kate Egan
Aliens was an interesting take on Alien but the rest just seemed to lack the
bleak middle of deep space atmosphere of the original and that, for me at
least, was its masterstroke.
(#690, male, 36–45)
I consider Aliens a standard 80s action movie with none of the character
development and atmosphere of the original.
(#678, male, 26–35)
Aliens was a great action film, perhaps one of the best, but it lacked the
atmosphere and dread of the original, even though there were more aliens,
they simply weren’t as scary.
(#16, male, 16–25)
Across these responses, then, there is a sense that Alien is seen as exceeding the
‘standard’ expectations that audiences would have of competent (or interesting or
even ‘one of the best’) genre films, and that the element that makes it surpass
these expectations, makes it ‘so good’ and is its ‘masterstroke,’ is consistently
identified across these responses as being its atmosphere. With regards to the
identification of key uses of atmosphere by these respondents, also of note in the
last response given above is the association made between atmosphere, dread,
and effective scariness, the combination of which seems key, for many respon-
dents in this ‘atmosphere group,’ when considering why Alien is a superior film
to its sequels: because of this combination it is seen as exceptional and thus a
superior rather than a standard horror film. In Julian Hanich’s analysis of what
he terms ‘dread scenes’ in horror films, the ‘threatening aspect’ of such scenes
tends to be heightened by atmosphere generated by a range of elements (sound,
setting, use of space, and mise-en-scene) which, for him, ‘play a crucial role in
supporting and facilitating’ viewers’ emotional responses to such scenes (2010,
170). In his analysis of how viewers’ emotions are facilitated and engaged by a
variety of formal and aesthetic techniques in horror cinema (informed by phe-
nomenological concepts and methods) Hanich identifies dread and terror ‘as
anticipatory forms of fear’ (2010, 109), distinct from the responses of horror and
shock associated with direct and suggested horror scenes which are focused on
and directed toward a visually and/or audibly present horrific object (i.e., a
monster or other threatening presence). It is notable that Hanich cites horror
author William F. Nolan’s comment that ‘what is primary in creating true horror
is the mood’ (2010, 170, my emphasis). This mirrors Spadoni’s assertion that
horror films are atmospheric ‘compared to most other genre films’ (2014a, 151)
and suggests that the creation and heightening of atmosphere may be employed
by other genres, but that it is often seen as the horror genre’s raison d’être. For
Nolan, Spadoni, and the respondents discussed in this chapter, it is something
that, given the right circumstances and the right intentions on the part of the
filmmaker, can elevate a horror film to ‘masterpiece’ status while, crucially,
allowing it to still remain a horror film because it is amplifying a quality which is
seen as the true, pure essence of effective or ‘true’ horror—the production of
dread supported and enabled by the generation of atmosphere.
Indeed, the filmmaker’s ability to produce cinematic atmosphere in the creation
of dread, rather than rely on what one respondent calls ‘simple scares,’ seems key
to its exceptionality across the 91 responses analyzed, with respondents noting
that later Alien films—particularly Alien Resurrection (1997), Alien vs. Predator
(2004), and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)—were ‘too focused on making
the aliens traditional movie monsters, rather than placing the aliens within the
moody and atmospheric setting of the previous films’ (#899, male, 16–25). The
focus on setting here connects this response to Spadoni’s assertion that a film’s
atmosphere is intrinsically linked with setting and employment of space. As Spa-
doni notes, when analyzing the employment of atmosphere in RKO’s 1940s
horror films:
An artist who can make things ‘radiate’ with ‘felt presence’ in an especially
intense fashion will produce an atmospheric film. Asking how creative prac-
titioners such as Lewton and Tourneur de-emphasize the human within the
environment, the foreground against the background, and the narrative
against the atmosphere may help us to explore with greater concreteness what
is meant by that intangible thing atmosphere, and to consider why some films,
more than others, brim with this elusive aesthetic air.
(2014b, 116)
These qualities, and their link to setting, are evident in a number of responses
which directly connect Alien’s atmosphere (and Prometheus’ employment of this
prized element too) to director Ridley Scott’s ability to create, and his ‘love’ of,
‘very atmospheric sets’ (#415, male, 16–25 and #835, male, 36–45). However, with
regards to Alien specifically, these respondents’ understanding of what they mean
by atmosphere is also evident in their responses to another qualitative question in
the questionnaire, which asked respondents to discuss their favorite moment in
Alien. It is notable that one particular sequence (which involves Lambert, Dallas,
and Kane’s exploration of the planet and discovery of the space jockey and egg
chamber) is chosen more frequently as a favorite moment by these 91 respondents
than is the case for the Alien Audiences project dataset as a whole (chosen by 21
percent of these 91 respondents, as opposed to 14 percent in the dataset as a
whole). This connects, in a number of responses, to the ways in which the fore-
grounding of space and setting in this sequence, and also in the film’s opening
sequence, allow for the notable foregrounding of atmosphere and mood. As these
respondents note, for instance:
The build-up to the first face hugger scene: The mood, the music, the
characters and then the sudden event (at least 30 minutes into the quite
modestly paced film). I find this particularly more effective than (old and
new) movies that don’t take their time and cut to the chase, so to speak.
(#1077, male, 36–45)
100 Kate Egan
The opening scene showing the empty, computer-controlled cockpit. I find it
sets the tone and pace of the film and gives the film the best possible starting
place.
(#148, male, 26–35)
It would have to be the scene with the eggs inside the chamber of the alien
spacecraft. Nothing beats the chilling, ominous atmosphere of that particular
scene, and it would also be the one I’d show my future kids to really whet
their appetite.
(#1116, Male, 26–35)
There are a number of elements which inform the discursive links made between
atmosphere and other attributes in these responses. First, there is the fact that the
last two responses identify their favorite moments in the film through reference to
filmic space (the Nostromo cockpit, and the chamber in the alien spacecraft) and
then relate their choice of this moment to tone and atmosphere, illustrating quite
clearing how an appreciation of and focus on atmosphere ‘invites us to consider the
spatiality of a film’ (Spadoni 2014a, 153). Second, and despite Spadoni’s contention
that the foregrounding of atmosphere can de-emphasize the narrative, the responses
above illustrate that their appreciation of these moments is very much tied to the
pacing of the film—the way in which these scenes set the rhythm, enable a build-up,
and create and generate an ominous atmosphere, relating to Spadoni’s conception
that those who make atmospherically effective films can ‘make things radiate with
felt presence.’ Consequently, and in line with Hanich’s arguments about ‘scenes of
dread,’ what’s being valued here is the ways in which the employment of atmosphere
in a setting (which can work, for Hanich, to present these settings as constricted and/
or isolated) can build tension and allow, as another respondent notes, ‘the audience
to engage both emotionally and intellectually in the story’ (#1102, male, 26–35). In
one of the responses above, the focus on the opening scene, which is noted as being
‘empty’ by the respondent (i.e., empty of characters), also connects to Spadoni’s
assertion that atmosphere or mood can thrive when human characters are de-
emphasized, or, in this case, absent from a filmic environment, a condition which,
for Kristin Thompson in her narrative analysis of the film, ‘establishes [Alien’s]
narration as being free of links to the characters’ (1999, 287), foregrounding the role
of the Nostromo in this narrative, illustrated by this respondent’s comment that this
sequence ‘sets the tone and pace of the film.’
These evaluations of Alien therefore chime with Spadoni and Hanich’s contention
that the foregrounding of setting in a horror or thriller narrative can provide a film-
maker with valuable opportunities to load a film with atmosphere. For Spadoni, once
a horror film begins, ‘the real work of building atmosphere gets underway’ (2014b,
113), suggesting the idea that filmmakers have to work (in some ways, against the
forward movement of the film’s plot) to find these moments in a horror film, seize the
opportunities for atmosphere creation they provide, and then capitalize upon them.
This discursive conception of a filmmaker, or ‘artist’ in Spadoni’s terms, working
against the forward motion of a plot to populate their film with slower-paced
moments of atmosphere-aided tension, is echoed in the director’s commentaries
accompanying the DVD releases of Alien and the longer, special edition version of
Aliens. In the Alien commentary, Scott notes that ‘they were always worried’ about
the fact that ‘nothing really happens action-wise for about forty minutes in the film,’
while Cameron overtly identifies Scott’s ‘they’ as Twentieth Century Fox, and notes
that they asked Cameron to cut certain scenes from Aliens which focused on ‘trying
to build tension before the alien appears’ because they felt that Cameron should
remain focused on progressing with the story (Scott 2003, commentary; Cameron
1991, commentary). In these commentaries, then, the director presents himself as
attempting to imbue the film with what Spadoni calls the ‘elusive aesthetic air’ of
atmosphere. In both Scott and Cameron’s accounts, these attempts are militated
against by the forward motion of the story as prioritized by the Twentieth Century
Fox studio over the aim to generate atmosphere.
However, if, in these examples, it is a focus on story progression that is seen to be
at odds with the prized creation of atmosphere, for other respondents, a range of
factors associated with inauthenticity and the commercial aspects of genre-film-
making are also seen to squeeze the atmosphere out of the Alien sequels. The range
of factors marring the Alien sequels are illustrated in these responses, for instance:
The other films became much more self-aware of themselves as STORIES

ABOUT THE ALIEN. They weren’t embedded in the atmosphere, the
other world, in a way that allowed us just to LIVE there. They’re too self-
conscious, which kills the wonder (and the terror).
(#147, female, 36–45, emphasis in original)
Prometheus was alright but it definitely did not focus on what made Alien
so original. There was too much CG and not enough biological and bio-
mechanical elements in a lot of the set designs. The derelict in Alien was
wet, misty, and hot on the inside whereas the ship in Prometheus was cold
and honestly looked like it was made of black painted wood (The 4k
cameras didn’t help in creating an atmosphere like in Alien either).
(#415, male, 16–25)
The others [beyond the first three films] are comic book films made for an
entirely different generation.
(#171, male, 26–35)
Alien Resurrection, Alien vs Predator and Alien vs Predator: Requiem come

across as a glossy gory advert to sell miniatures to moody, geeky teenagers.
(#148, male, 26–35)
In the first response above, the factors which impact on the sequels’ lower
standards (when measured evaluatively against the original film’s employment
of atmosphere) include a ‘self-conscious’ or ‘self-aware’ approach to telling a
102 Kate Egan
story about the alien. So, in contrast to the earlier discussion of de-emphasizing
the ‘foreground against the background,’ these films are seen to emphasize the
presence in these films of a monster over the realization of a world in which the
monster and the other characters exist and are ‘embedded.’ As realized in Alien,
a world that is so palpable for this respondent that it can allow ‘us just to LIVE
there.’ Here, then, is an identification of a second key use of atmosphere in
Alien; not just to generate tension and dread in an audience but to, in Mark J.P.
Wolf’s terms, encourage immersion and absorption in its storyworld. As Wolf
argues, illustrating the importance of atmosphere to this process (and shedding
further light on many of these respondents’ favorite moments from the film):
World-building … often results in data, exposition, and digressions that pro-

vide information about a world, slowing down narrative or even bringing it to
a halt temporarily, yet much of the excess detail and descriptive richness can
be an important part of the audience’s experience. World information that
does not actively advance the story may still provide mood and atmosphere, or
further form our image of characters, places, and events.
(2012, 29)
In the second response above, the focus remains on comparisons of space and setting,
with atmosphere being seen to have been removed from Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel,
Prometheus, due to the employment of contemporary technologies, including CGI
and 4K cameras. The focus on the contrasts in the visual depiction of the alien ships
in Alien and Prometheus provides further illustrative detail in this response, as the
respondent contrasts the (seemingly diegetically integrated) ‘wet, misty, and hot’
atmosphere of Alien’s derelict ship with an emphasis on Prometheus’ alien ship not as
a diegetic element but as a constructed and artificial set, through a focus on how it
appears to have been made by the set designers (with ‘black painted wood’). Again,
such tendencies, like the self-conscious storytelling of the sequels addressed in the first
response, are therefore presented discursively here as disrupting the immersion into
the storyworld seen to be so effectively achieved in the original Alien film.
Beyond this, and as illustrated in the final two responses above, atmosphere is also
seen to be lacking or neutered in the last three films in the Alien series—Alien Res-
urrection, and the two Alien vs Predator films—due to a shift in target audience and
associated commercial strategies. In the last response, the final three films in the Alien
series are deemed to be ‘glossy’ and ‘gory,’ factors which are then linked to overtly
commercial rather than artistic or aesthetic concerns through the references made to
adverts, miniatures, and teenagers. Indeed, this focus on merchandise and teenagers
seem to link with other responses amongst the ‘atmosphere group,’ which outline
how their preference for Aliens has shifted to Alien as they have got older. As one
respondent notes, for instance: ‘As a kid I obviously liked Aliens more for the action
and the Kenner toys that I loved as a kid. But over time I began to appreciate the
original more’ (#469, male, 16–25).
Here, then, amongst these Alien-valuing respondents, atmosphere is not only
associated with dread, tension, the presence of emotion, and a palpable
storyworld, but also with a form of film appreciation which is associated with
the reflective, the nuanced, the darker, and the more adult. Indeed, such shifting
forms of appreciation (on these terms, from Aliens to Alien) may help to
explain the higher numbers of younger people among this atmosphere-appre-
ciating group of respondents (with 67 percent of the ‘atmosphere group’ being
under 35). Many of these respondents were either extremely young or not even
born when Alien was first released at the cinema, but are more inclined to refer
to merchandise or elements of CGI in the later Alien sequels in negative terms
than is the case across the dataset as a whole, suggesting a move, across their
history of viewership of the Alien series, to a more reflective appreciation of the
original film and its darker atmosphere rather than what they see as the
‘glossy,’ ‘comic book’ nature of the sequels.
It is on these terms, relating to the mature, reflective appreciation of dark atmo-
sphere, that, for these respondents, some of the Alien sequels hold more potential to
be appreciated and defended than others. As the analysis so far has illustrated, Alien’s
status as a superior horror film, which, for respondents, can be elevated not only over
the film’s sequels but also ‘standard’ genre films more broadly, relates to its effective
employment of atmosphere generated through dynamic interaction with a range of
other filmic elements, from the depiction of setting and a complete and immersive
storyworld to storytelling techniques associated with pace, tension, dread, and emo-
tion. However, while for the majority of these 91 respondents, all the subsequent
Alien sequels lack this ‘unparalleled’ use of atmosphere (#690, male, 36–45), the
employment of this evaluative measure can elevate appraisals of some of the Alien
sequels, particularly Prometheus and, most markedly, Alien 3. As respondents note,
for instance:
Alien 3 was flawed in many ways, but I loved the atmosphere.

(#344, male, 46–55)
Prometheus was a wreck but had its moments and had great atmosphere.
(#23, male, 46–55)
Given the extremely troubled nature of the production, it is obvious that

Alien 3 is not as well made a film as the first two, but what it lacks in
structure, it more than made up for in atmosphere.
(#189, male, 16–25)
Prometheus had a laughable storyline as well as terrible acting, but the

atmosphere made it all worth spending a ticket to the cinema.
(#1116, male, 26–35)
Alien 3 I also liked a lot, but it didn’t carry the suspense of the original. I
give it points for its dark, cold atmosphere.
(#42, male, 26–35)
104 Kate Egan
In all these responses, which are all structured in a similar discursive manner,
the flaws of Alien 3 and Prometheus are first identified: the two films are presented
as ‘a wreck’; ‘not as well made a film as the first two’; having a ‘laughable story-
line’ and ‘terrible acting’; and as not carrying ‘the suspense of the original.’ How-
ever, both films are then critically redeemed and given kudos (or ‘points’) by these
respondents for their generation of the precious commodity of atmosphere. For
Spadoni, ‘a long-standing tendency in critical writing on horror films is to find
some films succeeding, as films, on the strength of their atmospheres alone’ (2014b,
110). As these responses illustrate, a similar kind of evaluation is being enacted
here amongst long-term, invested audiences of Alien, with atmosphere being con-
stituted as these films’ saving grace which raises them, to some extent, from the
mire of the more overtly negative critiques given by these respondents to the other
films in the Alien series.
In the case of Alien 3, it is noteworthy that, for these respondents, atmosphere’s
dynamic relation with suspense, pace, and structure seems to be lacking (or to have
not been capitalized upon) within this film. Yet simultaneously, its atmosphere is
still valued for its ability to infuse the film with a sense of emotion, environment,
or presence—a darkness and a coldness, to cite the last response above. This
emphasis on the specific qualities of the atmosphere in Alien 3 is also evident in the
following responses:
Alien 3 I feel is very underrated and has all the emotion of the original and
is oozing with atmosphere.
(#469, male, 16–25)
I appreciated Alien 3 for its grim style atmosphere.

(#862, male, 26–35)
I like Alien 3 a lot even if it didn’t bring much new to the table. I love the
bleak atmosphere.
(#931, female, 26–35)
I do love Alien 3 for its attempt to capture that helpless and claustrophobic
atmosphere that makes Alien such a great horror film, but I fault Fox stu-
dios and not Fincher for its (almost) failure.
(#304, male, 26–35)
Regardless of how effectively or ineffectively it is employed to support tension,

pace, and storytelling in Alien 3, the value of the film’s atmosphere is particularly
related in these responses to the generation of emotion, and the way in which it
provides, supports, or enhances the presence of feelings, sensations, and ideas
associated with grimness, bleakness, helplessness, and claustrophobia. For these
respondents, Alien 3 seems to belong to the world of the Alien series in a way that
is not the case with the subsequent sequels (Alien Resurrection, Alien vs
Prometheus, and Alien vs Predator: Requiem). This is also illustrated by the way in
which an ideal framework or template for ‘an Alien movie’ is employed by
respondents to redeem and defend Alien 3. For one respondent, for instance, Alien,
Aliens, and Alien 3 all ‘felt like Alien movies,’ while, for another, Alien 3 ‘had the
feel an Alien movie should have’ (#997, female, 26–35, and #313, male, 16–25).
This notion of ‘feel’ seems to chime with Spadoni’s argument that the term atmo-
sphere refers predominantly to ‘the texture of the world a film creates’ (2014b,
112). In turn, these respondents’ measuring of the extent to which the Alien sequels
have the ‘feel’ of ‘an Alien movie’ points to the ways in which consistency, which
Mark J.P. Wolf sees as so essential to effective world-building, plays an important
role in these evaluations, informing assessments of how atmosphere helps to
‘create the illusion of another world’ (2012, 34).
To return to an earlier point, what is also evident in the last audience response
cited above (which also echoes the earlier-cited comments from Ridley Scott and
James Cameron) is the way in which this ‘capturing’ of atmosphere is seen to be at
odds with the studio, Twentieth Century Fox, who are here explicitly associated
with the film’s flaws and failures rather than Alien 3’s director, David Fincher. As
is now well known, and as was extensively documented in the supplementary
materials accompanying Alien 3’s release as part of the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy
DVD boxset, Fincher’s experience making Alien 3 was extremely troubled, char-
acterized by lengthy battles with the studio over the shape and content of the film.
In this respect, what is noteworthy is that mentions of Fincher amongst the
‘atmosphere group’ responses invariably refer to these circumstances. Aside from
the aforementioned response distancing Fincher from culpability for the film’s
flaws, one respondent, for instance, refers to Fincher ‘practically disowning the
film’ (#136, male, 16–25), and another noting that ‘Alien 3 was pretty much
doomed after its pre-production problems and David Fincher did the best he could
with a poisoned chalice’ (#164, male, 26–35). Meanwhile, a third respondent states
that their assessment of Alien 3 as worse than the original film is based on ‘D
Fincher’s vision and decisions being compromised and stomped on throughout the
process by D[avid] Giler’, one of the film’s key producers and screenwriters (#663,
male, 46–55). For respondents, this illustrates the rather vexed relationship
between Alien 3—its qualities and characteristics—and its director: Alien 3 was
Fincher’s feature film debut, but as his career developed and his status as an
‘auteur’ steadily emerged, he felt that he could publicly distance himself from the
film because of his ‘decisions being compromised’ during its making. Interestingly,
this distancing is often mobilized similarly by respondents through discourses of
‘compromise’ and studio interference as opposed to blaming Fincher for the
shortcomings of Alien 3.
This set of circumstances, explicitly referred to amongst this group of respon-
dents, clearly complicates their evaluations of Alien 3 in relation to the Alien series
as a whole. The aforementioned 2003 Alien Quadrilogy boxset included not only
the original version of the film but also a special edition, which, as the accom-
panying booklet notes, is not a director’s cut but ‘a restored and re-mastered pre-
sentation of the 1991 assembly cut of the film’ featuring 30 minutes of additional
106 Kate Egan
footage (2003, 15); although on the basis of the 91 responses analyzed in this
chapter, this assembly cut is frequently referred to as the ‘director’s cut’ of the film.
Notably, the existence of this assembly cut seems, on a number of occasions, to
bolster respondents’ conceptions that Alien 3 is a film with value because of its
atmosphere. As one respondent notes, for instance, ‘Alien 3, especially the direc-
tor’s cut, is underrated and very atmospheric’ (#648, male, 16–25), a version that
can be conceived as a director’s cut because it has an enhanced employment of
atmosphere that brings it closer to the intended vision of Fincher than the com-
promised original version of the film.
Conclusion: atmosphere as a transtextual measure

In many ways, this returns the chapter to Brooker’s argument that the distinctive-
ness of Alien as a franchise is due to the involvement in each installment (or, at
least, the first four films and Prometheus) of an ‘auteur’ director. In his account of
the evaluations of the first four films in the series by internet fans, Brooker cites an
example of a fan comment, which, for him, illustrates fan recognition of the ‘dis-
tinction between directorial styles’ evident across the Alien series (Brooker 1999,
63). This fan’s evaluation notes regarding the first four films in the Alien franchise
that
each of them have their own ‘trademark’. Scott has his dark and gloomy
big space. Cameron has his big budget spending. Fincher is quite similar to
Scott in some ways, with his gloomy corridors. Jeunet has his dark sense of
humor mixed with excellent effects and a more pristine view on the aliens.
(Quoted in Brooker 1999, 63)
While here, each director is associated with a ‘trademark,’ it is notable that Scott
and Fincher, in particular and in line with the perspectives evident in the Alien
Audiences project’s ‘atmosphere group,’ are associated with space and setting and
their filmic depiction as ‘gloomy’ (in comparison to the association of Cameron
with budget, and Jeunet with effects). On this basis, it could be argued that the
connections between Alien and Alien 3 relate to the fact that Fincher was
attempting to emulate or recapture the atmospheric qualities of Scott’s original
Alien film as much as, or in dynamic tension with, his attempts to imbue his film
with a distinctive trademark. This is supported, for instance, by Alien and Alien 3
editor Terry Rawlings’ comment that Scott was ‘a hero of David Fincher’s’ and it
was ‘clear he wanted it to have some of the pacing and tension of Alien’ (Rawlings
2003, commentary).
However, for the 91 respondents analyzed in this chapter, atmosphere—its
identification and appreciation—has become a defining aspect of what makes an
Alien film have ‘the feel an Alien movie should have,’ with this determining the
framework and parameters through which all films in the Alien series are
valued, regardless of a particular Alien film’s director, their trademark pre-
occupations, and the efficacy of their relationship with Twentieth Century Fox.
In this sense, atmosphere, for these respondents, is the key transtextual dimen-
sion determining the success or failure of each film in the series. It is the pri-
mary evaluative element in ‘the ties that link’ these ‘texts to one another,’ to use
the definition that Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer employ when dis-
cussing Gerard Genette’s conception of transtextuality (2016, 1). Over the years,
and over multiple viewings, it is the key element that has illustrated, explained,
and enhanced the original Alien’s ‘long term durability’ for these respondents
(#1102, male, 26–35). And, in turn, this detailed appreciation of Alien’s atmo-
sphere has facilitated a recuperation (and potential ‘cultification’) of Alien 3 as
a film that attempts, within the context of Fincher’s now well-documented
battles with the studio, to ‘capture’ the same precious atmosphere that is seen
to imbue and elevate the original.
References
Alien Quadrilogy. 2003. DVD Boxset Booklet, Twentieth Century Fox.
Barker, Martin, Kate Egan, Tom Phillips, and Sarah Ralph. 2015. Alien Audiences:
Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brooker, Will. 1999. ‘Internet Fandom and the Continuing Narratives of Star Wars,
Blade Runner and Alien’. In Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema,
edited by Annette Kuhn, 50–74. London: Verso.
Cameron, James. 1991. Audio Commentary, Aliens Special Edition, included on Alien
Quadrilogy DVD Boxset, Twentieth Century Fox, 2003.
Hanich, Julian. 2010. Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic
Paradox of Pleasurable Fear. New York: Routledge.
Klein, Amanda Ann and R. Barton Palmer. 2016. ‘Introduction’. In Cycles, Sequels, Spin-
Offs, Remakes and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, edited by Amanda
Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer, 1–21. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rawlings, Terry. 2003. Audio Commentary, Alien 3, included on Alien Quadrilogy DVD
Boxset, Twentieth Century Fox.
Scott, Ridley. 2003. Audio Commentary, Alien, included on Alien Quadrilogy DVD
Boxset, Twentieth Century Fox.
Spadoni, Robert. 2014a. ‘Carl Dreyer’s Corpse: Horror Film Atmosphere and Narrative’.
In A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M.Benshoff, 151–167. Oxford:
Wiley Blackwell.
Spadoni, Robert. 2014b. ‘Horror Film Atmosphere as Anti-narrative (and Vice Versa)’.
In Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema, edited by Richard Nowell,
109–128. New York: Bloomsbury.
Thompson, Kristin. 1999. Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical
Narrative Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wolf, Mark J.P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Sub-
creation. London: Routledge.
Part II
Millennial franchises
6 Cut-price creeps
The Blumhouse model of horror franchise
management
Todd K. Platts
Though established in 2000 by former Miramax executive Jason Blum, Blum-

house Productions only emerged as a significant player in cinematic horror after
the release of Paranormal Activity in 2009, a film notable for its incredibly low
budget and astronomically high profit margin. Since then, Blumhouse’s core
business model has been ‘telling scary stories’ (Ryan 2016) with stripped down
budgets, which until recently stipulated $5 million (or less) for original films and
$10 million (or less) for sequels (Platts forthcoming a). Recent Blumhouse relea-
ses have strayed slightly from these budgetary constraints, including $13 million
for The First Purge (2018), $15 for the BlacKkKlansman and The Hunt (2020),
and $7 million for both Fantasy Island (2020) and the Invisible Man (2020).
Despite spending so little on individual films (averaging just over $5 million per
film), however, Blumhouse maintains an impressive track record with an average
return on investment standing at 3,027.5 percent per film (Platts forthcoming a).
The company has been so astute in its operations that Blum and Blumhouse
have garnered numerous sobriquets by industry observers, including reference to
Blum as a ‘micro-budget mogul,’ and to Blumhouse as the Pixar of horror cinema
in multiple media outlets (see e.g., Guthrie and Siegel 2013; Hatfull 2017; Lang
2017; Mendelson 2017). Blum and Blumhouse have even prompted comparisons to
(in)famed low-budget producer Roger Corman who is also known for cranking
out low-budget genre fare (Johnson 2020). Unlike Corman though, Blumhouse has
produced critically acclaimed films, such as Split (2017) and Get Out (2017), highly
lucrative films such as Happy Death Day (2017)1 and Truth or Dare (2018), and
several bankable franchises that are the subject of this chapter, such as Paranormal
Activity (2009–present), Insidious (2011–present), The Purge (2013–present), and
Halloween (1978–present). Through it all, Blumhouse maintains an unusual model
of producing original films, and as this chapter documents, an unusual model in
managing franchise films.
Franchises constitute a significant aspect of Blumhouse’s business strategies,
comprising roughly half the company’s output, according to Blum (see Fletcher
2020). Though each of the franchises covered in this chapter have received aca-
demic scrutiny, it is surprising to note that relatively few studies consider the
industrial imperatives of the company given its atypical business model and con-
duct. After all, at their core, horror films are business ventures designed to make
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-9
112 Todd K. Platts
money for their backers with horror franchises hedging on previously profitable
formulae and known properties. While the prevailing political climate might
inspire individual writers and directors to dramatize certain ideas and events in
their films, the types of films that get made, their longevity as a trend, and their
content are inescapably shaped by the commercial motivations of production.
With this epistemological gap in mind, the primary aim of the chapter is to shine
light on Blumhouse’s industrial curation of its franchises.
With regards to its franchise films, Blumhouse deviates from its model for ori-
ginal films by slightly upgrading its budgets, producing the film with a wide-release
in mind, and carrying over key creative personnel into new franchise installments.
A common thread for Blumhouse’s franchise and original films is the ceding of
artistic license and authorial vision to the creative forces involved in an individual
film. In documenting Blumhouse’s handling of its franchises, both the opportu-
nities and constraints within the film industry from the period between 2010 and
2019 can be illustrated as can the institutional location of horror in an era of
financially bloated blockbusters, such as John Carter (2012, $255 million) and
Beauty and the Beast (2017, $255 million). Accordingly, the chapter’s analysis has
broader significance for scholars interested in contemporaneous low-budget genre
filmmaking insofar as Blumhouse emerged at a distinct period of horror film pro-
duction, a time when specific industrial and creative practices dominated, effec-
tively taking the place of the majors’ recently jettisoned specialty units. The
chapter proceeds by first exploring the history and operating structure of Blum-
house Productions before considering the company’s handling of the aforemen-
tioned franchises. While the chapter will make use of scholarship that links the
output of horror cinema to diffuse social trauma, it departs from it by focusing on
the industrial dynamics underwriting Blumhouse’s franchise management.
The Blumhouse model: horror on a budget

Before detailing Blumhouse’s production model, it is important to unpack the
current state of the motion picture business as the company’s operations are lar-
gely in response to this ever-evolving environment. Across the 1980s and 2010s, the
business of studio film production underwent seismic changes that ultimately set
the industry conditions from within which Blumhouse operates. Between the late
1980s to the late 2000s, major studios responded to the successes of independent
films by acquiring independent production companies or establishing their own
semi-autonomous divisions. These divisions were tasked with producing genre
films including horror and mid-budget prestige/drama films (Balio 2013, 114–148).
Importantly, the films produced by these operations were bolstered by a strong
sell-through DVD/home video market that often helped underperforming thea-
trical releases to turn a significant profit (Bernard 2015; Platts 2020, 257–258). The
business structure underwriting this conduct, however, crumbled by 2010. Starting
in 2008, there was a precipitous decline of the DVD/home video market without a
comparable replacement (Fleury et al. 2020, 9; Fritz 2018, 18–22). Meanwhile,
consumers flocked to new rental services like Redbox and (initially) Netflix, as
Cut-price creeps 113
well as later subscription video on demand platforms like Netflix and Hulu that
cut into ancillary profits (Fleury et al. 2020, 9–10; Schatz 2012, 208–213). With the
films produced by the studios’ specialty wings losing their dependability, the major
studios downsized or abandoned the units, a process exacerbated by the 2008–2009
financial crisis (Fleury et al. 2020, 9). Collectively, these industry shifts led to the
entrenchment of franchise films with exorbitant budgets (e.g., films of the Marvel
Cinematic Universe [2008–present], and the Transformers [2007–present], Jurassic
Park [1993–present], and Pirates of the Caribbean [2003–present] franchises to
name a few) and a significant reduction of mid-budget films (Fleury et al. 2020, 9–
10; Fritz 2018, 118–124). For horror films, this realignment led to a slight decline in
the number of movies receiving wide-release (Platts and Clasen 2017). While this
new production auspice put smaller budgeted drama and studio-backed indepen-
dent films on life support, it created an opportunity for horror films to fill out
release schedules (Platts forthcoming b).
Horror films retain a special place in the industry because of their ability to
procure reliable returns on modest investments. They are one of Hollywood’s
most reliable genres, especially in the usually slow months of January, Feb-
ruary, September, and October, with a track record of exceptionally low-bud-
geted films becoming massive hits.2 However, the genre stood on shaky ground
before Blumhouse took center stage. Critics and academics saw horror as crea-
tively stagnant in the late 2000s with annual lineups featuring uninspired
remakes and new installments of the Saw franchise (2004–present) (see Murphy
2007, 188–200). Meanwhile, budgets of horror films escalated as ticket sales
sagged, particularly in subtypes that found popularity a few years earlier such
as torture porn and zombie films (Platts and Clasen 2017).
Against this backdrop, Blumhouse acquired Paranormal Activity, the success of
which set the tone of Blum’s formula for future films: ‘I decided that now that I did
something that worked, I was going to try to repeat the model’ (Elberse 2018, 3).
This model entails producing films under tightly controlled budget constraints,
giving directors creative control, and releasing select films using the distribution
and marketing power of a major studio. Keeping production costs low also mini-
mized risks and allows Blumhouse to bankroll multiple films, including nontradi-
tional and/or experimental films like Get Out and Whiplash (2014). According to
Blum, ‘forcing the filmmakers to work for a lower-budget makes us able to bet on
unusual creative choices’ (Fletcher 2020). The ‘too small to fail’ (Meslow 2017)
model means that their films are low-risk, high-reward, including their more
expensive franchise films. The paltry budgets are not arbitrary, but represent the
amount of money needed to recoup cost if a film does not receive a wide-release.
According to Blum, budgets are ‘reverse-engineered to thinking that if the movie
isn’t in wide release, at least we get our money back and can keep our doors open’
(Lincoln 2015).
This is one of many strategies that Blumhouse has relied on to keep production
costs low. All talent are paid union minimums and usually work on backend deals
wherein they share a portion of a film’s profits. Also, sets are limited, special effects
are kept to a minimum, speaking roles for extras are virtually eliminated, and
114 Todd K. Platts
shooting schedules are condensed to approximately one month (Elberse 2018, 5–7;
Platts forthcoming a). In exchange for budgetary constraints, directors retain
creative freedom over their films, a move that has led industry reporters to herald
Blumhouse for returning to auteurist filmmaking (Hirschberg 2015; Nicholson
2019). In turn, Blumhouse sometimes exploits the willingness of journalists to
surreptitiously use the term in marketing films (Nero 2018), including films by
nascent directors like Jordan Peele (cf. Keegan 2017). Though Blumhouse execu-
tives give filmmakers notes to give their films more mainstream appeal, directors
retain control over the final cut (Fleming Jr. 2017). Blumhouse also never gives
original movies a guaranteed release, with Blum telling directors that ‘I can’t
guarantee you a hit movie, but I can guarantee you that the movie is going to be
yours’ (Summers 2014, 64). It is only when a film is deemed market competitive
that the company spends the $20 to $30 million in marketing necessary to make the
film competitive for wide-release (Platts forthcoming a).
A large part of Blumhouse’s market power stems from its first-look deal with
Universal that allows the firm to operate in a manner similar to studio-backed
independent units. The deal was initially signed in 2011 and renewed for another
ten years in 2014, much longer than the industry standard two- or three-year deals
(Elberse 2018, 4). Under the deal, Blumhouse pitches projects to Universal first,
with Universal paying Blumhouse’s overhead and assisting in financing, distribut-
ing, and marketing of those films in return (Elberse 2018, 2). Universal signed the
pact as a cost-effective way to return to horror production. Universal executive
Donna Langley noted: ‘I wanted us to play in the very-low-budget horror space,
but the main studio has other things to focus on’ (Barnes 2013). This allows
Blumhouse to perform the function once served by specialty units because it
develops films under the financial support of Universal (Platts and Clasen 2017). In
turn, Universal pads its bottom line with a lineup of reliably lucrative horror
pictures.
As with most businesses involved in filmmaking, Blumhouse has produced
sequels of its most popular films. For such films, Blumhouse upgrades budgets to
$10 million, but has spent more on recent franchise films, as noted above. Since the
sequels are attached to films that have made money, Blumhouse produces them
with a wide-release in mind. The oddest component of Blumhouse’s franchise
model is the insistence of keeping key original personnel involved in subsequent
installments of the franchise. According to David D’Alessandro (2018), ‘typically,
when it comes to horror sequels, studios will shoehorn in a new director, because
it’s cheaper and too expensive to carry the original creator or stars from sequel to
sequel.’ Blum credits a mistake in his handling of Jem and the Holograms (2015) as
the rationale behind this aspect of franchise management, stating that ‘the creator
of Jem and the Holograms had a relationship with its fans, and wasn’t involved in
the movie. From day one, we got off to the wrong start’ (Fleming Jr. 2017). While
being interviewed shortly after Halloween’s release, Blum mentioned that ‘when-
ever we do a horror sequel, we always involve the original person who created it
whether it’s James DeMonaco with The Purge, or Christopher Land with Happy
Death Day or James Wan and Leigh Whannell with the Insidious movies’
(D’Alessandro 2018). It is important to note that the three of the franchises pre-
date Jem and the Holograms, but in each instance, Blum retained the creative core
of each franchise for new films. As explored below, Blum remains steadfast to this
commitment.
In addition to serving as a business practice, the participation of original crea-
tors in sequels to their films and the creative power yielded to them also performs a
rhetorical and promotional function. It signals to fans and reporters that Blum-
house is not solely interested in milking profits out of lucrative films through the
production of uninspired cash-ins; instead, they focus on extending the vision of
filmmakers’ ideas in new franchise installments. In so doing, Blumhouse demon-
strates a degree of stewardship in its properties that elevates its sequels to more
than commercial opportunism, imbuing their sequels with an ‘aura’ of authenti-
city. Here, a new Purge film is not simply a sequel, but a continuation of James
DeMonaco’s dystopic imagining of a near-future America. A new Halloween film
has the benefit of John Carpenter’s insights and blessings (see Chapter 3 in this
volume). In essence, the retention of key talent allows Blumhouse to market its
franchises through an auteurist model of filmmaking.
Each franchise assessed below represents a significant period in Blumhouse’s
history, and therefore offers insight into the company’s evolution. With Para-
normal Activity, Blumhouse discovered the model it would use in future films;
Insidious saw Blumhouse improve this model by offering a series of films that
broke away from the found footage type and closely resembled the aesthetics of
more mainstream films; and The Purge represents the first franchise developed
under Blumhouse’s first-look deal with Universal. Halloween constitutes one of
Blumhouse’s first forays into resurrecting dormant horror properties, a trend they
look to continue with new Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, and The Thing films men-
tioned as possible franchises for Blumhouse to resurrect (Eisenberg 2019). Blum-
house’s efforts to reimagine Universal’s classic monster movies is briefly considered
in the conclusion.
Paranormal Activity and Insidious: the haunted house franchises that

built Blumhouse
The original Paranormal Activity was Blumhouse’s first great commercial success
and its sequels constitute its first franchise. In exploring the franchise, it is
instructive to note that Blumhouse played no role in the creation of the original
film. Instead, Paranormal Activity was ‘a truly independent feature written, direc-
ted and produced by Oren Peli in just 7 days’ (Konda 2017). DVDs of the film were
fished to every conceivable studio and all passed on acquiring the film. Eventually,
a copy found its way to Blum who saw it as the next The Blair Witch Project. Blum
worked with Peli to refine the film, including revising the climax, and then screened
it at the Sundance Film Festival. DreamWorks, then a subsidiary of Paramount
Pictures, acquired the film with the desire to remake it with a bigger budget and
more recognizable cast. Peli’s film was initially intended as a DVD extra for the
remake (Harvey 2009, 12). Blum agreed to DreamWorks’ offer, but ultimately had
116 Todd K. Platts
different plans. Blum requested that DreamWorks screen the film in front of at
least one audience before setting off to remake it (Guerrasio 2017). The gambit
worked, but the task of selling the movie to the ticket-buying public was still
ahead.
Upon release, Paranormal Activity benefited from a slick marketing campaign
where it was one of the first Hollywood films to harness Facebook and Twitter to
augment ticket sales by encouraging would-be audiences to exhibit the film in their
town next (Evangelista 2009). The film’s teaser trailer, released in September 2009,
listed cities playing the film and ended with ‘Paranormal Activity not playing in
your in your area? Demand it! Bring it to your city by visiting paranormalmovie.
com’ (Bernard 2015, 191). It is also significant that Paranormal Activity’s trailers
spotlighted audience reactions to it rather than scenes from the film itself, a prac-
tice the film helped popularize that suggests the thrill of watching the movie in a
crowd (Swanson 2015). The campaign helped the film become a smashing success
and within months of Paranormal Activity entering into wide-release, Variety
reported a sequel was under negotiation (McNary and McClintock 2010, 6).
After the original film, director Oren Peli went on to produce each new install-
ment of the franchise. Subsequent writers and directors formed the creative core of
the series, which Peli credits for keeping the franchise’s mythology in check (Gin-
gold 2013, 24–5; Turney 2015, 48). In brief, Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) was
written by Michael Perry and directed by Tod Williams; Paranormal Activity 3
(2011) and Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) were written by Christopher Landon and
directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman; while Landon would take on writing
and directing duties in Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014); and Para-
normal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) was directed by Gregory Plotkin
and written by a team of writers. Despite being criticized for lacking ‘narrative
substance’ (Olsen 2011, D4), the common theme that unifies the installments is in
the story of Katie Featherston and her family’s past of dealing with demons. With
a streak of impressive returns, Blumhouse and Paramount kept greenlighting new
Paranormal Activity films. Before Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, the
fifth film of the franchise, started shooting, Peli seemed optimistic of the franchise’s
future:
as long we can get them done, I would love to maintain our position as a
Halloween movie each year … Paramount loves the franchise and is com-
mitted to getting a new movie done once a year … so far, no one has suggested
that we skip a year.
(Gingold 2013, 26)
Despite maintaining a vibrant fanbase, however, new Paranormal Activity entries

witnessed declining ticket sales and slowly inclining budgets. Paranormal Activity
2 (2010) earned $177.5 million on a $3 million budget; Paranormal Activity 3
(2011) took in $207 million on its $5 million budget; Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)
had a $5 million budget and made $142.8 million; Paranormal Activity: The
Marked Ones (2014) also carried a $5 million budget and sold $90.9 million at the
box-office; and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) had the highest
budget at $10 million, but also the lowest box-office with $77.9 million, which
seemed to indicate a dip in audience interest compared to Blumhouse’s other
offerings.
By the time of The Ghost Dimension, Blum and Peli seemed to indicate the
franchise had run its course. Peli noted: ‘We want to bring [Paranormal Activity]
full circle and wrap it up nicely – not get to the point that we’re making the 10th
sequel and people get really sick of them’ (Turney 2015, 49). Blum seemed to
agree with Peli, but considered the conceivability of another sequel as a possibi-
lity ‘if a whole other mythology came down the pike in a few years, it wouldn’t
be impossible’ (Turney 2015, 49). In 2019, Paramount announced the seventh
Paranormal Activity film. The film is set for release in March 2022, although plot
details have been kept under tight control.
The decline in ticket sales, and the desire of Blum and Peli to conclude the
franchise, offer the easiest explanations for the hiatus in new Paranormal Activity
films, but it is important to take stock of other factors that also likely contributed
to the decision. From Blumhouse’s standpoint, the company entered its first-look
deal with Universal and began producing other films. Much of the franchise’s
creative core departed for other projects. Notably, Christopher Landon, who
was behind four of the screenplays, moved on to the Happy Death Day films.
Meanwhile, Blum had consistently feared the saturation of horror films in the
marketplace, noting that ‘the market can only support so much,’ and that ‘too
many horror movies’ (Foutch 2018) can saturate the market and impact box-
office receipts. Collectively, these circumstances could have motivated a hiatus in
the series, fueled further by a fear of flooding theatrical markets with too many
haunted house films as the Insidious series (discussed below) and Warner Bros.’
Conjuring universe (2013–present) came to dominate the sub-genre. Second,
Blumhouse decided to chase more lucrative and fresher films under the first-look
deal with Universal.
From Paramount’s standpoint, the studio fell into disarray during a power
struggle that saw Brad Grey ousted as CEO and Jim Gianopulos brought in as his
replacement in 2017. During Grey’s last years with Paramount, the studio lost
ground against its rivals. Gianopulos was tasked with ‘setting a new strategic
direction for Paramount, focusing on bringing fresh, story-driven content —
including properties from Viacom’s flagship brands — to audiences, and expand-
ing the studio’s global footprint’ (McClintock 2017). Gianopulos described his
charge as ‘a strong opportunity to position the studio for success by creating
valuable franchise opportunities, developing fresh creative ventures, and mining
Viacom’s deep brand portfolio to bring exciting new narratives to life’ (McClin-
tock 2017). The commercially deteriorating Paranormal Activity series simply did
not fit the new vision of Gianopulos’s Paramount that sought to develop globally
significant franchises on the uptick.
Since stumbling upon Paranormal Activity, Blumhouse initially favored super-
natural horror, especially haunted house films that played on recession-era anxi-
eties about real estate, (re)possessions, and dispossessions that have rendered the
118 Todd K. Platts
suburban ideal untenable (Murphy 2015, 243). Insidious, the ‘spiritual heir’
(Zeitchik 2013) to Paranormal Activity, stands as the direct progeny of the fran-
chise. Mike Fleming, Jr. identifies the significance of the franchise in Blumhouse’s
history of moving the company ‘beyond found-footage movies’ and putting their
films on par with the production aesthetics of mainstream Hollywood films
(Fleming Jr. 2017).
The original Insidious draws upon the plot of Poltergeist (1982), with both films
following a young family with a trio of children struggling to save a ‘lost’ child
whisked away to a parallel dimension within the family home (Murphy 2015, 237).
Subsequent Insidious films focus on paranormal psychic Elise Rainier and her tra-
vails in the paranormal realm known as ‘the Further.’ For director James Wan, the
first film was a proving ground of sorts. After striking big with Saw (2004), he
encountered setbacks with Dead Silence (2007) and Death Sentence (2007) as both
films underperformed at the box-office (Heath 2018). Wan mentioned that he
wanted to show that he could helm a horror film that did not rely on gore and set-
piece torture spectacles popularized by Saw: ‘I made Insidious to remind people
that I could make an old-school movie that harkened back to suspenseful story-
telling’ (Horn 2013, D6). The point was caught by critic Matt Armitage, who
claimed the Insidious franchise was a throwback to late-1970s filmmaking that
‘[utilized] fine-tuned atmosphere, tension, direction, and perfectly timed jump
scares to grab the audience by the delicate parts and make them genuinely nervous
as to what is going to happen next’ (Armitage 2020). Wan was joined by Leigh
Whannell as the creative core of the franchise. Wan directed the first two films and
produced the third and fourth; Whannell wrote all the films, directed the third, and
produced the fourth. The two are set to produce the fifth film with Patrick Wilson,
the patriarch of the Lamberts in the first two films, assuming the director’s chair.
Insidious occurred at another focal point in the company’s history. Blum was
riding on the success of Paranormal Activity, but was still not a bona fide industry
player at this juncture. Blum screened the film at the Toronto International Film
Festival in one of the last slots where nearly all attending studio representatives
passed on it (Horn 2013, D6). Sony was the only studio with any interest in the
film, but they requested reshoots before releasing it through FilmDistrict, one of
their subsidiaries. Sony picked up the film with a mind toward ‘sequel possibilities’
driven by the popularity of Paranormal Activity (Stewart 2010, 16). Despite Sony’s
hopes, Insidious lacked a high-price marketing campaign, but benefited from
strong word-of-mouth on its way to earn just under $100 million at the box-office
(McClintock 2011).
Congruent with Sony’s desire for sequels, Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) zipped
through the production process. According to Blum, talks of the sequel occur-
red almost immediately after the release of the first film, provided that James
Wan and Leigh Whannell were involved with it:
We started talking about Insidious 2 pretty soon after Insidious 1 … As

long as there was a chance that James [Wan] and Leigh [Whannell] were
gonna write the second movie and direct the second movie, I didn’t want to
do it with someone else … When they finally decided they wanted to do it,
then it did go very quickly, and we were working on trying to make it
work with James’ schedule with The Conjuring.
(Nemiroff 2013)
In an on-set interview for Insidious: Chapter 2, James Wan described the chal-
lenges faced by directors operating under the Blumhouse model:
the complaint in indie movies is usually that you have the creative freedom to do
what you want, which is true, but you just don’t have the kind of money [you
want]. You do what you want, but you [need to] get it done on time and budget.
(Dickson 2013)
Immediately after a strong opening for Chapter 2, plans for a third film were
announced (Chitwood 2013), despite Wan’s hiatus from horror to direct action films
(which he preferred). According to Whannell, Wan briefly appeared on set (as a
producer), but was generally not involved with the production (Farley 2015, 12).
Negotiations for a fourth installment started before the third film hit theaters (Feld-
berg 2015). With profits for Insidious still going strong, Blumhouse has transferred
the series to Universal as the primary distributor of the franchise. As of this writing,
the fifth Insidious film is still in development with no announced release date.
Where Paranormal Activity helped Blumhouse establish its low-cost formula
for horror, Insidious demonstrated the company was capable of producing a
traditionally shot horror film that appealed to a significant slice of the cinematic
market. Together, both franchises helped establish Blumhouse as a significant
producer of horror films with mass appeal, all of which factored into the first-
look deal made with Universal (Weinstein 2011).
The Purge (2013–present): franchising the political

Originally entitled ‘Vigilandia,’ The Purge was the first film produced under Blum-
house’s first-look deal with Universal (Kroll 2012, 7). The film was another calculated
risk by Blumhouse as a script had been floating around Hollywood for three years
(Fleming Jr. 2017). When released, it outdid ‘even the most ambitious expectations’
on its opening weekend (Stewart 2013, 1). The premise behind the Purge franchise is
simple: one night each year, the rule of law is suspended for 12 hours and all crime is
legal. The opening film represents a home invasion film, but the franchise’s next films
have focused mostly on the inner-city poor in their fight for survival against white
vigilante groups associated with the rich or the films’ right-wing government the New
Founding Fathers of America (see also Chapter 7 in this volume).
James DeMonaco serves as the creative backbone of The Purge, directing the first
three films and writing/producing each film, including the latest (and reportedly) final
installment, The Forever Purge (2021). DeMonaco’s creative vision shows both
weaknesses and strengths of the Blumhouse model. DeMonaco reported feeling con-
stricted with Blumhouse’s budget constraints during the first film which carried a $3
120 Todd K. Platts
million price tag, stating that ‘we were very bound by budget … there were a lot ideas
we couldn’t do’ (Gingold 2014, 16). For The Purge: Anarchy (2014), DeMonaco
noted his intention to experiment with the concept of the Purge in an interview with
Fangoria: ‘if I was going to do a second film, I told Universal that I wanted to do it
from a completely different point of view’ (Gingold 2014, 16). With more money ($9
million), he took the action out of the house and into the streets, a move that transi-
tioned the franchise from home invasion to urban action thriller. Under the logic of
traditional blockbuster production, a move away from a profitable story element to
an untested one would have been inconceivable. However, the low budgets of Blum-
house’s films afford such calculated risk.
The franchise has been particularly notable for its commentary on con-
temporary politics, especially the rise of Donald Trump and authoritarianism
(Mendelson 2016), which has drawn the focus of scholars (see, e.g., Goodall 2020;
Platts and Majuto 2020, 130–131). Instead of focusing solely on social forces,
however, DeMonaco credits the low budget for the ability to push the political
envelope: ‘I guess the budget was so low, the studio was kind of not paying
attention. They were like, “Go do it; it’s a tiny thing compared to our $80-to-100
million projects”’ (Gingold 2014, 68).
The franchise’s trend of rapid greenlighting suggests the confidence Universal has
placed in the series, but there have still been issues in the industrial progression of the
franchise. DeMonaco revealed that as soon as the original Purge film returned a
significant profit Universal called with the message, ‘you’d better start seriously
thinking about the sequel’ (Edwards 2014, 24). As he was finishing production of
Anarchy, DeMonaco mentioned that Universal and Blumhouse had asked him to
consider a sequel, but that he was not ready to make the commitment (Gingold
2014, 16, 48). With the success of the first three movies and the speed of their pro-
duction, a fourth film seemed inevitable. However, as late as January 2017, the
immediate future of the franchise was uncertain. Frank Grillo who starred in Anar-
chy and The Purge: Election Year (2016) indicated he was done with the series after
failing to agree terms with the studio, while DeMonaco expressed interest in transi-
tioning the franchise to television (Briers 2017).3 Despite these hang-ups, DeMonaco
brokered a deal to write a fourth film with a new director one month later (Kit
2017). DeMonaco proved less reticent in developing a fifth film, which he sees as the
last. In an Entertainment Weekly interview, he was quoted as saying,
I have it in my head. I think I’m going to write it. I think it’s a great way to
end it all. We want to end it all, I think, in this one, and I’m very excited.
When I came up with the idea and pitched it to everybody, they seemed psy-
ched, and I think it will be a really cool ending, how we take this one home.
(Collis 2018b)
The fifth film was later titled The Forever Purge (2021), which was initially set
for a July 2020 release, but was postponed when the COVID-19 pandemic
forced a shutdown of large gatherings. Whether the film is the last in the series
remains to be seen.
With The Purge series and other films released under its first-look deal with
Universal— mostly notably Split (2017) and Get Out (2017)—Blumhouse emerged
as a bona fide brand in horror unafraid to tackle tough political issues (Tobias
2016, C1–2). Not only did their movies pack theaters, some of them received cri-
tical acclaim. In an interview with fellow horror auteur Mick Garris (2018), John
Carpenter revealed these factors were significant in the decision to work with
Blumhouse for a new Halloween film.
Halloween (1978–present): reorienting slashers for the #MeToo era

Halloween took a long and winding path to Blumhouse. The original film was
released in 1978 and is generally credited as inaugurating a cycle of slasher films, or
those films featuring the creative deaths of capricious teenagers by a puritanical
sociopath. The mainline of the franchise includes a total of eight films, concluding
with Halloween: Resurrection (2002). Amid a wave of remakes, musician-turned-
director Rob Zombie rebooted the franchise with Halloween (2007) and Hallow-
een II (2009), which focus on the backstory and motivations of its psychotic killer,
Michael Myers (Nelson 2010, 104–110). The years between 2011 to 2016 saw
numerous starts and stops before it was announced that Blumhouse would oversee
the next Halloween film (Anderton 2016). The new Halloween is not a reboot
insofar as it does not attempt to restart ‘a series of films that seek to disavow and
render inert its predecessor’s validity’; but instead, the film retracts the seven
sequels to the original film and becomes, effectively, the new Halloween II, relying
only on the ‘established continuity’ of the franchise’s first film, thus working as a
form of retroactive continuity (Proctor 2012, 4; see also Chapter 3 in this volume).
Blumhouse’s Halloween can be understood as a passion project of producers
Zanne Devine and David Thwaites, former employees of Miramax (the company
that owned the film rights of the franchise). When the property was taken to Blum-
house, the company was understood as a producer of quality horror films who could
be trusted to resuscitate a languished franchise, thereby constituting another phase of
Blumhouse’s development. Once Miramax gave up on a new Halloween film in
December 2015, Devine and Thwaites got to work, first contacting Malek Akkad, co-
owner of the franchise’s film rights and son of producer Moustapha Akkad, who
backed its first eight films. Akkad’s skepticism was assuaged when Devine suggested
Blumhouse would produce the film. When brought on the project, Blum insisted on
the involvement of John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis. In short order, Blum con-
tacted a reluctant Carpenter and told him that a new film was inevitable and he might
as well try to make it as good as possible. Curtis became part of project because she
was attracted to the ‘survivor trauma’ subtext of the film. By industry standards, the
film progressed quickly, despite several reshoots, with all talent coming to an agree-
ment after a ‘massively complicated’ negotiation period (Galloway 2018) with David
Gordon Green agreeing to direct and cowrite with Danny McBride (D’Alessandro
2018).
When released, Halloween scored at the box-office and received mostly praise
from critics (the latter being uncharacteristic of the franchise or films of its
122 Todd K. Platts
type). Ironically, after positive pre-release buzz, talks of a sequel were rumored
(Bleznak 2018), but Danny McBride wanted to see how the film would fare
(Collis 2018a). The fear was ultimately unfounded as the film broke the box-
office record of any Halloween release, even after adjusting for inflation.
According to Rebecca Rubin (2018), it
beat expectations to earn $77.5 million in North America, slashing past the
series record opening of $26 million that was previously held by Rob
Zombie’s 2007 reboot. It now ranks among the best debuts for the horror
genre just following ‘It’ and its $123 million launch.
Within Blumhouse, Halloween currently sits as the company’s second high gross-
ing film behind Split. It is hardly surprising therefore that Halloween already has
two sequels prepared– Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022), both of
which were shot concurrently. In contrast to other entries in the franchise,
reviewers generally applauded the film for its frank portrayal of the traumatic
aftermath incurred by victims (see, e.g., Chang 2018, E1, E5; Debruge 2018).
When making sense of the film and its success (both critical and box-office),
observers routinely pointed to Blumhouse as a shrewd horror producer and John
Carpenter’s involvement with it. In other words, Blumhouse had reached a point
in its history where it was no longer seen as an upstart production company, but a
‘savvy, and highly successful, production company’ (Smith 2018). One day after
Halloween’s opening, Hollywood Reporter’s Richard Newby (2018) intoned that
Blumhouse has been ‘ahead of the curve’ on creative filmmaking, while Nicole
Laporte (2018), writing for Fast Company, suggested the company ‘remain[ed] true
to the original [Halloween].’ Referring to Blum/Blumhouse and John Carpenter,
Rebecca Rubin (2018) of Variety suggested Halloween benefited from ‘having a
few horror maestros calling the shots.’ Carpenter’s involvement ‘add[ed] a certain
credibility’ for hardcore horror fans (Smith 2018).
In sum, Blumhouse entered the production of Halloween as a highly regarded
producer of original horror films, and left as an entrusted producer that can
inject new life into dormant franchises and properties, especially after Invisible
Man breathed new life into Universal’s Dark Universe. Blumhouse was per-
ceived to have done well enough for Grant DeArmitt (2019) to construct a wish
list of moribund properties to resurrect, including: Frankenstein, Phantasm, The
Omen, Ginger Snaps, and Nightmare on Elm Street. In total, with the addition
of Halloween to its list of accomplishments, Blumhouse became an all-round
horror company, one that can make original films, shepherd its own franchises,
and was capable of resurrecting dead franchises from the grave.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that Blumhouse evolved during a distinctive era of
horror cinema, one where the once vibrant video/ancillary market could no
longer be relied upon for significant profits and where major studios have
mostly bypassed mid-budget films. In this environment, Blumhouse has emerged
as a production company, backed by a first-look deal with Universal, that spe-
cializes in a model of filmmaking that produces ‘dirt-cheap movies that perform
at the box office like glossier, costlier big-studio releases’ (Summers 2014, 64),
filling a market void left by the pursuance of high-price franchise films. Blum-
house discovered and refined its production model with Paranormal Activity
and Insidious, franchises which helped cement a first-look deal with Universal.
Their reputation was further galvanized with The Purge franchise, a series that
pushes political issues while routinely hitting box-office paydirt. Halloween
helped transform Blumhouse into an all-purpose producer of horror cinema.
Undergirding these successes is a franchise management model that remains
unmatched in the industry. Budgets are kept exceptionally low (by industry
standards), even for tested properties. Moreover, key creative talent is main-
tained across the life of the franchise. In contrast to other companies and stu-
dios, Blumhouse will not make new franchise installments without the
involvement of individuals responsible for creating them. As the writing of this
chapter concludes, the industry is currently abuzz with the potential of Blum-
house to resurrect Universal’s classic monster films (see Chapter 1 in this
volume), which came after The Mummy (2017) failed to generate interest in a
big-budget action-oriented monsterverse, leading to the critical and commercial
success of Leigh Whannell’s Invisible Man for Blumhouse. Reportedly, new
Dracula and Wolfman films are in the works (Katz 2020). Should these films
prove popular, it could write another chapter of Blumhouse’s history.
Notes
1 As the writing of this chapter commenced, Blumhouse announced a third Happy Death
Day film, creating another Blumhouse franchise should the film come to fruition.
2 Two of the most prominent films of this phenomenon are The Blair Witch Project (1999)
and Paranormal Activity. The former earned $248.3 million at the international box office
on a $600,000 budget while the latter took in $194.1 million against a $450,000 budget.
3 The Purge eventually found its way to television, appearing for two seasons on the
USA Network.
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7 When the subtext becomes text
The Purge takes on the American nightmare
Stacey Abbott
In September 1979, Robin Wood and Richard Lippe programmed a season of

horror films as part of the Toronto Film Festival. The programme was titled The
American Nightmare and featured screenings of films from the 1920s through to
the present, with key titles representing each decade. The aim of the season was to
create a space to see the largest collection of horror films in North America, but
equally important was the desire to reflect upon the significance of the genre, its
increasingly violent imagery, and its potential socio-political function. Reviewing
the programme for Cinema Canada, Florence Jacobowitz noted that an emerging
theme of the programme explored ‘how the filmmakers and the film impart both
conscious and unconscious, subversive messages within the confines of a capitalist/
patriarchal Hollywood system’ (1979, 20). To support this discussion, Wood and
Lippe also produced a collection of essays, entitled The American Nightmare:
Essays on the Horror Film, which was given to all passholders (1979). Among
other essays, the collection included an introduction by Wood, ‘An Introduction to
the American Horror Film’ (1996), that has become a pivotal manifesto. With this
season and publication, Wood and Lippe were attempting to consider how the
horror genre could be used to explore and express radical politics and desires for
social change. As Wood argued, ‘the only way in which really radical and sub-
versive ideas can be expressed is under the cover of entertainment, often at
unconscious levels on the part of the filmmaker, as well as on the part of the
audience’ (in Jacobowitz 1979, 21). Wood’s assessment of horror in the 1970s was
that it was ‘the most important of all American genres and perhaps the most pro-
gressive, even in its overt nihilism’ (1996, 182).
The perception that the ferocity of much of 1970s American horror cinema,
typically described as either ‘new horror’ or ‘neo-horror,’ was an expression of the
rage and confusion of a nation in crisis has become an established critical frame
through which to interpret the significance of horror cinema. The millennial doc-
umentary, The American Nightmare (2000), has reinforced this perception by
juxtaposing footage from the films of George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes
Craven, John Carpenter, and David Cronenberg with period news footage of
America in crisis, highlighting a synergy of imagery. Coming out in 2000, this
documentary’s treatment of now classic horror cinema of the 1970s offers a strik-
ing contrast with how some fans and critics were responding to the American
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-10
When the subtext becomes text 129
horror genre at the turn of the millennium. Steffen Hantke argues that in the early
years of the twenty-first century, there was a perceived ‘crisis’ in the American
horror film with many lamenting the reduction of horror to ‘a mindless series of
remakes’ or pastiches (2010, viv). Though reductive of the reception of horror in
this period, this critical viewpoint has been largely accepted, with the later cele-
bration of films such as Babadook (2014), Get Out (2017), A Quiet Place (2018),
and Hereditary (2018) by critics, horror aficionados and mainstream audiences,
serving to reinforce this perspective. In fact, the process of recognizing the origin-
ality of these films has resulted in a recurring attempt by critics and filmmakers to
distance certain films from previous horror traditions through the adoption of
qualifying descriptors such as ‘elevated horror,’ ‘smart horror,’ and ‘post-horror’
(see Church 2021). For instance, in 2017 Steve Rose argued that because the horror
genre can be hugely profitable for Hollywood, ‘there’s a market for horrors with
low budgets and mass appeal. Which basically means variations on well-estab-
lished themes: supernatural possession, haunted houses, psychos, zombies. This is
the market post-horror is reacting against.’ In 2018, Graeme Virtue’s discussion of
‘smart horror’ similarly notes that Hollywood is ‘doubling down on safe sequels,
reboots and expanded universes. Yet a legion of smart, subversive and downright
scary horror movies has been packing them in’ (2018). These terms seem to suggest
that horror films that are ‘thought-provoking’ are something other than horror, or
at least require a generic sub-label, and that established horror sub-genres, sequels,
remakes, and franchises cannot be more than commercial enterprises.
With these discourses surrounding twenty-first-century horror in mind, the aim of
this chapter will be to consider how the Purge franchise, comprising at the time of
writing, The Purge (2013), The Purge: Anarchy (2014), The Purge: Election Year
(2016), and The First Purge (2018), demonstrates the way in which commercially
driven, formula-based, graphic genre films aimed at a mass audience can nevertheless
offer social commentary and moral nuance alongside high octane action and jump
scares. Due to their commercial drives and mass appeal, I will further demonstrate
that the Purge films offer an insightful template for the consideration of the place of
‘The American Nightmare’ within discussions around contemporary horror cinema
and American culture. While Wood saw the unconscious channeling of repressed
cultural rage beneath the surface of horror cinema, The Purge consciously brings
The American Nightmare to the surface, rendering the subtext as text.
Blumhouse and twenty-first-century horror

The Purge is a commercial horror franchise produced by Blumhouse Productions, an
independent production company founded by Jason Blum that has established itself
as a leading producer of ‘high-quality micro-budget films,’ largely aimed at a main-
stream audience.1 Blumhouse’s micro-budget horror films with ‘mass appeal’ are, in
many ways, the type of product that Steve Rose argued that ‘post-horror’ was
reacting against as demonstrated by the company’s first production, the found foo-
tage horror film Paranormal Activity (2009), which was made for $15,000 yet earned
$193,355,800 at the global box office, the highest return on investment (ROI) in
130 Stacey Abbott
Hollywood history. However, this gap between production budget and box office
income is more extreme than Blumhouse’s subsequent productions.2 Paranormal
Activity 2 (2010), was made for $3 million and earned $177,512,032 at the global box
office; Paranormal Activity 3 (2011) made for $5 million, taking in $207,039,844;
Insidious (2011) with a production budget of $1.5 million and accumulating
$97,009,150 in box office receipts; and Sinister (2012), which was made for $3 million
and earned $77,712,439. By 2012, Blum had established the company as a leading
house of horror with three hugely lucrative franchises (see Chapter 6 in this volume).
The success of these films also consolidated their production model, restricting
budgets to approximately $5 million or $10–15 million for sequels (Platts and Clasen
2017, 7).3 In 2013, the company released The Purge, launching its next successful
horror franchise.
While Blumhouse is equally committed to standalone horror releases like The
Bay (2012) and Get Out (2017), Blum recognizes that making a sequel requires
commitment to the parameters of the franchise, stating that ‘there are rules that
you have to follow’ (in Crucchiola 2017). This does not, according to Blum, pre-
clude originality, arguing that ‘most of our sequels subvert expectations. They’re
really good. They’re not what people are expecting’ (Crucchiola 2017; italics in
original). Within this context, The Purge films stand as a key example of twenty-
first-century horror cinema that is commercially successful, visceral entertainment,
and socio-politically grounded. As Blum explains:
In every art form, nothing exists in a bubble. It exists because of what came
before it. A lot of bricks were laid. I think if it weren’t for The Purge, Get Out
wouldn’t resonate as a mainstream movie. You push on the taste of the audi-
ence in a way, get them used to something, and then you keep pushing on it.
(in Crucchiola 2017)
The Purge and home invasion horror

The franchise currently stands at three films written and directed by James
DeMonaco, which came out between 2013 and 2016. The fourth installment in the
franchise, The First Purge, was written by DeMonaco and directed by Gerard
McMurray. Collectively the films have earned $432,074,852 at the global box
office, with production budgets of between $3 million and $13 million,4 which was
followed by a 10-episode straight-to-series TV drama for USA and SyFy networks,
titled simply as The Purge. 5
The Purge franchise is set in a dystopian not-too-distant future in which a
new fundamentalist right-wing party, The New Founding Fathers of America
(NFFA), have moved into the White House, and in order to combat unem-
ployment, recession, and high crime rates, they have created ‘The Annual
Purge,’ in which for a period of 12 hours, all crime, including murder, is legal.
Each film in the series takes place on ‘Purge Night,’ offering variations on a
theme as each story follows a selected group of people who are confronted by a
series of ‘Purgers’ participating in disturbing acts of violence as they try to
survive the night.
The first film in the series, The Purge, presents itself as a home invasion film.
This sub-genre of horror has its roots in the domestic horror films of the 1970s and
1980s, such as Amityville Horror (1979) and Poltergeist (1982), in which the home
is invaded by either spirits or demons that attempt to expel the family and displace
the father as a figure of patriarchal authority. Other non-supernatural examples
include Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw
Dogs (1971). A Clockwork Orange follows a gang of masked youths, led by the
charismatic and articulate Alex, in a series of seemingly random and brutal home
invasions while Straw Dogs, according to Carol J. Clover, is primarily preoccupied
with ‘the provocation of an essentially peaceful man to acts of savagery,’ when his
Cornish home and wife are violently attacked by a group of local thugs (1992, 137).
As Vivian Sobchak argues, in this period of cinema, a ‘man’s home in bourgeois
patriarchal culture is no longer his castle’ (1996, 145).
In the twenty-first century, the sub-genre has moved away from traditions of the
supernatural to develop into a form of horror/thriller hybrid more in keeping with
Straw Dogs in which the protagonists are threatened by attackers attempting to
gain unlawful entry into domestic spaces to commit acts of violence against the
home-owners. The early to mid-2010s saw a number of these films being produced
internationally, including: Funny Games (1997), Panic Room (2002), Ils [Them]
(2006), À l’intérieur [Inside] (2008), The Strangers (2008), You’re Next (2011), and
Hush (2016). These films arouse anxieties around the protection of family and
home, coupled with the fear of being randomly targeted. Kevin J. Wetmore attri-
butes the randomness of these attacks to the events of 9/11, which ‘brought home
the reality and possibility of death at the hands of people who did not know you
and were not targeting you specifically’ (2012, 84). When the protagonists of The
Strangers ask their attackers ‘why us?’ they are told: ‘because you were home.’
The continued prevalence of these kinds of films following the financial crisis
of 2007 began to introduce an economic context to the sub-genre. While the
stated motivation in The Strangers suggests that the choice of victim is random,
Tony Williams argues that
since the three victimized youngsters appear to come from an upwardly

mobile social group and their assailants are young, working-class kids who
seem unable to displace their rage except in random acts of violence, it
appears that economic resentment may be one cause of the assault.
(2015, 294)
Craig Ian Mann similarly positions You’re Next within a culture of austerity,
arguing that Felix and Crispin’s plot to kill their families is ‘financially moti-
vated: they see butchering their way to an early inheritance as an escape from a
lifetime of financial struggle’ (2016, 183).
The Purge fits comfortably within the conventions of the home invasion film.
While the opening establishes the dystopian nature of this future society, once the
132 Stacey Abbott
Purge commences, the drama is built around the threat to one family (the Sandins)
who are confronted by a group of masked invaders attempting to break into their
home on Purge Night to kill them. Having established the conventions of the home
invasion film, The Purge undermines them in subtle ways, such as its use of masks.
In the tradition of many home invasion films, including The Strangers, You’re
Next, and Hush, the Purgers wear masks designed for anonymity and to generate
terror through their distorted and grotesque smiling faces. These masks, along
with their machetes and automatic weapons, offer a disturbing contrast to the
Purgers’ tailored suits and white dresses and have become an iconic element of the
franchise, with the masks becoming increasingly surreal from film to film. Having
established this imagery, however, the lead Purger who approaches the Sandins’
front door—credited as the Polite Leader (Rhys Wakefield)—removes his mask.
This action undermines the anonymity of The Strangers, and instead, as the Polite
Leader explains, it reveals that they are ‘some fine, young, very educated guys and
gals. We’ve gotten gussied up in our most terrifying guises, as we do every year.
Ready to violate, annihilate, and cleanse our souls.’
While the unmasking of the Polite Leader breaks with genre conventions, the
narrative structure of the film also challenges expectations by featuring multiple
home invasions prior to the arrival of the Purgers that disrupt the perceived ran-
domness of the genre. After the Purge has officially begun and the Sandins settle into
a quiet evening, two events are intercut together to signal the vulnerability of their
home security and the danger of invasion. The first surrounds the Sandins’ pre-teen
son Charlie (Max Burkholder), who is struggling with the morality of the Purge. As
Charlie stares at the security monitors, he sees a black man, distressed and bleeding,
running down the street calling for help (credited as Bloody Stranger, played by
Edwin Hodge). In a moment of empathy, Charlie opens the security doors and calls
to the man to enter the house. At the same time, teenage Zoe Sandin’s older Cau-
casian boyfriend Henry (Tony Oller) reveals that he has hidden in the house to ‘talk’
to James, who does not approve of their relationship. Realizing that their home
security has been breached, James runs to the front of his house to be confronted by
Bloody Stranger. Both stare at each other cautiously as James pulls out his handgun.
As this happens, Henry calls to James from the top of the stairs, pulls out a gun and
shoots at him, causing Sandin to shoot back. The intercutting of the simultaneous
arrival of Bloody Stranger and Henry in the main reception area of the Sandin house
in the film’s first action sequence presents James with two home invasions and
deliberately contrasts the perceived threat of the homeless black man with the actual
threat of the white middle-class male. Henry’s attack prefigures the arrival of the
Polite Leader, signaling that the danger is white privilege.
Return of the repressed: white privilege in the Obama era

In ‘The Introduction to the American Horror Film,’ Wood argues that:
the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that
our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in
our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, the ‘happy
ending’ (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repressions.
(1996, 171)
Purge Night is based upon the belief that humanity is inherently violent, and in
order to maintain a civilized society, it must regularly release that violence in a
contained fashion in order to ‘purge’ itself of these tendencies before repressing
them once more and returning to ‘normal’ the next day. The story is invested in the
language of ‘the return of the repressed’ (Wood 1996, 173). Reflecting on horror in
the 1970s, Wood saw the genre expressing the cultural anxiety and, at times, rage
emerging from ‘the period’s great social movements—radical feminism, the black
movement, gay rights and environmentalism’ (2004, xiv). Released at the beginning
of Barack Obama’s second term as president of the United States, The Purge sug-
gests that ‘the return of the repressed’ is galvanized and co-opted within the dieg-
esis to express white anxieties about their seeming marginalization in an increasing
multicultural global landscape. The film explores a narrative in which white, well-
educated middle-class characters ‘release the beast’ under the pretence of ‘cleans-
ing’ their souls, but in reality, they lash out as a means of reasserting their per-
ceived cultural, hierarchical dominance. The Polite Leader informs Sandin that the
Bloody Stranger
is nothing but a dirty, homeless pig—a grotesque menace to our just society
who had the audacity to fight back, killing one of us when we attempted to
execute him tonight. The pig doesn’t know his place and now he needs to
be taught a lesson. You need to return him to us—alive—so that we may
purge as we are entitled.
There is no direct articulation of race in this statement, or indeed throughout The

Purge. The film is set within an affluent, upper middle-class neighborhood, and the
Sandins’ neighbors, including three Caucasians, one African-American, and one
Asian-American, seem to reflect the post-racial promise of the Obama era, parti-
cularly within upwardly mobile areas. The Polite Leader, however, tells Sandin
that his ‘home tells us that you are good folk just like us … one of the haves … we
don’t want to kill our own.’ There is a clear discourse around ‘them’ and ‘us’ that
can clearly be read along class lines. The need to ‘purge’ is used to evoke class and
perceived entitlement, but the fact that the focus of their attention is an African-
American suggests that the monster that is released is white privilege.
The racial undercurrent of the film is evident by the choice to initiate the
horror with the image of a lone black man running down the streets of this
affluent neighborhood looking for assistance, an image that is charged with
meaning. The Purge was released in 2013, over a year after Trayvon Martin
was killed in Florida by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer.
The shooting of Martin in February 2012 and the subsequent protests calling
for Zimmerman’s arrest, including the Million Hoodie March on March 21,
2012 (Crimesider Staff 2013), led to extensive public discourse about the dangers
134 Stacey Abbott
faced by young black men in white neighborhoods due to racial profiling. This
discourse is increasingly prevalent through the repeated stories in the media of
‘white people call[ing] the police on black people,’ citing traditionally normal
behavior such as sitting in Starbucks, touring a college campus, and leaving an
Airbnb as suspicious (Victor 2018). This is a theme that has been most recently
explored by Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which begins with a lone black man,
Andre, being attacked and abducted as he walks down an empty, affluent sub-
urban street at night. Both Get Out and The Purge highlight the dangers that
this type of neighborhood can play for people-of-colour and, in both cases, the
men recognize the risks of inhabiting such an environment. Even before he is
attacked, upon seeing a white car pull up next to him on the road, Andre
recognizes a potential threat and tries to avoid confrontation. Similarly, in The
Purge, when the Bloody Stranger enters the Sandin house, his nervousness—
standing with his back to the wall and observing Sandin cautiously—signals
that he is as scared of Sandin as Sandin is of him. This house is a space of
refuge for the Bloody Stranger, but also of potential entrapment.
Having established the potential for danger regarding people-of-colour in white
neighborhoods, The Purge employs its horror narrative to question the rights of
individuals to protect themselves against perceived threats, a legal grey area that
becomes increasingly problematic when racial profiling is part of the equation. In
fact, the tension at the root of the confrontation between Sandin and the Bloody
Stranger seems to put the controversial ‘Stand Your Ground’ law to the test. This is
a law that was perceived by many to play a role in Zimmerman’s acquittal of
murder charges, despite not being used in his defence (Kessler 2014). According to
this law, introduced in Florida in 2005, an individual is legally allowed to use lethal
force rather than retreating in order to protect and defend themselves and others
against threats, whether real or perceived.6 Sandin, who is told by the Polite Leader
to hand over the Bloody Stranger or they will ‘release the beast’ on him and his
family, is faced with the choice to hand over the stranger to certain death or to face
the Purgers himself. While Sandin struggles with the morality of this situation, he
eventually resolves to catch and hand the Stranger over to the Purgers. Later, in a
confrontation with the Stranger, Sandin positions himself as a victim in this situation
by saying, ‘We didn’t do anything to you—we don’t deserve this,’ a common utter-
ance within the home invasion film where the protagonists feel unjustly targeted.
The focus of the film, however, shifts away from the Sandins when the Bloody
Stranger responds, ‘I don’t deserve this either.’ What distinguishes the men in this
moment is not that either or neither deserve it, but rather that one is privileged
enough to not expect to be victimized. As an affluent white male with a large house,
Sandin can afford protection and can avoid being out on Purge Night, something not
available to the homeless black man. At this point in the film, Sandin ‘Stands his
Ground’ and uses the defense of his wife and children to justify handing the Stranger
over to violent death to purge himself of guilt and responsibility. From this per-
spective, the horror becomes about actual privilege as well as perceived entitlement.
Kevin J. Wetmore notes that, after 9/11, ‘the only plausible plot development’
for the home invasion ‘is the death of everyone’ (2012, 91). In contrast, The
Purge does not end with the death of all the protagonists or antagonists; the
action ends with the jarring and repetitive siren that marks the end of the
Annual Purge and the return to ‘normality.’ The film highlights the hollowness
of this ‘return to normality,’ which, as argued by Robin Wood, has often been a
central tenet of the horror film, as the Purgers and the survivors get up and
walk back to their ‘normal’ lives (1996, 175). Normal behavior may be restored
while Purge-like behavior is once again repressed, but survivors are forever
marked by their experiences, and normality has been revealed to be a façade for
the truly monstrous—a façade that can never be fully restored. This is rein-
forced by the final intertitle that reminds the audience that it is 364 days until
the next Annual Purge, emphasizing that the cycle of violence continues.
The Purge franchise and #BlackLivesMatter

While adhering to the tropes of the franchise, the sequels, Anarchy and Election
Year, strip away the conventions of the home invasion and move the narrative out
of affluent white suburbia and onto the urban streets of multicultural America (Los
Angeles and Washington, respectively). As a result, the series is increasingly pre-
sented as an action/horror hybrid that integrates chase scenes, fight choreography,
and gun play with the surreal and macabre imagery of public ‘Purging’ on the
streets of the city. Furthermore, this shift from the home to the streets enables the
themes surrounding class, race, and the economy, which I have argued underpin
the first film, to rise even further to the surface; that is, from subtext to text.
Through their narratives and horror/action set pieces, the films offer a confronta-
tional critique of American culture and the promise of the American dream that is
present in the first film, embodied in Sandin’s exploitation of Purge Night for his
family’s financial gain. For instance, The Purge: Anarchy intercuts its end credits
with images of the American flag and the faces of the Presidents on Mount Rush-
more paralleled by surveillance-style footage of violent attacks from the film, and
extra-diegetic footage of money being burned and people loading and firing their
guns. These images are accompanied by Christy Carew’s arrangement of a choral
version of ‘America the Beautiful’ jarringly spliced with Nathan Whitehead’s dis-
cordant musical score, creating a violent aural juxtaposition. The sequence con-
fronts audiences with the contradictions inherent within the American Dream, and
not so subtly suggests that this is a society that is defined by money and violence.
The Purge: Election Year similarly distorts images traditionally associated with
American culture and heritage when a group of European Purge tourists dress up
as the Statue of Liberty, George Washington, and Uncle Sam to get a taste of
murder and mayhem. The image of these American icons covered in blood spatter
is telling, offering a new set of iconic and macabre Purge masks, while linking this
imagery with tourism reiterates the economic imperative that underpins an econ-
omy of violence.
While both sequels place another white male at the narrative centre—Sergeant
aka Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo)—the sequels feature a more diverse ensemble cast in
terms of gender, race, and ethnicity, and the horror of Purge Night is overtly
136 Stacey Abbott
presented as targeting the marginalized and economically challenged or disen-
franchised underclasses, which plays out along racial lines. For instance, in Anarchy,
African-America single-Mom Eva Sanchez (Carmen Ejogo), a waitress struggling to
support her teenage daughter and cover the medical bills for her father, is first tar-
geted on Purge Night by her lecherous landlord who resents her rejection, and later
by a group of government sponsored mercenaries who are murdering the lower
classes to thin the population. In Election Year, African-American Joe Dixon
(Mykelti Williamson) runs a successful delicatessen, yet cannot afford the unex-
pected increase on his premiums when the corrupt insurance company decides to
increase his rates the day before the annual Purge. He therefore finds himself out on
Purge Night to protect his livelihood. The government soldiers that appear in
Anarchy are presented as white military, but by Election Year, another group of
mercenaries under the employ of the NFFA are not only white, but rather, white
supremacists¸ covered in swastika and confederate flag tattoos.
While racial tension was implicit in the first film, the sequels bring this to the
surface of the story, showing that contemporary issues surrounding race have
become increasingly central to the franchise’s thematic continuity. For instance, the
silent auction in Get Out, in which a group of white people bid to take ownership
of the young black hero’s body, is prefigured in Anarchy when an old black man
sells his dying body to a group of wealthy white Purgers so that he can provide for
his family. His dying body is his only commodity. Both Get Out and Anarchy offer
a disturbing reminder of the legacy of slavery in the United States. In particular,
Anarchy and Election Year speak to a legacy of resistance and protest, galvanized
in recent years around #BlackLivesMatter.
Created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, Garza argues
that #BlackLivesMatter is:
a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was
posthumously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George
Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed. It was
a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society.
(2014)
The protests surrounding Zimmerman’s acquittal were followed by similar pro-

tests and riots in Ferguson Missouri following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown
in 2014, and again in Baltimore, after the arrest and subsequent death-due-to-
injuries of Freddie Gray (Edwards and Harris 2016). Anarchy and Election Year
were released in 2014 and 2016, respectively, amidst these protests and the
increasingly racially focused debates and discourses surrounding the 2016 election,
consciously drawing upon a legacy of civil unrest through the inclusion of an
African-American-led protest and resistance movement within the narratives. In
Anarchy, the resistance is led by Carmelo Johns, played by Michael Kenneth Wil-
liams, who is renowned for his role as anti-authoritarian Omar in the HBO series
The Wire (2002–2008). Johns is presented as a Malcolm X-styled leader, linking
contemporary protests with historical civil rights movements, who not only speaks
the economic realities behind the Purge, but advocates picking up of arms and
revolution, concluding his online speech with: ‘Fuck the New Founding Fathers.
Fuck you! Fuck your money. And motherfuck the Purge!’ More significant, how-
ever, is that he is accompanied in Anarchy by the Bloody Stranger, the only char-
acter to appear in the first three films, highlighting that it is the African-American
victims who are standing up and fighting back. By Election Year, the Bloody
Stranger is finally named (Dante Bishop) and he is presented as the leader of the
resistance, a man of action attempting to pave the way through violence for the
anti-Purge election candidate, Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell). As important,
however, is that in Election Year, the movement is revealed to feature more than
soldiers, but volunteers putting their lives on the line to provide protection, medi-
cal care, and sanctuary to those in need on Purge Night. This group embodies an
intersectional representation of women and men across multi-generational, racial,
and ethnic lines.7 With Election Year coming out at the end of the Obama era, and
through its election narrative, the film self-consciously highlights the racial ten-
sions and social division that prefigured the rise of the so-called Alt-Right and the
election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States.
The First Purge is the fourth film in the franchise, but the first to be released in
the Trump era. It is the first to be written but not directed by DeMonaco, instead
being helmed by African-American filmmaker, Gerard McMurray. McMurray is
the director of Burning Sands (2017) and producer of Fruitvale Station (2013), a
film based on the events that lead to the death of Oscar Grant, an African-Amer-
ican youth who died in 2009 at the hands of a BART police officer. The First Purge
is a prequel to the other films in the franchise, set just after the NFFA have been
elected and have decided to test the ‘scientific’ principles that underpin the Purge;
that a healthy society benefits from purging its repressed violent inclinations. They
decide to test the theory with a controlled experiment on Staten Island. Residents
are given a fee of $5,000 to stay on the island during the Purge and, if they ‘parti-
cipate,’ their remuneration is increased. This film brings together themes around
race, politics, and economy that have been established by the earlier films, with
director McMurray consciously aligning the film with ‘real-world’ events as he
explains:
The movie was filmed during the time of the Charlottesville riots. ‘We see
events that taking place in this country over the last year,’ McMurray said. ‘I
just try to use what was going on in the real world and trying to bring it into
the film. I felt like horror films wrestle with the evils of real life, and that was
one of the things I wanted to do with this film.’
(N’Duka 2018)
Through this statement, McMurray is presenting a preferred reading of the film as

something more than a visceral action/horror film, situating The First Purge within a
legacy of horror as serving a socio-political function. This reading is in keeping with
his previous work on Burning Sands and Fruitvale Station, and these types of state-
ments serve to ensure his clarity of message with regard to his perception of the
138 Stacey Abbott
progressive politics of the series.8 Mark Bernard argues that there is a tendency for
many contemporary filmmakers to attempt to legitimize horror by elevating it from
its ‘low culture’ origins by claiming ‘the political and social significance of their
films,’ in many ways echoing the more recent critical tendency to elevate certain
horror films by challenging their credentials as horror through such terms as ‘post-
horror’ and ‘elevated horror’ (2015, 2; see also Church 2021). While these types of
statements by McMurray can be seen to legitimize the genre, and the Purge franchise
in particular, they are also consistent with the overt politicization of horror that has
become embedded within the franchise as I have argued, a factor that goes hand-in-
hand with the franchise’s more visceral thrills. Also, as a critical frame through
which to consider the series, this political reading sits alongside a repeated emphasis
by the producers, Jason Blum and Brad Fuller, that this franchise delivers pulse
raising and adrenalin pumping action and horror (Blum and Fuller in ‘Behind the
Anarchy’ 2016). Furthermore, while Bernard notes that this tendency to elevate
horror films through a socio-political reading often detaches the genre from its
commercial imperatives, the release of The First Purge after the success of Jordan
Peele’s Get Out positions this approach as an element within Blumhouse’s com-
mercial strategy for the series, offering social commentary alongside visceral violence
and surreal horror (Bernard 2015, 5). The selection of McMurray, an African-
American filmmaker, as the first director to take over from DeMonaco associates
The Purge with the critically and commercially successful Get Out, signaling that
commerce and politics are not mutually exclusive and binaristic. In this manner, if
The Purge was a significant precursor fueling the commercial potential of Get Out as
Blum claimed, then the cycle has come full circle with the success of Get Out
potentially influencing the trajectory of the franchise in The First Purge, with its
clear focus on the African-American community. In this case the politics and com-
mercial drive of the franchise go hand-in-hand (Blum in Crucchiola 2017).9
Like The Purge, the First Purge returns to the home invasion narrative but
equates home with community rather than individual property. It is the commu-
nity of Staten Island and, in particular, the impoverished, largely African-Amer-
ican residents who are targeted and whose home is invaded by mercenaries (again
funded by the NFFA), dressed as white supremacist Purgers wearing black-face
masks, Nazi uniforms, KKK robes, and, in extremely charged imagery, as riot
police officers stalking a lone beaten man crawling away from them across an
empty baseball field. With references to Trump in the marketing campaign that
refashioned the ‘Make America Great Again’ red baseball cap as a marker of the
Purge and a release date of July 4, 2018, alongside repeated footage of demonstra-
tions and protests in the film, the marketing campaign and the film are discursively
positioning the film as being specifically about Trump’s America, and thus taps
into contemporary politics to sell the film by signaling its contemporary relevance.
The prequel’s move into the franchise’s past, therefore, allows the franchise to
comment even more openly on the present. As McMurray explains: ‘Right now
we’re living in a time where people are waking up and seeing how things really are
and are needing to stand up and voice their opinion’ (in N’Duka 2018). Sig-
nificantly, the franchise has finally abandoned its white male central hero and
replaced him with dual protagonists Nya (Lex Scott Davis)—an activist fighting to
save her community from the Purge—but also from more insidious perpetrators,
such as the drug trade that ‘destroy[s] this community 364 days a year,’ and Dmitri
(Y’lan Noel), a local drug kingpin who, like Leo in Anarchy, transitions from
focusing upon his selfish needs toward fighting to protect friends and community.
The elevation of Nya and Dmitri to heroes moves the franchise away from the lone
white savior to a narrative in which the African-American and Latino community
stands up for itself. The final image of surviving residents gathering at the end of
the Purge, preparing to ‘fight,’ challenges the ‘return to normality’ that is self-
consciously and uncomfortably re-established in the earlier films. There is no
return for Nya and Dmitri; their fight is just beginning.
Conclusion: ambivalence and The Purge

In keeping with Wood’s arguments, at the core of horror films is often an
ambivalence to their own messages (1996, 176–177). Wood saw that ambivalence
centred around ‘the monster’ and ‘our attitude to normality,’ suggesting that
‘central to the effect and fascination of horror films is their fulfilment of our
nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us,’ a theme that emerges at the
conclusion of The First Purge, albeit slightly curtailed by the knowledge that
within narrative chronology, this film marks the beginning of the Purge and not the
end (1996, 177). In the Purge franchise, the ambivalence centers around the
response to the Purge itself. DeMonaco and other producers note that the films
offer wish fulfillment in terms of a cathartic fantasy of violence alongside a social
commentary that seems to condemn violence. Narratively, the audience may be
encouraged to recognise the barbarity, and side with those who seek the end of the
killing, but engagement with the franchise means ironically that audiences want
the Purge to continue so that the films and television series can continue. The films
purport to condemn violence and advocate for peace and restraint in the face of
escalating hatred and aggression, and yet they also wallow in violent excess.10 The
films present the horror of gun culture with wealthy Purgers in Anarchy evoking
the worst imagery of the National Riflemen’s Association (NRA) bedecked with
their high-tech assault weapons. It is, however, also the men with guns who
repeatedly save the protagonists, whether in the form of ex-soldier Leo or drug
dealer Dmitri in keeping with the NRA’s defense of existing gun laws. Nya con-
demns Dmitri because his instinct is to resort to violence but she is thankful when
he arrives at her apartment and kills her assailants. Election Year deliberately
contrasts democratic process in the form of anti-Purge presidential candidate,
Charlie Roan, and radical protest, resistance, and rebellion embodied in Dante
Bishop. These contradictions can be read as revealing the films’ tendency to nod to
progressive ideals and social critique, while simultaneously producing reactionary
rhetoric, but they can also be read as conveying a growing sense of rage and revo-
lution that is often contradictory in its execution. Writing about twentieth-century
horror cinema, Adam Lowenstein argued that ‘the modern horror film may well be
the genre of our time that registers most brutally the legacies of historical trauma’
140 Stacey Abbott
(2005, 10). In the twenty-first century, the way in which ‘the American Nightmare’
is self-consciously mobilized by horror filmmakers, such as DeMonaco and
McMurray, suggests that horror continues to be the genre that best expresses, in
all its chaos and pain, the trauma of the present and the desire for revolution.
The contradictions within the Purge films also evidence the tension between the
franchise’s commercial drive and its socio-political agenda, delivering high octane
action alongside political commentary (and profit). Regardless, The Purge fran-
chise, as I have demonstrated, challenges perceived distinctions between ‘elevated
horror’ and mainstream horror through its overt engagement with a political
rhetoric. To achieve this, it does not deny the pleasures of the genre but instead
offers suspense, violent mayhem, and surreal horror. Furthermore, it does not bury
its political message beneath the surface of the narrative, ‘under the cover of
entertainment’ as Robin Wood put it (1996, 21). Instead, it places its genre alle-
giance and politics on display, inviting audiences to engage with one or the other
(or both), thus resisting concrete definition to some degree. The Purge franchise
demonstrates how commercially driven horror films, traditionally disparaged as
‘mere’ exploitation that only offer cheap thrills, can be intelligent and thought
provoking without denying their horror credentials, even if the message is contra-
dictory. Instead, they integrate these ideas within their aesthetic and narrative
matrix, making the subtext of Wood’s ‘American Nightmare’ text. The continua-
tion of the Purge narrative across an extended franchise, including multiple films
and a television series, allows the development of an extended socio-political
reading alongside more visceral thrills, and challenges assumptions that commerce
and politics, exploitation and art, are oppositional. As the Purge franchise
demonstrates, they can, in fact, go hand-in-hand.
Notes
1 www.blumhouse.com/about/
2 All box office figures are given in US dollars and are drawn from www.boxofficem
ojo.com.
3 This budget stands in contrast to the average budget for mainstream American horror
films. According to Platts and Clasen, ‘the budgets for films in our dataset averaged just
under $30million while the domestic gross was roughly $65.5million’ (2017, 5).
4 These figures are dated from August 3, 2018.
5 At the time of writing the series had not been aired and so will not be discussed in
this chapter. There are now two seasons of the show. In 2020, the USA Network
decided not to renew the series.
6 See Owen (2018) for an example of the Stand Your Ground law. This article includes
a link to surveillance footage that some readers may find disturbing.
7 It is of note that the movement is depicted as being led by two African-American
men, which raises issues given that it was three ‘queer black women’ who began
#BlackLivesMatter. This is in line with how Garza explains how the movement they
created was repeatedly co-opted by other groups and movements, describing this as
‘racism in practice [and] hetero-patriarchal. Straight men, unintentionally or inten-
tionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions.
Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it
would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and
apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and non-relevancy’
(2014). The inclusion, in Election Year, of former gang member Laney Rucker (Betty
Gabriel) as a member of the resistance, patrolling the streets in an ambulance on
Purge Night, helping those needing treatment and intervening in moments of esca-
lating violence does move toward challenging the male-centered focus of the resis-
tance but she is still not a leader of the movement.
8 This is reinforced by interviews with the directors, producers and cast in ‘The Making
of the Purge’, ‘Inside the Purge,’ and ‘A Radical Experiment,’ wherein the actions within
the film are repeatedly discussed as an allegory and/or metaphor for the real world.
9 Get Out was released in the cinemas in January 2017 and McMurray was announced
as the director for the The First Purge in July 2017.
10 This is reinforced by the fact that the Purge features as part of the many attractions
at Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights in which ticket holders can be
entertained and terrorized by recognizable Purgers from the films.
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2018.
‘Behind the Anarchy’. The Purge 3-Movie Collection. Bluray (Disc 2). Universal Studios,
2016.
Church, David. 2021. Post-Horror: Art, Genre, and Cultural Elevation. Edinburgh:
Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.
London: BFI Publishing.
Crimesider Staff. 2013. ‘“Million Hoodie March” Held in NYC in Memory of Trayvon
Martin’. Crimesider, July 12. www.cbsnews.com/news/million-hoodie-march-held-in-
nyc-in-memory-of-trayvon-martin/.
Crucchiola, Jordan. 2017. ‘The New Master of Horror’. Vulture, March 3. www.vul
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Edwards, Sue Bradford and Duchess Harris. 2016. Special Reports: Black Lives Matter.
Minneapolis: Abdo Publishing.
Garza, Alicia. 2014. ‘A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza’.
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American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, edited by Steffen
Hantke, vii–xxxiii. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
‘Inside the Purge’. The Purge 3-Movie Collection. Bluray (Disc 1). Universal Studios, 2016.
Jacobowitz, Florence. 1979. ‘The American Nightmare’. Cinema Canada (October/
November): 19–25.
Kessler, Glenn. 2014. ‘Was the “Stand Your Ground” Law the “Cause” of Trayvon
Martin’s Death?’ The Washington Post, October 29. www.washingtonpost.com/news/
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rtins-death/?utm_term=.980579c995b9.
Lowenstein, Adam. 2005. Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National
Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press.
‘The Making of the Purge’. The Purge 3-Movie Collection. Bluray (Disc 1). Universal
Studios, 2016.
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Mann, Craig Ian. 2016. ‘Death and Dead-end Jobs: Independent American Horror and
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Owen, Tess. 2018. ‘White Man Who Shot Black Father in Front of His Kids Over
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comes-at-night.
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Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals.
Part III
Cult franchises
8 ‘What film is your film like’?
Negotiating authenticity in the
distributive seriality of the Zombi
franchise
Mark McKenna
Unlike its archetypal cinematic relatives, the vampire, the werewolf, and even the
mummy (the creature to which it is perhaps most indebted), the contemporary
zombie has had a relatively short existence. Where early iterations of the cinematic
zombie, in films such as Victor Halpernin’s White Zombie (1932) and Jacques Tor-
neur’s I Walked like a Zombie (1943), were drawn from Haitian mythology and the
undead slaves of voodoo tradition, contemporaneous depictions across popular
media like 28 Days Later (2002), the Resident Evil video-games (1996–), and the TV
series The Walking Dead (2010–) have tended to follow the blueprint established by
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the sequels that followed in
its wake. Romero’s zombie has been widely accepted as an apocalyptic cypher that
provides social commentary in times of political unrest, but the allegorical nature of
these films almost came about by accident when Night of the Living Dead was
released following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. The
film famously concludes with the murder of its lead, the black protagonist Ben,
played by theater actor Duane Jones. It was uncommon at that time for a film to have
a black lead actor, and the combination of his death and the images of zombies
‘hangin’ from the poplar trees,’ like the ‘Strange Fruit’ of Billie Holiday’s 1939 song,
could not help but invoke lynching and the beginnings of the civil rights movement.
Romero has famously rejected the idea that film was intended as an explicit political
commentary, arguing that Jones was simply the best actor that they knew and that
they only learned of the assassination of King after the film was completed on the
journey from Pittsburgh to New York to find a distributor. Nevertheless, these par-
allels have given the film a political resonance that has been reproduced over time,
compounded by Romero’s appeals to these kinds of political readings in the sub-
sequent entries in the series that are seen to offer commentaries on capitalism, con-
sumerism, gender roles, and social media.
Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been a noticeable rise in the
visibility and profitability of the zombie across all media platforms, with many
continuing to draw political parallels with the events of 9/11 in the United
States and 7/7 in the United Kingdom (McSweeney, 2010; Wetmore Jr., 2011).
Behind the political flexibility of the creature, as well as the potential for pro-
gressive ideological readings, also exist economic imperatives. It could be argued
that the presence and heightened visibility of the contemporary zombie can be
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-12
146 Mark McKenna
attributed to its potential for commercial success, and this is something that can
be seen in the eagerness of distributors worldwide to capitalize on the genre’s
popularity through a process of retitling and re-releasing narratively unrelated
films as sequels to popular releases in promotional strategies that began over two
decades before the turn of the twenty-first century.
This chapter will consider the ways in which distributors, first in Italy, and then
subsequently in the United Kingdom, Germany, Thailand, and the United States,
have all contributed to the formation of overlapping, unofficial zombie franchises
that has occurred through the practice of retitling films in a way that disingenuously
signifies them as ‘proper’ series installments which, in fact, are not only disconnected
in narrative terms, but also were produced by different production companies. Using
this series of unrelated films, I will examine how an expanded understanding of
genre that is specific to Italy, and what Stuart Henderson calls ‘the conceptual series,’
that is, films that ‘repeat basic narrative situations … but never carry over characters
or continue narrative strands from previous films’ (2014, 32), allowing distributors
worldwide to adopt and adapt films into these series. In the final section, I will
explore how consumers negotiate the commercially imposed seriality of the unoffi-
cial ‘distributive franchise,’ by which I mean a kind of ‘corporate authorship’ that is
discursively appended not by official producers or legal frameworks, but by dis-
tributors seeking to capitalize on the success of an original film that they do not
control as intellectual property. Through an exploration of this ‘illegitimate’ (and in
many cases illegal) series, it is then possible to illustrate how this kind of outlaw
franchising is informed by a sub-cultural adoption of Italy’s expanded notion of
genre, through which, in lieu of official copyright, priority is given to other filmic
elements as a means of constructing ‘aura’ and ‘authenticity.’
Sequels, retitling, and the adaptative practice of European exploitation

Retitling is a relatively common practice in the transnational film industry and, from
country to country, films will often be given a new title to ensure a greater cultural
(and therefore commercial) resonance. Ordinarily, this practice is mobilized to
remove nationally specific associations, as was the case with the Marvel Studios’
film, Avengers Assemble (2012), which was retitled for release in the United King-
dom from The Avengers to avoid confusion with the 1960s British television series of
the same name. Occasionally, this process occurs as the result of attempts to ensure a
broader cultural appeal, as was likely the case with the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
(2010), which was retitled from its original literal Swedish title of Men Who Hate
Women (2010) in an attempt to side-step some of the feminist leanings of the novel.
The most common instances of retitling can be seen within the production and
distribution of the exploitation film, where films are produced inexpensively for
maximum return by routinely ‘piggybacking’ on the success of another film. Often,
this piggybacking takes the form of narratively similar films that are produced to
capitalize on the commercial appeal of any given film, a strategy that I.Q. Hunter
(2009) has argued can be considered a form of adaptation. Although in broad terms,
adaptation usually refers to texts that are translated intermedially, Linda Hutcheon
‘What film is your film like’? 147
argues that remakes can be considered ‘same-platform adaptations,’ arguing that
‘not all adaptations involve a shift of medium or mode of engagement, although
many do’ (2006, 170).
Hunter explores the wave of so-called ‘Jawsploitation’ films that followed the
massive box office success of Jaws in 1975. Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster stimulated
the production of inexpensive exploitation films worldwide that riff on the generic
tropes established in Jaws; first in the United States with thrillers such as Orca (1977)
and Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976), Great White Death (1981), and the porn
parody film, Gums (1976). In Mexico, there was Tintorera: Killer Shark (1977),
whilst in Italy it reinvigorated interest in related ‘creature features’ like Tentacles
(1977), and the more obviously directly inspired The Shark Hunter (1979), The Last
Shark (1981), Monster Shark (1984), and later films like Deep Blood (1990) and
Cruel Jaws (1995), the latter being released in the domestic Italian market as Jaws 5:
Cruel Jaws. In his study, Hunter observes that ‘imitation is, of course, standard
practice across all entertainment media [and] Hollywood minimises risk by sticking
closely to generic formulae and updating familiar properties in disguised versions’
(2009, 10). The main difference between Hollywood’s approach and these ‘mock-
busters’ is that exploitation cinema is often simply less concerned with disguising the
source than it is with capitalizing on the success and appeal that the source provides
by highlighting it in order to find purchase in the cinematic market.
The way in which these types of films aim to draw attention to their sources
becomes explicit through the construction of paratextual associations enacted by the
retitling of otherwise unrelated films (as seen with Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws). Though less
prevalent elsewhere, much of Italy’s domestic film production has historically been
managed by responding to the box-office appeal of domestic or international film suc-
cesses by producing their own sequels. For example, a home-grown success like Sergio
Corbucci’s seminal spaghetti western Django (1966) showcases this adaptive process in
microcosm. The spaghetti western itself was an industrial response to the enduring
commercial appeal of the imported American western, stimulating a cycle of films that
was produced by the Italian studios between 1962 and 1980 that saw the production of
almost five hundred films (Fisher 2011, 2). Django was an Italian western produced to
capitalize on the success of Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars trilogy,’ but when the film proved to
be a success, it spawned more than 30 unofficial sequels, with the protagonist por-
trayed by 16 different actors, the only connection typically being signified paratextually
by invoking the ‘Django’ brand in titles such as Django Kill … If You Live to Shoot!
(1967), Django, Prepare a Coffin (1968), Django the Bastard (1969), and many more.
As unusual and illegitimate as this practice might seem to Anglo-American
audiences, Italy has a long tradition of promoting films in this manner, and the
practice is not limited to domestically produced films. American imports would
often receive similar treatment, with the production of unofficial sequels or unre-
lated films that are retitled in an attempt to capitalize on the domestic appeal of
commercially profitable imports. While these sequels might appear to be cheap
‘knock-offs’ that disregard international intellectual property rights, they remained
a vital part of the Italian film industry for a long time. High-profile horror film
imports like Alien (1979), The Evil Dead (1982), and the zombie film Dawn of the
148 Mark McKenna
Dead (1978) were, to draw from Henderson, ‘conceptually serialised’ by the Italian
film industry through this process (2014, 32). For instance, some films borrowed
narrative and generic elements from Ridley Scott’s Alien, which received the Italian
unofficial sequel treatment with Luigi Cozzi’s Alien Contamination (1980, inter-
nationally released as Contamination), as well as other films that were retitled to
appear as if they were legitimate installments in the official series, including Alien
Terror (1980, retitled in Italy to Alien 2: Sulla Terra / Alien 2: On Earth). Similarly,
the success of both The Evil Dead (1981) and The Evil Dead II (1987)—released in
Italy as La Casa and La Casa 2—contributed to an unofficial extension to the series
with the inclusion of unrelated Italian films, La Casa 3 (1988, globally released as
Ghosthouse; La Casa 4 [1988]), globally released as Witchery; and La Casa 5 (1990,
globally released as Beyond Darkness). Perhaps more unusual is that the Italian
version of the Evil Dead series culminated with two unrelated American films that
were themselves part of a different series—the horror-comedy franchise House.
Thus, House II: The Second Story (1987) and House III: The Horror Show (1989)
were released in Italy as La Casa 6 and La Casa 7 respectively, meaning that the
films that make up the La Casa franchise ignore the third (official) installment in
the official Evil Dead series, Army of Darkness (1992), while also demonstrat-
ing a willingness in Italy to permit generically associated films entry into a pre-
established series that is unlikely to have been accepted elsewhere.
While this practice may at first appear disingenuous to Anglo-American viewers, it is
reliant upon a broader cultural understanding of genre that is specific to Italy. The
peculiarity of Italian film culture often destabilizes traditional notions of genre and
suggests that it may not offer a sufficient framework through which to understand the
specificities of the Italian film industry. In his introduction to the Giallo (a subset of the
thriller and horror genres particular to Italian literature and film), Gary Needham
notes that the Italian concept of filone is capable of challenging Anglo-American pre-
conceptions of a fixed ‘taxonomic imaginary’ (2002). Instead, he suggests that filone
can be used to describe genres and cycles as well as currents and trends. Mikel J. Koven
later frames discussion of the concept though the phrases ‘sullo stesso filone’ (in the
tradition of) or ‘seguire il filone’ (to follow in the tradition of), adding that the nearest
English equivalent would be ‘in the vein of’ (2006, 5). These definitions provide some
perspective on ways in which Italian audiences and producers appeared to embrace
what would have otherwise been dismissed as inauthentic in the Anglo-American
marketplace. There is little that could be more in the tradition of a film than a sequel,
regardless of whether this is a ‘proper’ follow-up (at least, in the Italian context).
Adaptation and narrative fidelity: franchising Dawn of the Dead

The practice of franchising unrelated zombie films began with Romero’s Dawn
of the Dead, the success of which stimulated a cycle of zombie films in Italy from
the 1970s onwards that would take the practice of filone outside the national
borders of the country. Similar to the success of the spaghetti western in the
1960s and 1970s, the zombie film was responsible for much of Italy’s output
during the late 1970s and 1980s, including films like Nightmare City (1980),
Zombie Holocaust (1979), and Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror (1981).
Although these films are not narratively connected, they have nevertheless been
incorporated into the Zombi franchise as sequels to either Zombi (1978) (Dawn
of the Dead), or Zombi 2 (1979) (Zombie Flesh Eaters), not only in Italy, but also
in Germany, Thailand, and the United States.
Though the Zombi series begins with Dawn of the Dead, Italian involvement in
this franchise is more complicated than simply producing cheap ‘knock-offs’ or
‘pseudo-sequels,’ as they had done with Alien Contamination. Italian horror director
Dario Argento had helped George Romero develop the story and had assisted in
securing the finance to support the production of Dawn of the Dead. In exchange,
Argento retained control of the European cut of the film and received international
distribution rights. Argento’s edit was retitled as Zombi; and though it ignored any
connection to Romero’s first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, its success
ensured the production of an Italian produced sequel the following year. Hence,
Zombi 2 (1979) was neither narratively connected to the first film nor was it connected
to Argento or Romero; it was instead, the work of veteran director Lucio Fulci. The
film would be sold globally as Zombie Flesh Eaters, becoming the inaugural entry in
secondary zombie franchise that would be sold around the world. Indeed, the global
success of Zombie Flesh Eaters complicates our understanding of the film as neither
simply ‘official’ or ‘unofficial.’ In Italy at least, the film can be seen as an unofficial
sequel to Argento’s cut of Dawn of the Dead, but outside of this nationally specific
context, the film marks the beginning of another series, and a franchise that exists in a
liminal space that problematizes the binary between legitimacy and inauthenticity.
In the special features for the UK release of unofficial Alien sequel Con-
tamination, director Luigi Cozzi states:
in Italy, when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not
‘what is your film like?’ but ‘what film is your film like?’ That’s the way it is,
we can only make Zombi 2, never Zombi (Dawn of the Dead).
However, despite Cozzi’s frustration at the apparent limitations that were imposed
upon him under the Italian studio system, Zombi 2 (or Zombie Flesh Eaters as it is
more commonly known) is a film that succeeds despite being produced in this system
of ‘filone,’ despite being developed as a pseudo-sequel to Dawn of the Dead. While
Cozzi mourned the limitations placed on the creativity of the Italian directors, the
fact that Zombie Flesh Eaters would find worldwide commercial success and mark
the beginning of a whole new franchise suggests that even within this system of
imitation there is an opportunity to rebrand these products and signal their osten-
sible ‘authenticity’ in the international marketplace.
To understand the way in which this complex and complicated series developed, it
is necessary to first understand how a decision by George Romero in the production
of Dawn of the Dead helped to stimulate the franchising of numerous unrelated films
as sequels to his original series worldwide. Dawn of the Dead is a direct sequel to
Night of the Living Dead, and suggests that it takes place in the same storyworld,
despite making no direct reference to the characters or locales from the first film.
150 Mark McKenna
Instead, it focuses on a different group of survivors and their struggle against the
living dead. While this narrative device allowed Romero to foreground different
issues—and contributed to his films being read as responses to racism, capitalism,
consumerism, gender roles in society, and social media—it also gave space for further
installments that Romero had no involvement in through its lack of explicit narrative
continuity. Dawn of the Dead was followed by Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the
Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). This is what
we might describe as ‘the Romero series.’ Although the series does not explicitly
follow the logics of narrative continuity, as with a sequel, it instead maps the survival
of the human race and the response to the zombie epidemic over a 41-year period,
thus allowing for the insertion of new installments that were not created or authored
by Romero. Tim Lucas describes Dawn of the Dead as a ‘non sequitur’ sequel to
Night of the Living Dead, by which he refers to the fact that it ‘shows how a different
group of people react when the recently dead revive to satiate their hunger for warm,
living flesh’ (quoted in Verevis 2010, 17). Conversely, there are multiple examples of
Henderson’s ‘conceptual series’ which pre-date Romero, such as Warner’s Gold
Diggers (1933–1938) and MGM’s Broadway Melody (1935–1940), film series that
‘repeat basic narrative situations’ yet ‘never carry over characters or continue narra-
tive strands from previous films’ (Henderson 2014, 32). Romero’s Dead films works
likewise: a zombie series that lacks serial continuity, but perhaps maintains thematic
and conceptual continuity, signaled by the temporality of each installment title, most
notably in the first three films (‘Night,’ ‘Dawn,’ and ‘Day’). I would argue that it is
this temporal ‘looseness,’ this dearth of serialization, that allowed new installments
not authored by Romero to be incorporated into an alternative franchise by savvy
distributors seeking to capitalize on a fictional association with the success of first
film.
Mapping the genre: ‘the confusing as fuck “Zombi” series’

Zombi 2 was the first of the Italian sequels and was the most successful of these
installments, yet to understand both the impact of this film and the degree to which
this practice of retitling and franchising has been adopted worldwide, it is useful to
track the series in their various incarnations by mapping the way in which these
entries operate as chapters in several different franchise incarnations and back to
Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, the film that marks the beginning of
the official line. Through this process, what emerges is a complex, non-linear, and
often overlapping history that is often difficult to understand, revealingly described
as ‘the confusing as fuck Zombi series’ online by fan-blogger Criterionmaster
(2009). To assist readers in this, Figure 8.1 offers a visual representation of the
franchise cartography, essentially mapping the multiple lines in the series and their
various intersections, along with the original titles, alternative titles, the country of
origin for each film, and the country of origin for each distributive franchise.
Since Romero’s Night of the Living Dead represents the birthplace of the con-
temporary zombie, it is somewhat appropriate that the film is also the point of
origin from which all other zombie lines begin. The film was shot, directed and
Figure 8.1 The unofficial ‘distributive’ zombie franchise
edited by Romero, and was co-written by Romero and John Russo, and unlikely as
it might seem nowadays, the film started out primarily as a comedy horror. Over a
number of rewrites, the film was refined into something that more closely resem-
bled the post-apocalyptic narrative of Richard Matheson novel I am Legend
(1954), exchanging vampires for the ghoulish undead, and in doing so, adding a
contemporary archetypal villain to the horror canon. In 1978, after a clerical error
left the film in the public domain, Romero (independent of Russo) returned to the
series, and in collaboration with Dario Argento, produced Dawn of the Dead.
Seven years later, Romero added Day of the Dead (1985), and completed what
would for many years be a trilogy. However, almost two decades later, Romero
returned to the series with Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and
Survival of the Dead (2009), and planned to extend the series further before his
death in 2017. Though there are still ardent fans that give priority to the first three
films, referring to the series either as a coherent trilogy or by dividing the films into
two trilogies, these six films present the official entries into the series, the six films
that were written and directed by George A. Romero.
As already discussed, the success of Dawn of the Dead on its release in Italy
inspired a flurry of creativity, with zombie films soon dominating production.
Dawn of the Dead, or Zombi as it was known in Italy, soon had a ‘sequel’ directed
by veteran Italian exploitation director Lucio Fulcio, a seasoned Italian director
who, at that time, was more famous for producing westerns, comedies, and Giallo
films. Despite being unconnected to the Romero series, the importance of Fulci’s
Zombi 2 should not be underestimated. Beyond its memorable set-pieces of zom-
bies stumbling over the Brooklyn Bridge, an underwater sequence where a zombie
attacks a shark, and the trauma of a wooden splinter being forced into the eye of a
screaming Olga Karlatos, the film became successful worldwide, inspiring a fur-
ther installment in Italy, that being Zombi 3 (1988). This became the first in a
succession of films that would become known worldwide as the Zombi series.
In the United Kingdom, associations with the Romero series were removed, and
the film was released as Zombie Flesh Eaters. Two versions of the film were released:
a version that had been approved for cinematic screenings by the British Board of
Film Censors (latterly the British Board of Film Classification), and later, an uncut
version which restored all of the material that had been deemed too problematic for
theatrical consumption by the BBFC (due to the fact that there was no regulatory
body governing video in the UK at that time). The UK distributor VIPCO became
embroiled in the so-called ‘video nasties’ furore in Britain in the early 1980s, and the
152 Mark McKenna
film was banned under the Obscene Publications Act, subsequently being removed
from the shelves. The categorization as a ‘video nasty’ contributed to the film’s
notoriety (see McKenna 2020), and a decade later in 1992, the distributor VIPCO
were able to re-release the film, a release that was later followed by Zombie Flesh
Eaters 2, an official installment in the Italian line that was released in Italy as Zombi
3. Partially directed by Lucio Fulci, and in the vein of Romero’s conceptual series, the
film was not an explicit narrative continuation, but focused on another pocket of
survivors struggling against the zombie hordes. Recognizing the trend, VIPCO deci-
ded to capitalize by releasing Oltre la morte (aka After Death) as Zombie Flesh Eaters
3 (1988). These three films can be described as ‘the British line.’
The films were then released in Thailand in a series that follows the order of
release, with Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2), Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombi 3),
and Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 (Oltre la morte, aka After Death). However, they also
added Zombie Flesh Eaters 4 (1988) to the series, a previously unrelated film that
was oddly renamed from its original title Killing Birds (Uccelli assassin).
When the series was released in America, the various branches became even more
confusing as two different distributors released two different lines. Neither sequence,
however, claims connection with Romero’s series. Presumably, given the success of
the Romero series, any association would have likely contributed to legal action
against the distributor. In the absence of an official starting point, the first American
series begins with Zombi 2 (Zombie Flesh Eaters), which was anglicised to Zombie 2
for the US market, with subsequent entries in the series following the lineage of
releases in Thailand (though the numbering is changed, whereby number three
becomes number four, and number four becomes number five). So, for the US series,
Zombi 3 (Zombie Flesh Eaters 2) is retitled to Zombie 3; Zombie Flesh Eaters 3
(Oltre la morte, aka After Death) is retitled to Zombie 4: After Death; and Zombie
Flesh Eaters 4 (Uccelli assassin / Killing Birds) is retitled to Zombie 5: Killing Birds.
As if this wasn’t confusing enough, the American experience of these films is
further complicated by a second series released by -Z Video (aka Edde Entertain-
ment) in the 1990s. Again, in the absence of an official starting point, Zombi 2 was
released as both part two, but also, perplexingly, as part one—two releases of the
same film seemingly retitled to avoid a break in numerical continuity. The series
then broke away altogether from the established sequence previously seen in the
Italian, British, and Thai lines, and began to incorporate previously unrelated titles
from Italy, Spain, and France. Zombie 3: Return of the Zombies (1973) was an
unrelated Spanish film directed by José Luis Merino and starring Paul Naschy,
which was originally titled The Hanging Woman (La orgía de los muertos);
Zombie 4: A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973) was a French/Spanish co-pro-
duction directed by Jess Franco, more widely known as A Virgin Among the
Living Dead (Christina, princesse de l’érotisme); Zombie 5: Revenge in the House
of Usher (1982), again directed by Jess Franco, was an unrelated French release
that was originally simply Revenge in the House of Usher; while Zombie 6: Mon-
ster Hunter (1981) was an Italian film directed by Joe D’Amato and originally
released as Absurd, which was originally a sequel to the film that would be
released as Zombie 7, Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagus (1980).
To add to the confusion related to the American line, the German series
initially appears to follow the series’ official trajectory, beginning with
Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (retitled to Zombie), but the sequence avoids the
Italian sequel, Fulci’s Zombi 2 (a film released separately in Germany as
Woodo: The Dread Island of Zombies). Instead, the series follows the official
Romero line, continuing with Day of the Dead, albeit retitled to Zombie 2, but
then adds Zombi 3, which since it was the official sequel to Zombi 2, would
perhaps have better been released in Germany as Woodoo 2. This is also further
complicated by a secondary line in Germany that begins with Dawn of the
Dead (retitled Zombie 1), and then progresses to Zombie Flesh Eaters (retitled
to Zombie 2), and Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 (retitled to Zombie 3).
As difficult as all of this may be to follow, it is further complicated by the fact that
there also exists what could be considered as a second official line, produced by
Night of the Living Dead co-writer, John Russo. Following production of Night of
the Living Dead, Romero and Russo entered into dispute about the direction that a
possible sequel could take. Since the film had mistakenly fallen into the public
domain, this allowed Romero to develop Dawn of the Dead independently, in spite
of Russo’s reservations. This meant that Russo, as co-writer, retained the rights to
any titles featuring the phrase ‘the Living Dead’, and he began developing his own
line with Return of the Living Dead released in 1985. This situation shares com-
monalities with the James Bond series as Thunderball (1965) writer Kevin McClory
retained the rights to re-adapt the novel, which he did so with Never Say Never
Again, starring an aging Sean Connery in 1983 (which incidentally was released the
same year as official Bond franchise installment, Octopussy [1983]). Thus, Russo’s
Return of the Living Dead can be considered a second official sequel to Night of the
Living Dead, which gave rise to four other sequels: Return of the Living Dead Part II
(1988); Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993); Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis
(2005); and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005). Also, Russo pro-
duced and co-produced, respectively, a remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990),
directed by make-up mastero Tom Savini, on which he collaborated with Romero,
and a direct-to-video release called Children of the Living Dead (2001). All of this of
this does not even consider the American remakes of Romero films that began in
2004 with Zak Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, and includes a remake of Day of the
Dead (2008), as well as an unofficial prequel, Day of the Dead 2: Contagion (2005).
While many fans seem satisfied to accept the legitimacy of both Romero’s and
Russo’s contributions, it would be reductive to simply dismiss the European
entries simply as the flagrant attempts of distributors to capitalize upon the success
of Zombi 2 or Dawn of the Dead (although they certainly did that as well).
Though these lines are clearly motivated by the commercial impulses of the pro-
ducers and distributors, there are other factors that must be considered in this
context. It is significant that, other than in Italy where this practice is a common
phenomenon and the Zombi franchise originated, distributors worldwide have
almost universally chosen not to include Dawn of the Dead as the starting point.
Outside of Italy, the only country to include Dawn of the Dead is Germany, and
this series also includes Day of the Dead, only adding Zombi 3 as a conclusion to
154 Mark McKenna
their series. In an Anglo-American context, this could possibly be attributed to two
factors: first, the decision in the United States and the United Kingdom not to begin
the series with Dawn of the Dead is most likely indicative of the potential for
issues over copyright infringement. Even in the exploitation film market, there are
instances where companies have been prosecuted for attempting to capitalize on
the success of another bigger budget film.
In the UK, for example, video distributor, World of Video 2000, retitled an old
low-budget sci-fi film from Night Fright (1967) to E.T. Nasty (1983) in the hope that
it could capitalize on both the success of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the
notoriety of the ‘video nasties.’ This was not without repercussion, however. When
Universal International Pictures threatened legal action, World of Video 2000 were
forced to recall the cassette, only to later re-release it with an amended title and
different artwork. Although the film was not a big-budget blockbuster like E.T., one
might extrapolate that the same may have been true for Dawn of the Dead had dis-
tributors tried to capitalize on this association in the UK and North America. The
second reason, and perhaps the most likely explanation, is that if Dawn of the Dead
was popular enough to stimulate the production of so many different zombie films,
then it is unlikely that these films would have been accepted as sequels to Dawn of
the Dead in the United Kingdom and the United States with our limited under-
standing of genre (at least in comparison with the Italian context). The fact that
distributors decided to begin the new series with Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2)
suggests that, in the Anglo-American market at least, there is a tipping point, a level
of success at which an unrelated sequel will be dismissed as inauthentic, illegitimate,
or outright fraudulent. However, this does not account for the many entries into the
series worldwide that accepts Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombi 2) as their starting
point, or the importance that is placed upon this film due to Lucio Fulci’s cultish
author function. After all, this film was the starting point for numerous sequels but
these were not challenged in the same way. It could be that the market that grew
around the zombie genre is more willing to collectively group Italian produced films
together on the basis of a shared ‘trashy’ exploitation aesthetic. This of course begins
as marketing strategy on the part of the distributor, but there is no real evidence of
resistance to these ‘unofficial’ series on the grounds of continuity. However, the only
way to test whether these films are accepted as canonical is to consider the response
to these various releases, which I explore in the next section.
Audience responses to retitling the Zombi series

In recent years, scholars of reception studies have veered away from using Amazon
reviews as a reliable source of information amid concerns that this data may have
been distorted by the brands themselves commissioning bogus reviews that work to
skew public perception of their products. Despite these concerns, I have chosen to
use the platform for two reasons: first, I am not dealing with a huge dataset (only 87
responses), so I can scrutinize each review individually and could dismiss any
reviews that are clearly automatically generated or ‘spam’ (though this wasn’t
necessary and only one duplicated review was removed). Second, and most
importantly, the concern over positive bias of web reviews is largely irrelevant to my
analysis since I am only interested in responses to the film as an unofficial entry into
an established series. While it is possible that the companies distributing the films
would omit this information, it is unlikely; for anyone familiar with the series (and
one would assume someone seeking to purchase part 3 would be), it is common
knowledge that they are unrelated as part 2 features a similar lack of fidelity.
To evaluate public responses to distributors releasing unrelated films into the
Zombi series, I concentrated on Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 as this film represents the first
real break from the ‘official’ sequence of sequels in the Italian line. To clarify this
point, while none of the films in the series are narratively connected, as with
Romero’s conceptual series, Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 (Zombi 4) is often dismissed
because it was not directed by Lucio Fulci, where Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2)
and Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombi 3) were branded with his imprimatur. Though
the second film was only partially directed by Fulci, this association has nevertheless
given the film a cultish pedigree that has served to protect it from some of the criti-
cisms typically leveled at Zombi 3 (a film directed by Bruno Matai, a filmmaker who
does not carry associations of cult auteurism like Fulci). Conversely, Zombie Flesh
Eaters 3 (Zombi 4) is often viewed as inauthentic because it is not directed by Fulci,
and the film was retitled by distributors in the United Kingdom, the United States,
Germany, and Thailand, all hoping to capitalize on the commercial appeal of the
Zombi brand. This lack of an auteur signature means that Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 is
perhaps the most appropriate entry in the series through which to discuss reactions
to retitling and the fannish discourses that surround the film. Since this film has been
retitled by four different distributors in four different countries, and the online
shopping portal Amazon provides nationally specific websites, this provided the
most convenient way of collecting information that would otherwise be incredibly
difficult to access. Though there is no Thai specific platform for Amazon, the com-
pany has a nationally specific platform for the United Kingdom, the United States,
and Germany (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, and Amazon.de). In lieu of a sustained
audience study, it is then possible to view responses to the practice of what I am
terming, in this chapter, distributive franchising.
Zombi 3 (Zombie Flesh Eaters 4) has generated a total of 87 reviews across
the UK, US, and German specific portals of the international shopping site.
This total is comprised of 13 responses in the United Kingdom, 56 responses in
the United States, and 18 responses in Germany. From this data, I removed one
review from the United States and one review from the Germany, as these
duplicated reviews that were already present. All respondents have been anon-
ymized. I then coded the data based on seven recurrent discursive clusters that
were visible across all three of the datasets:
1 direct reference to the film or the series being unrelated to each other;
2 referenced the director in their perception of whether or not the film should
be considered important;
3 referenced the presentation of gore within the film;
4 the overall quality of the presentation was discussed;
156 Mark McKenna
Figure 8.2 Audience responses to the Zombi series
5 referred to the film being cut, either historically or in that version;

6 framed the discussion of the film in terms of being a ‘bad movie,’ that
could primarily be enjoyed by virtue of it being ‘so bad it’s good’;
7 made explicit reference to the narrative throughout the review.
The vast majority of reviewers across the three territories chose not to emphasize
the fact that the film was narratively unconnected to its predecessor, which implies
that this aspect of the film’s lineage is unimportant for these viewers. However, 15
reviews out of 85 usable responses made explicit reference to the fact that the films did
not follow the principle of narrative continuity, equating to 17.6 percent of the
reviews, the same respondents who offered any description of the narrative within
their review. While this number is significant, over half of the UK and US respondents
(52.9 percent) were more concerned that the film was not directed by Lucio Fulci, and
a similar percentage of the German reviewers noted that it was not directed by
George Romero (where the film was released as a sequel to Romero’s series). Because
of this, all three sets of reviewers felt that the lack of an ‘authentic’ director-figure
meant the film should not be considered as legitimately canonical. This directorial
emphasis is implicitly linked to the emphasis given over to the gory elements in any
given film, with Lucio Fulci often referred to as ‘The Godfather of Gore’ and Romero
‘The Godfather of the Dead’. 37.6 percent of the reviews were more concerned that
the film be gruesome in its depiction, compared with only 17.6 percent who were
concerned that the film be narratively connected, suggesting that serial continuity was
less important to these viewers than the affective qualities of the film and that the
author functions of both Fulci and Romero had become a signifier of a kind of excess.
This same emphasis can also be seen in the interest in whether the film was presented
in its full uncensored form (27 percent), a factor that also contributed to 30.5 percent
of reviewers concerned about the overall quality of the presentation of the film.
Reviews that did foreground the lack of continuity are either understated—
‘Zombie 3 does not really have anything to do with the first two films’—or for the
German respondents—‘this movie is not a 3rd part of George A. Romero’s hit
zombie trilogy.’ Indeed, Zombie 3, the first deviation from both the Romero line and
the Fulci line, becomes the central point of disruption in the series, described as ‘the
pseudo-sequel to a genre classic, which was itself a pseudo-sequel to THE genre
classic.’ Assessing the merits of the film in similar terms, one reviewer explains that:
Fulci’s original Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2) was an unofficial sequel to

Romero’s Zombi (Dawn of the Dead). Not content with releasing Zombi 3
on us, they are now renaming even worse 80s Italian Zombie movies as
unofficial sequels to the unofficial sequel.
What is significant in both these reviews is that while the criterion for inclusion
appears to be one of quality, as opposed to the film’s pedigree, both return to
the notion of quality being explicitly tied to a cultish author function. They
acknowledge that Zombie Flesh Eaters is an unofficial sequel, retitled to capi-
talize on the success of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), and they appear to
acknowledge Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (1988) as an official sequel, despite criti-
cizing the film’s quality. The main problem occurs with Zombi 3, a film that is
deemed to be of significantly lesser quality, but that also lacks the pedigree of
the lineage of the previous entries, at which point acceptance seems to return to
authorial legitimacy as means determining inclusion or exclusion.
Conclusion
Whether these films are actually understood as coherent entries in a franchise is
ambivalent. Their commercial acceptance for audiences, however, does raise
interesting questions about the ways in which consumers are negotiating films of
this nature, and the basis on which they choose to include (or exclude) particular
entries in the series as ‘good’ objects by reifying a cultish author-function (and of
course, by rejecting other directorial signatures as ‘bad’ and unworthy). In her
study of film adaptation, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Lit-
erature and Drama, Christine Geraghty argues that ‘faithfulness matters if it mat-
ters to the viewer’ (2008, 3), and although she was primarily concerned with
adaptations of literature into film, this idea of faithfulness, of fidelity, has reso-
nance here through the economically enforced seriality of what I have called the
distributive franchise. Like Romero’s conceptual series, the lack of continuity
between installments is not a problem to be navigated inasmuch as fidelity to the
tone, tenor, and aesthetics of other films helmed by directors with significant sub-
cultural capital. As I.Q. Hunter states, ‘adaptation, much like genre itself, is a
method of standardising production and repackaging the familiar within an econ-
omy of sameness and difference’ (2009, 9), and these distributive negotiations
demonstrate an overt approach to this repackaging of the familiar that offers just
enough difference to be accepted as generic serialization within an economy of
sameness and difference while simultaneously allowing enough diversification to
extend the franchise property.
158 Mark McKenna
It is significant that the director as an auteur figure is central to over half of the
collected responses, although the level of gore also plays a pivotal role in the accep-
tance of these films. Indeed, this overarching emphasis on gore above all else can be
seen to build upon and expand this idea of generic fidelity, incorporating specific
tropes through faithfulness to the traditions of the zombie film. This demonstrates an
acceptance that these films, while not ‘official’ sequel productions, or at least not
authored or branded with Romero’s author function, draw upon tropes and themes
that relate to the film that they aim to ‘follow in the tradition of.’ The implication here
is that in countries without an established tradition of filone, audiences nevertheless
negotiate ‘distributive franchising’ by establishing connections that work to maintain
the authenticity of Fulci’s Zombi 2. Rather than simply dismiss these entries as illegi-
timate, the Zombi series teaches us a great deal about the ways in which consumers
construct aura and authenticity in the absence of either Fulci’s or Romero’s cultish
imprimatur. Ultimately, concepts such as canonicity become sites of negotiation, of
refusal, acceptance, and celebration. It is therefore necessary for more research in this
area of what I have called in this chapter the distributive franchise, with the Italian
filone tradition providing a wealth of opportunities with which to do so.
References
Criterionmaster. 2009. ‘The Confusing as Fuck “Zombi” Series’. Rate Your Music. https://
rateyourmusic.com/list/criterionmaster/the_confusing_as_fuck_zombi_series.
Fisher, Austin. 2011. Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and
Popular Italian Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris.
Geraghty, Christine. 2008. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature
and Drama. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Henderson, Stuart. 2014. The Hollywood Sequel: History and Form, 1911–2010. London:
BFI/Palgrave.
Hunter, I.Q. 2009. ‘Exploitation as Adaptation’. In Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation,
Reworking, Transformation, edited by I.R. Smith. Scope: The Online Journal of Film
and Television Studies. www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/issues/2009/october-issue-15.aspx.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge.
Koven, Mikel J. 2006. La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film.
Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
McKenna, Mark. 2020. Nasty Business: The Marketing and Distribution of the Video
Needham, Gary. 2002. ‘Playing with Genre: An Introduction to the Italian Giallo’. www.
kinoeye.org/02/11/needham11.php.
McSweeney, Terence. 2010. ‘The Land of the Dead and the Home of the Brave:
Romero’s vision of a Post 9/11 America’. In Reframing 9/11 Film, Popular Culture and
the War on Terror, edited by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, 107–
116. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Verevis, Constantine. 2010. ‘Redefining the Sequel: The Case of the (Living Dead)’. In
Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel, edited by Carolyn Jess-Cooke
and Constantine Verevis, 11–31. New York: State University of New York Press.
WetmoreJr, Kevin J. 2011. Back from the Dead: Remakes of the Romero Zombie Films
as Markers of Their Times. North Carolina: McFarland & Co.
9 Horror heroine or symbolic sacrifice
Defining the I Spit on Your Grave franchise
as horror
Sarah Cleary
Though the character of Jennifer Hills made her debut in Meir Zarchi’s 1978 Day
of the Woman, later retitled as the more salacious I Spit on Your Grave in 1980, it
was four years earlier that her inspiration and real-life counterpart stumbled into
the life of the director in the guise of a naked, battered, and bruised woman
crawling through the undergrowth of Goose Pond Park. Subject to a brutal sexual
assault, Zarchi helped the woman to a local police station. Accompanying her as
she was questioned about the assault, he grew increasingly uncomfortable at her
treatment by the officer who, according to Zarchi, saw her as
another piece of damaged goods that he had to catalogue in his inven-

tory … As he was pounding and pounding her with these questions, I felt
that the rape of this girl had not stopped. It had just transferred from that
park into this police station and was continuing before my eyes.
(Cited in Maguire 2018, 31)
While the fate of this young woman remains lost to the annals of time, and the
suffering endured throughout her assault now reduced to that of an interesting
anecdote, one could infer from Zarchi’s observations that this young woman,
like so many before and after her, received little real justice. However, four
years later, Zarchi’s Goose Pond Park ward would get a poetic justice of sorts
in the form of his avenging heroine Jennifer Hills.
In Zarchi’s directorial debut Day of the Woman (1978) a similarly raped, bat-
tered, and bruised Jennifer (Camille Keaton) would eventually have her day,
although justice wouldn’t be meted out in any conventional court; Jennifer’s
bloody and vengeful justice would come from a much more primal place. Over the
next four decades, repeatedly abused, Jennifer and her cinematic heirs would con-
tinue to enforce this talionic law of retribution as an ‘expression of a perfectly
proportionate justice’ (VanDrunen 2008, 945) which was poetic in its application,
bloody in its execution, and certainly not without controversy.
In 2020, 42 years after the release of Zarchi’s ‘celluloid pariah’ (Maguire
2018, 1), Kaleidoscope Entertainment announced that a special edition boxset
of the ‘I Spit on Your Grave: The Complete Collection’ would be made avail-
able for purchase.1 Comprising the original 1978 edition along with the 2010
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-13
160 Sarah Cleary
remake directed by Steven R. Monroe, its two sequels I Spit on Your Grave 2
(2013) and I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance is Mine (2015), Zarchi’s sequel
to his original, I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà Vu (2019), as well as bonus feature
length documentary, Growing Up With I Spit on Your Grave (2019), directed
by Zarchi’s son, Terry Zarchi, Kaleidoscope Entertainment not only provided
fans with an opportunity to add to their collections, it has also consolidated the
films into ‘a complete 6-disc collection of cinema’s most shocking cult fran-
chise.’2 Aside from the controversial material enclosed within, on first glance
this seems like rather an innocuous enough tagline. On closer inspection, how-
ever, the grouping of these texts by multiple directors across numerous time-
lines together into what Kaleidoscope branded as a horror franchise was not
only a brave marketing move, but a commentary on the manner in which the I
Spit on Your Grave films have come together in a discursive act of interpreta-
tion mainly fueled by the marketing matrix of fandom, specifically, horror
fandom. However, while still retaining an undeniable power to shock (and
offend) four decades on, the I Spit on Your Grave series is certainly horrific, but
is it horror? Unperturbed by such generic dilemmas, Kaleidoscope’s decision to
position the I Spit on Your Grave boxset firmly within the rest of its horror
yield along such related titles like Julia X (2011) and Prevenge (2016) and firm
family favourites such as Killer Mermaids (2014), Night of Demons (1988), and
Resurrecting the Streetwalker (2009). Given that both the original 1978 film and
its direct descendant I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà Vu are available to purchase
from the horror dropdown menu, one could assume that rape-revenge titles, at
least as far as Kaleidoscope’s classification is concerned, warrants inclusion in
the horror genre. However, this belief is not universal and problematizing this
categorization is the fact that Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017) and Jennifer
Kent’s The Nightingale (2018), both similarly violent rape-revenge films, are
found in the thriller section of Kaleidoscope.
With such incongruities in mind, this chapter will explore the historical tra-
jectory that transformed the I Spit on Your Grave franchise from a thriller into
horror, considering the ways in which Jennifer’s thematic invocation of the lex
talionis principle of an ‘eye for an eye’ substantiate her horror heroine status.
Developed in early Babylonian law and present in both biblical and early
Roman law, lex talionis is a retributive principle asserting that those who
commit a crime should receive a punishment which fits this crime, replicating as
close as possible the precise injury they have inflicted upon their victims. In
other words,
a man who injures his countryman – as he has done, so it shall be done to

him … an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Just as another person has
received injury from him, so it will be given to him.
(Lev. 24:19–21)
Evaluating a proposed revision of the Pennsylvania penal code in the 1980s,

legal theorist Hugo Bedau noted:
Horror heroine or symbolic sacrifice 161
The classification [of crimes and punishments] … has been assumed to be
fundamentally retributive, and so its penalty schedule must be based on
two basic retributive principles: (1) the severity of the punishment must be
proportional to the gravity of the offense, and (2) the gravity of the offense
must be a function of fault in the offender and harm caused the victim.
(Bedau 1985, 102)
Together these two ‘basic principles’ form the law of lex talionis.
As argued throughout this chapter, within the framework of rape-revenge nar-
ratives, lex talionis not only ‘provides a controversial principle of proportion-
ality,’3 but it also provides both context and pretext for the motivations of the
female protagonist and her subsequent heirs throughout the franchise. Not simply
by means of ‘ratcheting up the stakes,’ in which the POV of the audience is trans-
formed into a contested space of ‘empathic consumers’ of (so-called) torture porn,4
the acts of violence perpetrated upon the men following the assaults are arguably
tools of visibility; albeit often blunt serrated tools of visibility. In the hyperbolic
landscape of the I Spit on Your Grave franchise, Jennifer finds herself not only an
avenging heroine, but, soaked in the blood of her rapists, she stands alone as a
compelling Final Girl.
Genre concerns aside, many might debate the status of the I Spit on Your Grave
series as a legitimate franchise. Ruminating on the flippancy in which the term
‘franchise’ is regularly invoked within cinematic discourse, Kristin Thompson
observes how it essentially refers to a ‘movie that spawns additional revenue
beyond what it earns from its various forms of distribution, primarily theatrical,
video, and television’ (Thompson 2007, 4). While she notes that these revenue
streams arise out of licensing the brand in order to manufacture ancillary products,
such as mugs, t-shirts, video games, etc., more traditional streams in the guise of
‘sequels and series’ validate a film’s franchise identity (Thompson 2007, 4). Given
the four subsequent films and the documentary that followed the 1978 original,
along with their accompanying movie merchandise, the boxsets, special editions,
and documentary, the validity of the I Spit on Your Grave series as a franchise is
certainly evident. However, there does remain a point of contention regarding the
categorization of it as a horror franchise. Therefore, if the I Spit on Your Grave
series is to be envisaged as a franchise, in terms of understanding the ramifications
of such a taxonomy, due consideration must be given to the interpretation of a
franchise as framework for understanding, meaning-making, and generic cohesion.
Embroiled within countless debates concerning media effects, video nasties,
second-wave feminism, ‘ethics of representation’ (Jones 2002, 2), and rape culture,
the series of five films, from the original to Zarchi’s official sequel in 2019, are
certainly no strangers to controversy. Yet given the levels of comfortability modern
audiences now have with what Adam Lowenstein denotes ‘spectacle horror’
(2011), the I Spit on Your Grave series may have lost its once razor sharp edge.
Understood as a cultural barometer for gauging attitudes toward sexual(ized) vio-
lence, perhaps it has become more of an illustrative ground zero for dissecting
cinematic representations of the tortured female body (Badley 1995; de Valk 2016;
162 Sarah Cleary
Creed 2015; Conrich and Sedgwick 2017; Mantziari 2018) and revisionist critiques
of feminist theory (Gubar 1987; Read 2000; Projansky 2001; Heller-Nicholas 2011;
Henry 2014). Whether the depictions of rape and revenge over time throughout the
series have become something more abstract, symbolic, or perhaps more pro-
blematically, simply a ‘plot device’ (see Wilz 2020, 22), if that is indeed the case,
can we truly consider these films part of horror franchise cinema alongside the
Nightmare on Elm Streets, the Friday the 13ths, and the Saws? Or have we some-
how lost the essence of Jennifer as a horror heroine and, instead, offered her up as
symbolic sacrifice to the ‘tyranny of textual analysis’ (Altman 1999, 213)? More-
over, with the release of this boxset crystalizing the series into a franchise, probing
the ontology of these five disparate films as a franchise becomes necessary in order
to fully appreciate the role performed by Jennifer and her heirs.
Suggesting that ‘[t]he power of the rape-revenge scenario, is in the calculable
intensity that sexualised violence (or the threat of sexual violence) holds over the
film as a whole’, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes that the rape in and of itself
need not always be shown, suggesting that the ‘intensity and centrality do not
automatically translate to visibility’ (Heller-Nicholas 2011, 4). As an example of
this, Heller-Nicholas cites The Accused (1988) where the rape is only shown at the
end of the film, and Shame (1988), where the rape is not shown at all (4). Yet, in
not showing the rape—or worst still, as in The Accused, depicting the rape
through the eyes of a male bystander—conventional representations of rape have
often worked to obscure the role of the victim as a survivor seeking justice and
revenge. Portrayed with terrifying viscerality, the I Spit on Your Grave series dis-
regards such cinematic subtlety and sophistication in favor of repositioning the
(post-assault) female protagonist as focused solely upon bloody retribution by
dispensing entirely with traditional judicial procedures that are typically observed
in rape narratives (like The Accused and Shame). Arguing that ‘[t]he inclusion of a
rape scene in rape-revenge provides visible proof that a revenge-worthy crime has
been committed,’ Claire Henry suggests that this awards ‘the protagonists a valid
motivation for violent retaliation,’ thus restoring the ‘equilibrium and equality
between parties’ (Henry 2014, 73).
As a laceration of problematic judicial practice surrounding rape, it is impos-
sible to discuss a series of films like the I Spit on Your Grave franchise without
acknowledging the continued prevalence of sexual violence in the twenty-first
century, and the equally insidious culture of ‘victim blaming.’ In reality, it is simply
not enough to prove that a sexual assault has taken place, but it appears that blame
must be apportioned, and that blame is not always necessarily directed at the per-
petrator. Gabriela L. Culda et al. have observed that ‘[r]ape survivors who speak
out about their assault experiences are often punished for doing so because they
can be subjected to negative reactions from support providers such as family and
friends or even medical and justice workers’ (Culda et al. 2018, 99). ‘Such negative
social reactions,’ they conclude, ‘stem from the fact that society perpetuates the
same rape myths repeatedly, creating beliefs that “people get what they deserve,
and deserve what they get”’ (Culda et al. 2018, 100; see also Lerner 1980). In one
extremely high-profile rape case in Ireland in 2018, for example, a 17-year-old
victim’s underwear, a black lace thong, was used as a ‘sign of her consent.’ That
same year in Northern Ireland, tensions ran high during what came to be known as
the ‘Rugby Rape Trial,’ which saw two professional rugby players and their
friends acquitted of the rape of a young woman in 2016 at a house party. Spending
eight days giving testimony, she was asked why she didn’t ‘cry out for help.’ Her
answer was that she ‘froze.’ While her bloody underwear was similarly passed
around the court room, a forensic expert, acting for the defence, was asked by the
prosecution, ‘if, in her experience, women experiencing sexual assault resisted?’
She replied that ‘it is allowed to happen.’5 With such insults commonplace, the I
Spit on Your Grave series offers a retributivist fantasy adhering to the principle of
lex talionis (or like for like) that eradicates the need for litigious rigor, often com-
plicated by subjective narratives often described as ‘he said, she said.’ A central
conflict at the heart of rape revenge narratives that appeal to the principle of lex
talionis is, however, the issue around ‘like for like.’ Strict adherence to the princi-
ple of lex talionis would mean that a rapist would in fact be subjected to his own
sexual assault rather than torture and/or death. But given that women often per-
ceive the ‘seriousness of rape as exceeding that of murder’ (Monckton-Smith 2010,
2; Ferraro 1995), a Kantian reading of this principle would suggest that punish-
ments ‘satisfy the “spirit,” if not the letter, of Lex talionis’ (Kant 1965, 102; see also
Davis 1986, 240). Therefore lex talionis requires an equivalent ‘evil,’ not necessa-
rily the same ‘evil’ (Davis 1986).
Day of the Woman

It would be folly to assume that rape, revenge, and the subsequent metamorphosis
from hunted to hunter, were constructs of 1970s exploitation cinema. Nevertheless,
it is in this decade that we see the trope come to fruition, most notably within the
exploitation circuit. Considering its content and its release toward the end of the
1970s, Day of the Woman was greeted with quite a tepid reception initially. Jerry
Gross repackaged the film for the exploitation market in 1980 with the rather more
provocative title of I Spit on Your Grave and a provocative hypersexualized poster,
later revealed to be a close up of the actress Demi Moore (McKenna 2020, 96). These
paratextual revisions undoubtedly worked to emphasize the more sensational
aspects of the film. From these humble beginnings, I Spit on Your Grave went on to
become one of the most controversial and talked about films of all time.
In sharp juxtaposition with the swelling tide of second-wave feminism,6 rape-
revenge films were played in exploitation or grindhouse theatres, drive-ins, and, to
a lesser extent, mainstream cinemas.7 For some, these narratives were simple,
albeit violent, forms of entertainment, while for others, such as Julie Bindel, they
were an affront to their womanhood, sick filth that left perturbed audiences mur-
muring to themselves, ‘It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie,’ a promotional and
perhaps palliative incantation most visibly seen in Wes Craven’s own rape-revenge
film Last House on the Left (1972). In 2011, Bindle wrote in the Guardian that she
‘was wrong about I Spit on Your Grave,’ that ‘standing by the pickets against the
video-nasty genre 30 years ago,’ though still ‘exploitative,’ she now doubts the
164 Sarah Cleary
harmfulness of I Spit on Your Grave. In juxtaposition with a film such as The
Accused, Bindel now admits that when it comes to justice for rape survivors at
least Zarchi’s film does not erroneously ‘present the criminal justice system as a
friend to women.’8
Notwithstanding these later revocations, it would be remiss not to draw atten-
tion to the vast amount of criticism leveled at Zarchi upon the release (and sub-
sequent rerelease) of the original film. Even though the critic Roger Ebert lamented
in his 1980 review that ‘[t]here is no reason to see this movie except to be enter-
tained by the sight of sadism and suffering.’9 Nevertheless, it is a film which cap-
tured the zeitgeist of the era while simultaneously managing to remain timeless, a
testament perhaps to the subject matter which is as challenging now as it was in
1978. Zarchi’s rape-revenge thriller was considered not only a contemptible film
due to its violent depictions of rape, but reviewers imbued it with a dangerous
‘aura,’ suggesting that the film was capable of corrupting anyone who came within
spitting distance of it. In his review for Empire, Kim Newman wrote how he found
I Spit on Your Grave to be one of ‘the most loathsome films of all time’ (Newman
2011, 57). Equally repulsed by the film, Alan Jones exclaimed that the ‘protracted
rape is … as degrading and squirm inducing as anything I’ve seen in the exploita-
tion field … This irresponsibility would give the violence against women’s lobby
enough ammunition to successfully campaign against anything they wished to’
(cited in Barker 1984, 49).
Believing it to be inherently misogynistic, ‘sick, reprehensible and contemptible,’
Ebert wailed that ‘[a]ttending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my
life … At the film’s end I walked out of the theatre quickly, feeling unclean,
ashamed and depressed’ (Ebert 1981, 55). While that may have been the intended
effect of a film that deals exclusively with the repeated rape of a young women, it
was Ebert’s claim that I Spit on Your Grave was a ‘vile film for vicious sex crim-
inals’ that remains the most problematic insofar as it constructed the most inno-
cent of horror fan as a ‘sex criminal’ (61). It wouldn’t be long before the
correlation between a film depicting rape and its association with real life rapists
was quickly exploited in the media.
In one of the earliest and most notorious of such examples, the Daily Mail
reported that 18-year-old Mark Austin, having been convicted of burglary, now
faced two counts of rape in court and that, after watching I Spit on Your Grave
repeatedly, he got the ‘idea’ to attack these women. Austin’s solicitor, Robert
Francis, was quoted in the Daily Mail claiming that the 18-year-old’s ‘moral
values were obliterated by seeing women degraded in video films. What he saw
made him think that women were prepared to behave in a fashion that bore no
relation to reality’ (cited in Barker 1984, 194). Though reported wildly through-
out the press, many details were omitted, such as the fact that Austin was a
habitual glue sniffer, held previous convictions, and had an exceptionally low IQ
of 37. Unsatisfied with recounting the facts of the case, The Sun added con-
textually in 1983 that, ‘[t]he Nasties usually include violent rape scenes which
end up with the victims enjoying the assault.’ If the reporter had taken even a
cursory glance at the trailer for I Spit on Your Grave, he would have realized that
the repeated rape of the protagonist is represented as a torturous experience from
start to finish, an experience that ultimately drives her to kill the attackers.
In an effort to overcome such condemnations at the time, Marco Starr coun-
tered readings of the film as misogynistic by claiming that ‘it portrays violent
aggression and hatred towards women while simultaneously condemning those
very attitudes. And it does this long before the violated heroine has her day of
vengeance’ (1984, 50). The idea that women are treated as sexual playthings to be
discarded when used up is forcefully refuted by Starr who recognizes that while
the rapists do in fact seek to discard their victim, the filmmakers do not. Indeed,
the rapists are portrayed as ‘monstrously inhuman,’ and, as a result, their deaths
‘can only be viewed as inevitable.’ While far from heaping praise upon the film,
Carol Clover in Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992) admits that ‘most of the
action is registered from her [the victim’s] vantage, and there is no doubt what-
ever that its sympathies lie with her’ (Clover 1992, 118).
But contrary to the laments of its critics, it was just a movie. But what type of
movie was it? Alighting upon this very issue, Heller-Nicholas argues that if there
is indeed a concern with genre, with the rape-revenge film struggling to fit neatly
into a single generic category, it is perhaps because they ‘reflect a broader cultural
confusion about rape more generally’ (2011, 4). Therefore, its inclusion in cinema
from a broader, albeit more complex, perspective creates a space for ‘ideological
debates to be explored through areas such as gender, genre and cultural context’
(4). However, the trope of rape-revenge, if contextualized within discussions
regarding genre, is certainly not a singular, static image but, rather, one that is in
a constant state of flux, a sentiment which echoes Harold Bloom’s famous
declaration that ‘there are no texts, only relationships between texts’ (Bloom
1975, 3).
In his discussion on Stephen King, Simon Brown writes how it’s important to
note that, ‘claiming that any piece of work is immediately classifiable within a
certain genre implies that genre has a finite and unequivocal set of characteristics
component’ (Brown 2018, 13), which he argues can only lead, as Steve Neale sug-
gests, to definitions that are, at best, ‘banal, or tautological’ (1995, 13). It is per-
haps due to similar concerns concerning genre that there appears to be some
critical reticence pertaining to the categorization of rape-revenge films within
horror, a reticence that is evidenced in Jacinda Read’s analysis of Carol Clover’s
reading of rape-revenge as a ‘subgenre’ of horror. According to Read, this cate-
gorization limits the ability for rape-revenge to be read as ‘narratives of transfor-
mation’ (Read 2000, 127–139). Similarly, Henry remarks that Heller-Nicholas’
‘shyness’ to term rape-revenge a genre, and by avoiding theorizing what rape-
revenge is, ‘defaults to the model established by Read, in which rape-revenge as a
narrative pattern “mapped onto” more established genres,’ such as horror, the
western, and so forth (Henry 2014, 4). ‘Genre,’ Henry argues,
is a preferable term for rape-revenge because genre studies help us to

understand its processes of flux and inter-genre mutation. This labelling is
also a political move to validate the rape-revenge genre as being significant
166 Sarah Cleary
and worthy of study alongside the traditional genres of Westerns, film noir,
and horror.
(4)
A testament to the diversity of criticism when it comes to the genre, these critiques
tend to prefer a much more panoramic view of rape-revenge. Narrowing the focus
to the I Spit on Your Grave franchise creates at least some stability, especially
when the focus is not on gender but rather through an exploration of the nature of
revenge through the principle of lex talionis. Such a reading of I Spit on Your
Grave as a horror film is similarly echoed in the work of Laura Mee who argues
that Steve Monroe’s remake should ‘be positioned within its own genre context by
looking at recent trends in contemporary horror cinema’ (Mee 2013, 76). Invoking
the rather problematic categorization of ‘torture porn’ as a justification for estab-
lishing its horror credentials, Mee suggests that Monroe’s remake
also employs other motifs from horror cinema more widely. From early in
the film, the use of jump-shocks, POV shots of Jennifer stalked unknow-
ingly through Stanley’s camera, and an added intense score all aim to
increase the suspense and to explicitly code the film as belonging to the
contemporary horror genre.
(2013, 85)
Mee adds that the shift towards a more ‘obvious horror formula’ in Monroe’s 2010
remake is somewhat similar to the remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 rape-revenge film
The Last House on the Left (2009). Arguably, similar conclusions can be made
about Monroe’s remake-sequel I Spit on Your Grave 2. With a strong nod to the
xenophobic undertones of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Hostel 2 (2007) and Scott
Spiegel’s Hostel 3 (2011), wannabe model Katie Carter (Jemma Dallender) is kid-
napped, raped, and held captive in a foreign Eastern European country to be sold
like chattel. Reminiscent of the torture chambers in Hostel, Katie embarks upon a
chthonic rampage in which her rapists and kidnappers are subject to her down-
ward spiral of hate and vengeance. Likewise, Braunstein’s I Spit on Your Grave 3:
Vengeance is Mine sees the return of Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) post-assault, a
shadow of her former self struggling to overcome her past trauma; that is, until she
meets the ballsy and choleric rape survivor Marla (Jennifer Landon) and the two
embark upon an escalating campaign of retributive violence upon known rapists
who have evaded traditional justice.
From 1978–$19.78
Following festival screenings and a limited theatrical release in America and the
UK, Monroe’s film was released on DVD and Blu-ray in early 2011. Much like
the original, positive reviews were scant, and many of the negative reviews were
framed around the pointlessness of remaking a film that made the aforemen-
tioned Pulitzer prize winner critic ‘unclean, ashamed and depressed’ (Ebert 1981,
55). Mee similarly notes how the most scathing reviews were constructed around
the notion of I Spit on Your Grave’s pointless and ‘worthlessness.’ One parti-
cular review from the online film magazine Little White Lies exclaimed that
watching the 2010 remake was akin to ‘being in the Guinness Book of Records
for eating a wheelbarrow of your own shit,’ but the most ‘shocking thing’ about
this film is that ‘anyone bothered to make it once, let alone twice’ (2013, 76). In a
similar tone of exasperation and righteous indignation, before underlining his
disgust with a caustic ‘congratulations,’ Michael Ordoña for the LA Times
claimed:
The most shocking thing about ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ is that someone
thought the 1978 original deserved a remake. That was an artless, poorly
made, leering, phenomenally unintelligent chronicle of gang rape and intri-
cate revenge. It set so low a bar that even this ill-conceived but slick venture
can be called ‘better.’10
Not one for missing an opportunity, Roger Ebert bookended his own thoughts
on the franchise three decades after the first:
This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film ‘I Spit on Your Grave’
adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency. In the original, a
woman foolishly thought to go on holiday by herself at a secluded cabin. She
attracted the attention of depraved local men, who raped her, one after the
other. Then the film ended with her fatal revenge. In this film, less time is
devoted to the revenge, and more time to verbal, psychological and physical
violence against her. Thus, it works even better as vicarious cruelty against
women.11
Exchanging his 1980 ‘despicable’ with ‘loathsome’ in 2010, while reflecting upon
the motivations of his fellow patrons in the movie theatre, he probes not only the
content but also passes judgment about the motivations of people at the ‘packed
screening.’ Many people, he frets, were even there on dates!
But not all reviews reached such a fever pitch of righteous indignation. Riffing
on her own position as a writer, Jeannette Catsoulis’ review for the New York
Times was more ambivalent: ‘Female-empowerment fantasy or just plain pruri-
ence, [I Spit on Your Grave] is extremely efficient grindhouse. If there is any
message here at all, it’s don’t mess with a novelist: being creative is her job.’12
But perhaps it was Donald Clarke’s review for the Irish Times in 2010 that had
the most bromidic of reactions to the remake. Having situated the original
release in Ireland within the context of the UK Video Nasty controversy,13 the
original ‘existed at the hub of a cultural vortex that took in feminism, socialism,
the video-nasty sensation and the resurgence of the moral majority. The remake
looks like just another horror film. Is there anything here you haven’t seen
before?’14 Is the remake of I Spit on Your Grave ‘just another horror film’? Or
does Jennifer still have something left to offer? Is this an exhumation or an
168 Sarah Cleary
emancipation? Speaking in a 2010 interview Monroe mused on how he had
grown up,
worshipping Sam Peckinpah. ‘Straw Dogs’ is one of my all-time favorite

movies, and so is ‘Wild Bunch’ … and ‘Clockwork Orange’ and all kinds
of movies like that. So this kind of sat with me as one of those, you know,
did you enjoy the film? No, but you were really emotionally affected by it.
Therefore it was a good film that in a second-degree context you did enjoy
the movie, you know what I mean? You don’t go, ‘yeah, I loved it! I
enjoyed!’ … same thing with ‘Clockwork Orange’. It’s an incredibly bril-
liant film, but it’s a very, very violent, dark, disturbing movie.15
Roughly following a similar plot structure to Zarchi’s original, Jennifer Hills

retreats to the countryside to finish her latest novel. Following in the footsteps of
her predecessor, she stops at a gas station, where her attention is caught by two
grubbily dressed men rustically accessorized with a harmonica and whittling knife.
Quickly greeted by gas attendant Johnny (Jeff Branson), his attempts to flirt with
Jennifer leave him somewhat deflated: ‘Howdy ma’am. Just so you know; you’re
running a little hot. Maybe I should check up on your hood for you?.’ Bursting into
a fit of giggles, she drily responds: ‘How’s that line working for you?’ Not return-
ing the smile, Johnny persists: ‘Well I don’t know, how’s that line working for
you?’ With a clever nod to the original, the pump clocks $19.78. Having his offers
rebuffed, Johnny spills a nearby bucket of water all over himself when startled by
Jennifer accidentally hitting the panic button on her keys, foreshadowing her own
blind panic to come.
It is interesting to note that the 2010 remake similarly seeks to invoke sym-
pathy for the tragic figure of Matthew (Richard Pace 1978; Chad Lindberg
2010), an intellectually disabled member of the group. While Matthew’s culp-
ability in the attack on Jennifer in both the 1978 and 2010 film is problematized
due to his profound learning difficulties, he is guilty by dint of association, and
ultimately pays the price. However, focusing only on ‘harm the offender has
caused,’ the principle of lex talionis ‘ignores the offender’s moral culpability’
(Garvey 1998, 777) and instead seeks retribution without mitigation.
The principle of lex talionis provides a justification for their torture in which
both Jennifer, and by extension the audience, can suspend their moral obligations
within the narrow remit of the film as payback becomes a quest for resolution.
Through the torture and castration of Jennifer’s attackers throughout the series,
rape, the ultimate emblem of toxic masculinity, is not only neutered but obliter-
ated. Exposing the soft squishy insides of the human body, a common trope
within horror, Judith Halberstam argues that ‘pleasure resides in the visibility of
suture, the wound that has been barely covered over because the marks repre-
sents the place where the insides threaten to show through’ (Halberstam 1995,
155). Moreover, contextualizing the series within horror franchise cinema per-
mits certain conventions regarding overt graphic representations of the maimed
and wounded body to cohere.
Thus, for the horror fan, pleasure can be derived from seeing the perpetrators
again and again throughout the series rendered vulnerable, cut open, and bled
having inflicted so much damage upon the bodies of their female victims.
Musing upon this very point, ‘[t]he pleasures of genre,’ Darryl Jones notes,
are akin to those of ritual. They are based upon repetition, on the acting out of
predetermined roles, on the precise fulfilment of expectations. Horror audi-
ences are often knowledgeable with an acute intuitive knowledge of the codes
and conventions of the genre. They often know exactly what to expect, and
this explains the enduring popularity of many of the most generically for-
mulaic kinds of horror, from Radcliffe’s Gothic novels to slasher movies.
(2018, 16)
However, while Jones unreservedly espouses the generic horror properties of the I
Spit on Your Grave series (2018, 144), outside of Clover’s reading of I Spit on Your
Grave as belonging to a sub-genre of horror which promotes the city/country
axis,16 Mee does problematize Zarchi’s original (and by extension, his 2019 sequel)
as ‘not easily defined as a horror film, and certainly not when judged by more
recent genre conventions’ (Mee 2013, 83). Compounding this issue, Monroe him-
self stated in an interview how he felt the need to ‘amp … up the revenge sequences
more’ within the 2010 remake because
if you watch the original, the revenge sequences, outside of the brilliant
Johnny in the bathtub scene are really, really brief and quick and not really …
it’s not a horror film. The movie was not a horror film. Because it was banned
and banished and everything that happened with it and was said about it, it
was adopted and embraced by horror audiences and therefore, when you’re
doing a remake of something that was labelled a horror film, your remake’s
gonna be expected to be a horror film also.17
In terms of overcoming these issues, by-passing any static definition of what is

ipso facto horror, and drawing upon its earlier conventions within the Gothic,
may furnish both Zarchi’s 1978 original and subsequent 2019 sequel with gen-
eric properties, which may provide context when reading them alongside the
entirety of the I Spit on Your Grave franchise.
Gothic horror
So rampant was the implicit risk of sexual violence in eighteenth- and early nine-
teenth-century Gothic novels, an anonymous columnist for The Spirit of the Public
Journals wrote in 1797 that he believed Gothic romances were capable of stirring
up a sundry of undesirable responses in young ladies, prompting the author to ask:
Can a young lady be thought nothing more necessary in life, than to sleep
in a dungeon with venomous reptiles, walk through a ward with assassins,
170 Sarah Cleary
and carry bloody daggers in their pockets, instead of pin cushions and
needle books?
(Cited in Ledoux 2011, 331)
What is significant about such an observation within the context of this chapter
is the emergence of dual persona evident in the female Gothic protagonist at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Her exploits repeatedly cast her as victim,
though often the narrative would simultaneously provide her with the tools to
exert her own autonomy and even salvation. Aside from some of the more
explicit accounts of rape and attempted rape which litter Gothic literature, such
as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Isabella Kelly’s The Abbey
of St. Asap (1795), and Mathew Lewis’ The Monk (1796), Allen W. Grove
draws attention to the manner in which
formulaic repetitions across the genre create[d] associations and expecta-

tions for the Gothic reader so that once the convention is established, a
writer can invoke the threat of rape without ever naming or describing the
act. The trained reader comes to expect sexual transgression and violation
whether they actually happen or not.
(Grove 2000, 438)
Echoing Jones’ earlier comment regarding expectations of generic codes and con-
ventions found within the Gothic all the way through to contemporary horror, the
I Spit on Your Grave films of the twenty-first century deliberately attempt to
replicate many of the conventions established in the original. From the moment we
see Jennifer arrive at the gas station in the 1978 original, her urbanity, her gender,
and her proscribed status as an independent woman of means and intelligence
position her in sharp contrast with the boorish, crass, and homespun traits of
Johnny, Stanley, and Andy who immediately pose a threat. Later, a long angle
POV shot is focused on Jennifer swimming, inferring that she is being watched.
Arguably, however, the scene which anticipates the protracted rape sequence
locates the heroine firmly within a Gothic horror tradition. Jennifer hears a noise
late at night, dons a dressing gown and walks out her front door into the eerie beat
of cicadas, crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids. Scanning the surrounds of her
cabin, something is immediately off kilter. Yet the danger remains elusive. Walking
back inside she enters her room and looks down at a drawer which conceals a gun
she found earlier. The trope of leaving the safety of one’s home late at night to
investigate a noise outside is of course a well-established convention of both the
Gothic and horror genre.18 Similarly, the presentation of rape and the more ubi-
quitous threat of rape is a trope that is repeatedly coded within Gothic texts. Kate
Ferguson Ellis notes in The Contested Castle (1989), that one
of the real achievements of the Gothic tradition is that it conjures up, in its
undefined representation of heroine terror, an omnipresent sense of impending
rape without ever mentioning the word. … Given the constraints on female
virtue, terror becomes, in the hands of the Gothic practitioners, the intense
emotion … the terror of the Gothic heroine is simply that of being confined
and then abandoned, and beyond that, of being, in an unspecified yet absolute
way, completely surrounded by the superior male power.
(1989, 46)
Indeed, as Ferguson Ellis argues, ‘[t]he [Gothic] villain, in turn, is not provoked by
lust so much as by a wish to make his victim suffer for imposing limits on his male
will’ (1989, 46). The scene in which Jennifer hears a noise at night is mirrored and
amplified in Monroe’s 2010 remake. With a pervasive sense of dread permeating
the scene, upon Jennifer’s investigation outside she discovers a dead bird left on her
doorstep; an omen of what is to come. Following her rape, Jennifer inverts the
convention and uses the veil of rural darkness to unnerve her rapists. In I Spit on
Your Grave III: Vengeance is Mine, struggling to overcome her former trauma, a
similar scene is carried out repeatedly throughout the film as Jennifer walks home
confronted by a group of guys ‘hanging out,’ who seem to derive a sense of plea-
sure from intimidating her for laughs. Read through the prism of a Gothic per-
spective, it’s clear that this implicit sense of dread turns out to be a mechanism
through which women register danger in the presence of any male interaction,
especially within the horror genre.
Lex talionis
‘Writing about rape,’ Heller-Nicholas muses, ‘even fictional representations of it is
a formidable task, considering the ideological minefield and deeply subjective and
emotional responses that the topic evokes’ (2011, 7). No less controversial when
the subject matter at hand has been repeatedly the focus of criticism regarding its
exploitative, misogynistic, feminist, and, in later years, empowering critiques.
Moreover, adding to such trepidation, any discussion of the I Spit on Your Grave
franchise in particular and its archaic properties of bloody retribution within a
twenty-first-century context is not only an ‘ideological minefield,’ but one in which
live grenades are sprinkled in relative safe zones for added explosive effect.
Speaking in an interview in 2010 for Cine Vue on the eve of the release of the
I Spit on Your Grave remake, Zarchi ponders the question of onscreen brutality
further, anticipating this chapter’s discussion on lex talionis:
We’re talking about something that happened a long time ago and is still
with me today. I was about 39 at the time. I came across a girl as I was
driving home. She looked like the living dead, like a zombie. She was
bloody and covered in mud. She had been raped. I still feel the impact of
this today. This could have been my sister or even your sister. How do you
respond to something like that? Do you let a judge decide how to deal with
these people in a court?! No, you get angry. The most human elements kick
in; self-preservation and a desire for justice. The only real justice is true
revenge and that is what this film is about.19
172 Sarah Cleary
As David Maguire notes, ‘if this is indeed true, it does explain why the sexual assault
of Jennifer is so brutal, so visceral and necessary’ (2018, 32), a retributionist principle
which dictates within the context of rape-revenge narratives that ‘law cannot be
restored unless punishment takes place.’ As Alison Young argues, there seems
to be almost a cosmic fracture, ‘a world … out of kilter’ until ‘vengeance is
carried out by the victim’ (Young 2009, 46). Not just the remit of this particular
horror franchise, lex talionis has been a constant throughout rape-revenge in
horror over the past decade with recent examples such as Fargeat’s Revenge
(2017), wherein protagonist Jen (a namesake of her predecessor Jennifer) simi-
larly reclaims her bodily autonomy having had it violated through vengeful
violence. Michael S. Ojeda’s Avenged (2013) expands the principle further still
when his protagonist Zoe (Amanda Adrienne) is beaten, raped, and left to die
only to be resurrected by a Native Indian chief who inadvertently raises the
spirit of the Apache War chief who was killed by the ancestors of Zoe’s rapists.
Neither can rest until they are avenged and the balance re-set. In order for the
universe to make sense once again, the crimes inflicted upon Jennifer and her sis-
ters must be seen, made visible, and writ large and bloody for all to see. Yet for all
its simplicity, the I Spit on Your Grave franchise does not operate via a violence-
for-violence aesthetic, but, rather, is a tale of violence begot of violence.
Throughout the franchise, and conforming to the principle of lex talionis, it is
evident that the punishments awarded to the rapists are commensurate with the
violence inflicted upon Jennifer and her heirs. The scenes of torture range from quite
a modest and stylistic castration in a bubble bath in Zarchi’s original to a rather
gruesome gelding of a ‘untamed horse’ in Monroe’s 2010 remake, from a novel use
of a vice in I Spit on Your Grave 2 to a disturbing act of retributive justice in which a
pipe and mallet are used to penetrate a known rapist in Braunstein’s I Spit on Your
Grave: Vengeance is Mine. In Zarchi’s sequel, I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà Vu (2019),
history is repeated as we return to the canonical narrative in which Jennifer (Camille
Keaton), now a successful rape counsellor, is joined by her supermodel daughter
Christy Hills (Jamie Bernadette) as they are subjected to a horrific attack by the
relatives of the slain rapists from Jennifer’s past. Having spent 40 years planning
their own revenge, this subversion of the rape-revenge narrative is arguably a com-
mentary on the societally prescribed response to victim blaming. Though perhaps
not as visceral as Monroe’s remake and Braunstein’s sequel, the violence inflicted
upon Christy is returned upon the men in the form of an anal penetration and a final
castration with a broken bottle, which has Christy’s victim Kevin (Jonathan Peacy),
moaning aloud in orgasmic delight the fatal final words of Johnny (Eron Tabor)
40 years earlier as he bleeds out: ‘It’s so sweet it’s painful.’
What remains constant, however, from the first in 1978 to the more recent
film in 2019, is the onscreen torture and sexual violation of Jennifer and her
heirs. Never wavering in terms of its brutality, the onscreen rapes provides
‘valid motivation for violent retaliation’ (Henry 2014, 73). Though it may seem
a little simplistic to talk in such reductive terms, especially when one considers the
‘ideological minefield’ that follows any discussion of rape in any context, locating
such an argument within the I Spit on Your Grave universe allows a certain profligacy
to explore such extremities. Such a sentiment is echoed in Clover’s now lauded and
oft-cited chapter on the original film in which she writes:
One of the most disturbing things about I Spit on Your Grave I think, is its
almost perverse simplicity. The men are not odd specimens but in the normal
range of variation; their acts of brutal rape are not traced to the dysfunctional
upbringing (no Mother Bateses here); Jennifer takes the revenge she does not
for deep-seated psychological reasons but because it is the punishment that fits
the crime; there are no extenuating circumstances; the law is not involved, nor
are legal questioned raised; and there is no concern whatever, not even at the
level of lip service, with moral and ethical issues. In short, I Spit on Your
Grave offers no outs; it makes no space for intellectual displacement.
(Clover 1992, 120)
Disregarding any reading of Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave attempts to placate

the onscreen violence by exposing audiences to a variety of ‘ethical, psycholo-
gical, legal, and social matters,’ Zarchi instead closes
all such windows and leave us staring at the lex talionis or law of retribu-
tion for what it is. I Spit on Your Grave shocks not because its alien but
because it is too familiar, because we recognise that the emotions it engages
are regularly engaged by the big screen but almost never bluntly acknowl-
edged for what they are.
(Clover 1992, 120)
Firmly situated within the exaggerated visceral excess of the horror genre, ‘when
the law is broken, punishment must be carried out no matter what, since the force
of law cannot be restored unless punishment takes place’ (Young 2009, 46).
Conclusion
As ‘a painful, violent, horrific film about pain, violation and horror’ (Jones 2018,
144), Zarchi’s 1978 original set not only the tone for the franchise but invoked a
series of Gothic and horror conventions which were steeped in the grindhouse
aesthetics of its time. Indebted to the original precedents, throughout the I Spit on
Your Grave horror franchise it is the employment of this brutal principle of lex
talionis that endows a victim with the moral armament to heal through the act of
vengeance. As both hunted and hunter, the avenging figure of the ubiquitous Jen-
nifer looms large throughout the horror genre as the ultimate Final Girl. Tena-
cious, resilient, and unforgiving, Jennifer and her heirs continue to emerge from
the undergrowth in Goose Pond Park as heroes who in the face of potential psychic
annihilation ‘triumph using their own merits and abilities’ (Wee 2006, 58). See-
mingly assured that for the crimes she has committed ‘no jury in America would
ever convict her,’ Jennifer and her heirs do not take their chances that a jury in
America would ever convict their rapists either. So, they take matters into their
174 Sarah Cleary
own hands, warning potential aggressors that ‘[w]hatever undeserved evil you
inflict upon another … you inflict upon yourself’ (Kant 1996, 332).
Notes
1 There have also been several unofficial sequels to I Spit on Your Grave, including: Savage
Vengeance (1993), which also stars Camille Keaton as protagonist and rape survivor/
avenger; I’ll Kill You … I’ll Bury You … I’ll Spit on Your Grave Too (2000); and I Shit on
Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave (2001). The focus of this chapter, however, is focused
on official installments, or what might be termed ‘the Kaleidoscope franchise.’
2 www.kaleidoscopehomeentertainment.com/movie/i-spit-on-your-grave-the-complete-
collection
3 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-retributive/#LexTaliPaybRespKind
4 https://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/
5 www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/world/europe/ireland-underwear-rape-case-protest.htm
l. For a comprehensive account of this case please see www.theguardian.com/news/
2018/dec/04/rugby-rape-trial-ireland-belfast-case
6 The era saw ground-breaking publications in the form of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics
(1970), Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch (1971), Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (1974),
and Catherine MacKinnon’s Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1976).
7 Such films included a spectrum which ranged from low budget exploitation features
made quickly and carelessness which saw an extremely limited release such as I Drink
Your Blood (1970), Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973), Pigs (1973), Act of Vengeance
(1974), Trip with the Teacher (1975), and Lipstick (1976) to films which managed to
cross over into the main stream theatres such as Hannie Caulder (1971), Death Straw
Dogs (1971), Last House on the Left (1972), and Death Wish (1974).
8 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jan/19/wrong-about-spit-on-your-grave
9 www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980
12 www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/movies/08spit.html
13 I Spit on Your Grave was banned in Ireland and to this day has never gotten a
release.
14 www.irishtimes.com/blogs/screenwriter/2010/05/26/i-spit-on-your-grave/
15 https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3178950/interview-steven-r-monroe-on-i-spit-on-your-
grave-redo-a/
16 Such as Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972), Last House on the Left (1972), The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and more recently Eden Lake (2008), Calibre
(2018) and even comedy horrors such as Hot Fuzz (2007).
17 https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3178950/interview-steven-r-monroe-on-i-spit-o
n-your-grave-redo-a/
18 So much so it was featured in Wes Craven’s meta parody Scream (1996) as a version of it
(‘Never say I’ll be Right Back’) features as one of Randy Meeks ‘Rules of Surviving
Horror.’
19 https://cine-vue.com/2010/09/interview-meir-zarchi-i-spit-on-your-grave.html
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Part IV
Complicating franchising
10 Seriality between the horror franchise
and the horror anthology film
David Church
What distinguishes a film franchise from the broader category of the film series?
Although these terms are becoming increasingly conflated in popular discourse, we
might posit the contemporary franchise as a multi-film series that not only expands
chronologically forward (as with a sequel) or backward (prequel) from an initial
filmic text, but also includes a horizontal expansion of ancillary intertexts: from the
forking paths and parallel storylines of the spin-off, to the reverent remake or the
corrective reboot (Proctor 2012), to the more nebulous realm of official merchandise
and unofficial fan-made productions. A franchise, then, has less to do with the sheer
longevity of a film series (though that may certainly be a factor) than with a cross-
textual proliferation that extends beyond linear development. Hence, Metro-Gold-
wyn-Mayer’s Andy Hardy films (1937–1958) constitute more of a straightforward
series than, say, the same studio’s James Bond franchise (1962–present). Moreover,
the modern (post-1970s) film franchise depends, in part, on a presold property whose
initial filmic entry is already designed for potential sequelization and ancillary mar-
ketability, should it prove profitable (Henderson 2014, 88). The film series and the
film franchise therefore both hinge upon issues of seriality—often (but not always)
based upon recurrent characters or similar storylines—yet they deploy seriality in
different directions, albeit for similar commercial motivations.
Of course, this use of the film franchise as a familiar ‘brand name’ does not
have an especially privileged relationship to the horror genre in particular, for we
can easily cite examples of franchises within many popular genres, from comedy
(National Lampoon, American Pie) and action/adventure (Indiana Jones, Fast
and the Furious, Mission Impossible) to science fiction (Star Wars, Star Trek),
fantasy (Harry Potter), and superhero movies (X-Men, The Avengers). Unlike
most of these genres, however, the episodic anthology film is one of the most
popular and prolific sub-genres of horror cinema—and yet, even when horror
anthology films generate sequels, these films are seldom the products of existing
horror franchises, nor deemed franchises in their own right. Indeed, the shortage
of critical and scholarly attention to horror anthology films is conspicuously
disproportionate to these films’ actual (and growing) prominence within the
horror genre.1 As Mark Betz argues, such films formalize the ‘gaps’ between their
narrative episodes, even as their critical neglect represents a historiographic gap
in its own right (2009, 199).
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-15
180 David Church
In this chapter, I will argue that by using the short story form to effectively
‘internalize’ the seriality that otherwise structures clusters of multiple feature-
length films, anthology films constitute an important missing link in how to con-
ceptualize horror franchises and think about their critical reception. The multiple
connotations of the term ‘anthology’ are partly to blame for the scholarly inatten-
tion to such films, since the term is sometimes used to describe an omnibus or
portmanteau structure (multiple short episodes within the same feature-length
film, often joined by a framing story/conceit), while alternately used to describe a
series in which each freestanding episode is a self-enclosed story featuring different
characters. But those conflicting connotations, when taken together, also evoke the
segmented multi-narrativity upon which horror franchises are built. By looking at
several historical examples of each anthology tendency, including their roots in
media forms beyond feature-length films, we can better understand the horror
genre’s specific relevance to the franchise form. I will begin by delineating these
different connotations in more detail, before then elaborating on the anthology
film’s special relationship to the horror genre’s increasingly self-conscious fran-
chise development.
The multiple uses of ‘anthology’

Because few scholars have substantially examined anthology and/or omnibus films,
those who have, such as Mark Betz and David Scott Diffrient, tend to deploy dif-
ferent terminologies for distinguishing between different types of episodic cinema.
Diffrient, for example, reserves the term omnibus film for a collective, multi-
director feature that sequentially presents short, self-contained narrative episodes,
whereas he deems the anthology film a collection of narrative episodes by a single
director, and the portmanteau, a film broken into two, roughly equal halves
(whether by one or more directors) (2014, 3, 14–15).2 Betz likewise reserves omni-
bus film for the multi-director variant, but dubs the single-director variant an epi-
sode film (2009, 191); while Shekhar Deshpande instead uses the term anthology
film as synonymous with the multi-director/episode feature, but confusingly uses
the term omnibus film to describe a retrospectively assembled compilation of short
films that were not originally commissioned as constituent episodes toward the
same feature-length project (2010, 3). There is, then, a semantic disjuncture
between how scholars often use the term ‘omnibus,’ and how popular critics and
fans typically use the term ‘anthology’ in a broader way to refer to multi-episode
films, regardless of number of directors. Multi-episode films like Creepshow (1982)
and Cat’s Eye (1985), for instance, have single directors (George A. Romero and
Lewis Teague, respectively) and might derive from stories by the same author/
screenwriter (Stephen King), but are still most commonly referred to by fans as
‘anthology films.’ Such multi-episode films may range from two segments—such as
Two Evil Eyes (1990)—to as many as 26 short segments—for example, The ABCs
of Death (2012)—but most average 4–6 episodes within a feature-length duration.
Because my focus here is on episodic films within the same genre (horror),
and less concerned with the transauthorial and transnational variants that most
Seriality between franchise and anthology 181
interest Betz and Diffrient, I will attempt to ‘split the difference’ between scho-
larly distinctions and popular-fan usage by retaining anthology film, but sub-
dividing it with the somewhat unwieldy compound term omnibus-anthology
film to describe multi-episode feature films made by one or more directors. Yet,
these scholars of omnibus productions tend to ignore the second major category
of anthology narrative, which is better known as the anthology series, such as
The Twilight Zone (1959–1964, 1985–1989, 2002–2003, 2019–present), The
Outer Limits (1963–1965, 1995–2002), and Night Gallery (1969–1973). Unlike
the common cinematic connotation of ‘anthology’ as synonymous with the
omnibus-anthology film, this other usage bears a closer affinity to the regular-
ized broadcast schedules of radio and television; hence, there is a degree of
medium specificity behind these different connotations, but this very cross-
media confusion demonstrates the relevance of ‘anthology’ as a missing term
for thinking about the franchise as a cross-media, intertextual entity. Whereas
the omnibus internalizes its self-contained episodes within the context of a
single consumption experience (e.g., a feature-length film), the anthology series
spreads its self-contained episodes across a series of weekly or monthly install-
ments (e.g., a broadcast season), sometimes featuring the same host or narrator
as a framing device for unifying the overall series as a sort of brand name
applied to generically similar narratives.
Omnibus-anthology films have historical antecedents ranging from multi-story
literary works with a framing device (such as One Thousand and One Nights and
The Decameron) to multi-genre variety performances like vaudeville and burl-
esque, later popularized in filmic form with multi-story works like Pippa Passes
(1909) and Intolerance (1916). Early examples centred on supernatural horror
themes include the German productions Uncanny Tales (1919) and Waxworks
(1924), and the British productions Friday the Thirteenth (1933) and Dead of Night
(1945). The anthology series, however, has roots in the seriality of literary fiction
magazines, but especially in published compendiums of short stories (Diffrient
2014). During the early decades of the twentieth century, writers of pulp, detective,
and weird fiction specialized in short-form genre productions, bridging the gap
between nineteenth-century genre pioneers like Edgar Allan Poe and later televi-
sion writers like The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery’s Rod Serling. Indeed, the
anthology series largely developed from weekly radio and (later) television pro-
grams of self-contained dramatic and mystery narratives, such as Inner Sanctum
Mysteries (1941–1952). Inspired by Simon & Schuster’s mystery novel imprint of
the same name, not only did this series produce over 500 different stories during
more than a decade on the radio airwaves, but it also spawned a series of Inner
Sanctum B-pictures, mostly produced by Universal and starring Lon Chaney, Jr. in
different roles from 1943 to 1948, plus a short-lived syndicated television series
(1954). Through its cross-media proliferation and combination of mystery and
horror elements, Inner Sanctum thus represents a notable precursor of the anthol-
ogy series as horror franchise.
Yet the nexus between the omnibus-anthology and anthology-series formats
for the horror genre can perhaps best be found in comic books, since a
182 David Church
particular comic issue might include multiple short narratives, a single bounded
narrative featuring recurring characters, or one chapter of an ongoing serial
narrative. EC Comics’ horror series like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of
Horror (both 1950–1955) often included multiple short narratives with a
macabre but darkly comedic tone, foreshadowing these titles’ later adaptation
(in 1972 and 1973, respectively) within Amicus Productions’ series of omnibus-
anthology films—which spanned from Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) to
From Beyond the Grave (1974) (see Hutchings 2002; Pirie 2009).
As is well-known, the marketing of these comics to children and young adults
created controversy after pop-psychologist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduc-
tion of the Innocent and his testimony that same year to the Senate Subcommittee
on Juvenile Delinquency (Wertham 1954). Although this scandal effectively killed
off 1950s horror comics and led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority as an
industrial self-censorship mechanism, the nostalgic legacy of EC Comics can be
seen in the omnibus-anthology film Creepshow, whose framing story features an
abusive father confiscating his son’s copy of the eponymous horror comic (for
which the son later gets revenge, using a voodoo doll ordered from the comic’s
advertising pages), while animated effects vignette the discrete live-action segments
like comic-book panels. (A Creepshow graphic novel, featuring the anthology’s
five nested stories and the same Bernie Wrightson artwork featured in the intra-
filmic comic book, was published by Plume in conjunction with the film.) And
unlike the earlier Amicus omnibus version, Tales from the Crypt was later adapted
as an HBO anthology series (1989–1996) with each half-hour episode containing a
discrete story introduced by the skeletal, punning Crypt Keeper, a series which also
inspired several feature-length spin-off films, including Demon Knight (1995) and
Bordello of Blood (1996). With its cross-media incarnations (including further
spin-off shows, merchandising, etc.), Tales from the Crypt is the rare horror
anthology series to become a ‘proper franchise’ in its own right. Yet, its incarna-
tion as both an omnibus text and an anthology series demonstrates the potential
interpenetrability of these two meanings of the term ‘anthology.’3 Indeed, Betz
notes that, since the 1980s, episodes of anthology television series, especially from
‘body genres’ like horror and erotica, have often been repackaged as omnibus-
anthology features, and typically released direct-to-video since this format allows
viewers to selectively access individual segments according to their personal pre-
ferences (Betz 2009, 239–240, 242). The omnibus-anthology film’s underlying ten-
sion between the short and the feature therefore readily allows for both expansions
and contractions, from omnibus episodes that spin off into their own freestanding
films, such as Three … Extremes (2005) and its expanded feature film, Dumplings
(2006), to multi-episode films cobbled together from several aborted feature films,
like Night Train to Terror (1985).
Finally, the concept of the anthology series has more recently acquired an addi-
tional meaning in its televisual context: that of the season-long serial narrative,
with each season featuring a self-contained narrative with different characters and
settings in shows such as Fargo (2014–2020) and True Detective (2014–2019).
Whereas earlier anthology series like The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt
offer discrete narratives in each episode, this more recent usage of ‘anthology
series’ bears far closer affinities to the television miniseries, making each season
resemble a long-form film. Compare, for example, a traditional anthology series
like Masters of Horror (2005–2007), in which each episode is a self-contained short
film made by a prominent horror director (see Kooyman 2010), whereas each
season of American Horror Story (2011–present) may have recurring cast members
but the characters/story/setting will ‘reset’ to a new narrative arc with every new
season. In its use of the individual episode as a basic unit, the former is a proper
series and the latter is a serial. 4 Of course, television shows may also combine
these strategies, such as The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–2018) and Hannibal (2013–
2015) featuring more bounded ‘monster/killer-of-the-week’ episodes amid larger
season-long and series-long narrative arcs—which television scholar Robin Nelson
(1997) describes as a ‘flexi-narrative’—and both of these series also exist as parts of
larger cross-media franchises (Scahill 2016, 319). Moreover, most of these latter-
day anthology series do not have the same director for the entire season, but rather
different directors per episode, collectively working under the guidance of a
showrunner. In many respects, this showrunner (often the series creator and/or
executive producer) orchestrating multiple directors toward a shared vision is not
unlike the omnibus-anthology film’s commissioning producer as a creative director
for the overall project (Deshpande 2010, 7).5 However, because the serialized epi-
sodes within the season-long anthology series are less episodic in an individually
self-contained way, this alternate connotation of ‘anthology’ is more difficult to
square with the episode-specific short form that has allowed the anthology film to
flourish within the horror genre.
Why horror?
With this terminological excursus at our disposal, we can now inquire why the
horror genre in particular has been so generative of the anthology film in various
forms. As Kristin Thompson has observed, the short story’s limited duration,
narrative/thematic unity, and goal of creating a ‘single strong impression’ would
seem especially conducive to developing feature-length narrative films, in con-
trast to the tremendous condensation required to adapt novels for the Hollywood
screen (Bordwell et al. 1985, 167). Yet, this feature-length expansion of the lit-
erary short form is more useful for helping explain the self-enclosed narratives of
the anthology series (and the individual entries in a film franchise), whereas
omnibus-anthology films cannot help but foreground the sheer brevity of their
internalized narrative episodes. The morbid twists that punctuate the ends of
most anthology segments have more in common with, say, the sensationalistic
‘penny dreadful’ than the more austere Gothic novel. Literary scholars have
noted, for example, the difficulty in sustaining ‘the necessary tension of the ghost
story to the required length of a novel’ (Gilbert 1998, 69). In this regard, it is not
difficult to also see literary horror anthologies as especially generative of (loose)
film adaptations, such as the many freestanding films expanded from Stephen
King’s short-story collections. Among his Night Shift (1978) stories, for instance,
184 David Church
is ‘Children of the Corn’ (1977), which has itself spawned a series of 11 feature-
length films (1984–2020) as of this writing; while the ‘transfictional’ town of
Castle Rock, Maine, has featured as a setting in many of his written works, plus
various filmic and televisual adaptations, including Hulu’s anthology series
Castle Rock (2018–2019) (see Proctor 2018, 102, 104–106).
The omnibus-anthology film’s tendency toward internal fragmentation, genre
mixing, and tonal disunity helps explain why this form also proved amenable to
the modernist principles of European art cinema. As Betz notes, the omnibus-
anthology film experienced its first production peak during the 1960s, when
segments featuring major auteurs and sexy female stars (e.g., Boccaccio ’70
[1962]) combined cosmopolitan credentials and sensational genre material into
a consistent box-office draw. This was exemplified in the art-horror form with
the Franco-Italian coproduction Spirits of the Dead (1968), featuring Poe-adap-
ted segments by Federico Fellini, Roger Vadim, and Louis Malle, plus starring
performances by Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda (Betz 2009, 196, 206, 226–228,
236–237). However, aside from several notable exceptions like Kwaidan (1965),
most of the 1960s omnibus art films were not inclined toward the horror genre,
instead favoring comedic and dramatic segments as their generic repertoire.
Diffrient suggests that horror is one of the few genres in which short stories may
be far more effective than longer narratives (2014, 108), but I would also argue that
horror’s strong connection with the anthology film reflects the genre’s cultural
disreputability. That is, unlike many other genres, horror film reception often
evinces a sort of ‘inferiority complex’ wherein the genre’s supposedly frivolous,
sensationalistic, or juvenile qualities are seen as sapping a given horror narrative’s
potential to contain enough ideas for supporting a feature-length duration. Con-
sider the Halloween theme or setting of so many omnibus-anthology films, such as
the aptly named Trick r’ Treat (2007), as delivering a handful of small-but-sweet
bites of self-contained story, not unlike the assortment of ‘fun-sized’ candy bars
given out to excited kids (and the monster, disguised as a trick-or-treater, who
serves as Trick r’ Treat’s unifying figure) during that seasonal tradition. For Dif-
frient, the common critical complaint against omnibus-anthology films hinges on
precisely this sense that, unlike the ‘hearty meal’ offered by a ‘deep’ feature-length
narrative, anthologies only offer light ‘tasters’ or ‘side dishes.’ This denigration is,
then, less a defect of the films in their own right than a function of film criticism’s
failure to adjust evaluative expectations to forms other than the conventional fea-
ture, including a failure to understand how active audiences can fill in the gaps
between different episodes (2014, 5, 17, 32).
If we extend this food metaphor, it is not difficult to see how franchise horror
films, especially those evincing the supposed ‘McDonaldization’ of 1980s horror
franchises (e.g., Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street) (Wells 2000,
94), share many of the same presumed deficits. Like franchise fast food, the con-
sumption of franchise horror films is presumed to be quick, easy, and non-nutri-
tious, perhaps comforting in their familiarity but not a proper diet unto
themselves—or, to put it another way, fast-food and horror film franchises both
offer pit stops during a journey to a better destination but are seldom considered
worthy destinations in their own right (see the Introduction to this volume). In
other words, the frequent critical rejection of even feature-length horror films—
especially when those films are part of franchises—strongly echoes the critical saw
against the supposed shortcomings of anthology films in general, hence this see-
mingly natural connection between genre and format.
As Diffrient (2014) notes, all omnibus-anthology films are
structurally reliant on the coexistence of multiple beginnings and endings,

serially sprinkled throughout the text and suggestive of the ways that we,
as audiences, ‘enter’ into and ‘depart’ from all motion-picture experiences,
even those that are not episodic (that is, those that tell a single story over
the course of approximately two hours).
(221)
Moreover, he suggests that anthology films may have a deeper structural relation-
ship to the horror genre because the carnivalesque shift between unnatural death
and gallows humor across their episodes offers a ‘text of continuous, yet limited,
replenishment … allow[ing] the spectator to laugh in the face of death, for the
withering away of one story is followed by the blossoming of another (at least
until the very end)’ (65). Like Scheherazade’s survivalist storytelling endeavors in
the One Thousand and One Nights, mortality and narration exist in productive
tension with each other here, but in the more Bakhtinian vein of reversibility
between grotesque death and fertile rebirth (Diffrient 2014, 50, 65–66, 128, 131;
Diffrient 2002, 295–296, 298–299). Indeed, Diffrient notes that many omnibus-
anthology episodes end with the resurrection of a recently deceased person to take
revenge on his/her killer—a dynamic that seldom occurs within the franchise
horror film (in which victims generally stay dead, though the monster endlessly
returns across sequels), but is also echoed when the same actors inhabit different
roles across different segments. Corporeal fragmentation and textual fragmenta-
tion literalize one another in these films (2002, 289, 291). Yet, I would argue that
the tendency for these films’ episodic narratives to ‘spill over’ their containing
structure like so much shed blood also signals their affinity with the viewing
dynamics of the horror franchise as a multi-narrative corpus that temporally
exceeds beyond instead of contracting within a feature-length duration.
The production of omnibus-anthology films sharply declined after the 1960s, but
since the 1990s these films have become more prolific than ever (Betz 2009, 206;
Diffrient 2014, 149). In the world of art cinema, many of these films are now
funded by (non-US) governmental and non-governmental agencies to celebrate
transnational alliances, but genre-centred omnibus-anthology films—much like the
innumerable published anthologies of short horror fiction—may represent a more
commercially oriented means of capitalizing on the short form, whose brevity can
be creatively generative (especially for upcoming filmmakers) but which is difficult
to financially justify in a film industry built upon features (Deshpande 2010, 6, 11;
also see Fonseca and Pulliam 1999, 23–31). Moreover, the omnibus art film may
still focus on collecting the work of transnationally known auteurs, whereas the
186 David Church
horror omnibus-anthology is more likely a proving ground for lesser-known
directors from around the world. Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that the post-
1960s decline of auteur/star-branded omnibus-anthology films led to an upswing in
horror omnibus-anthology films in the 1980s–1990s, since strong generic identifi-
cation could help compensate for the shortage of those other appeals in potentially
profitable ways.
Although far from exhaustive in its scope, Steve Hutchison’s 2017 self-published
guidebook Anthologies of Terror lists an average production of one horror omni-
bus-anthology film per year from 1962 to 1975, then two every other year from 1983
to 1997 and 2004 to 2006, and finally three or four per year since 2011. As suggested
earlier, this recent proliferation is partly due to the rise of a direct-to-video and cable
television market for such films—and, I would add, streaming services, since horror
anthologies, in both omnibus and series forms, continue to be popular offerings on
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Shudder—but it is also notable that this growth
roughly coincided with the increased franchising of the horror genre in general.
Much as Creepshow borrowed not only the EC Comics aesthetic but also allowed
viewers to ‘recreate’ the film’s intradiegetic reading experience via the graphic novel
adaptation, a more recent omnibus-anthology film like V/H/S (2012) uses a framing
story about found VHS tapes to justify both a visual aesthetic and a segmented
format that foreground home video as the prevailing mode of omnibus-anthology
consumption. Meanwhile, popular streaming services have moved into the original
production of anthologies, such as Netflix’s omnibus-anthology film Don’t Watch
This (2018), Shudder’s Creepshow (2019–present), and Hulu’s Into the Dark (2018–
present), an anthology series co-produced by Blumhouse, with feature-length epi-
sodes released monthly; while the Netflix-produced anthology series Black Mirror
(2011–) released the feature-length episode ‘Bandersnatch’ in late 2018, allowing
viewers to navigate a branching, ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ storyline akin to
clicking through the Netflix interface itself.
Although Betz argues that viewers of omnibus-anthology films actively evaluate
the merits of each episode against one another other in ‘a kind of spectatorship
qualitatively different from that of the narrative feature film’ (2009, 231), I would
argue that this comparative assessment is precisely what horror franchise viewers
do as well, rooting their valuations in the context of the franchise as a whole, not
merely the individual entry. Indeed, for those of us of a certain generation, the
amount of space that a popular horror franchise took up on VHS rental shelves
suggested the franchise as a compendium of different narratives not unlike the
horror anthology film or the stories collected in a literary anthology. Unlike pro-
fessional film critics, for whom each sequel or spin-off is denigrated as more of the
same, a reiteration that should be too flimsy to support a freestanding feature film,
genre fans readily judge a horror franchise’s different installments as an inter-
textual web of tenuously connected stories. Omnibus-anthology films, for exam-
ple, operate via intratextuality instead of the horror franchise’s intertextuality, but
both rely on framing devices for their ‘endlessly deferred narratives’ (Hills 2002,
139–140). In many horror franchises, the monster (whether Jason Voorhees,
Freddy Krueger, or Michael Myers) becomes the main recurring character across
the individual films, whereas the other characters and settings often reset from one
entry to the next. This use of the monster as a franchise’s unifying textual entity
also recalls the anthology series’ host/narrator character (whether a real authorial
presence like Rod Serling or a monstrous avatar like the Crypt Keeper), but differs
in the sense that the monster is an agentive force within the diegesis, whereas the
anthology series’ host/narrator may instead be relegated to an observational or
commentating role at the story’s bookends, framed less as a puppet-master than an
impresario. With its function of supplying viewers with self-conscious ‘spectacles
of death’ (Sconce 1993), the role of the horror monster can therefore blur the thin
line between the representational and presentational storytelling modes respec-
tively occupied by the diegetic character and the quasi-diegetic host/narrator.
Here, we can usefully contrast the largely failed attempts to officially anthol-
ogize the big-three 1980s slasher franchises: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A
Nightmare on Elm Street. Whereas Halloween II (1981) immediately picks up
where its predecessor left off, with Michael Myers continuing to stalk Laurie
Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) during the second half of the same Halloween night from
the 1978 film,6 the series’ third installment, Halloween III: Season of the Witch
(1982), attempted to turn the franchise into an annual anthology series of unrelated
feature-length stories released under the Halloween brand name. Without a slasher
narrative and no appearance of the franchise’s iconic killer (aside from several brief
clips from the first film glimpsed on television sets), the film instead features the
convoluted story of a mad toymaker who, disgusted that Halloween has become a
commercialized holiday divorced from its pagan roots, invents a line of Halloween
masks programmed to kill their young wearers after the masks are remotely acti-
vated by a televised ‘giveaway’ announcement on Halloween night. Driven by
Universal’s misleading advertising, which did not clearly signal the film’s shift
away from slasher tropes toward an original concept, Halloween III proved a box-
office disappointment. Initially rejected by fans for failing to deliver another epi-
sode in the Michael Myers vein, the film did however receive mixed praise from
professional critics who lauded its inventive plot as a welcome digression from the
then-controversial slasher movie cycle. In more recent years, horror fans have
gradually reassessed the film on its own merits, albeit with the seemingly obliga-
tory caveat that it not be judged against the Myers’ films to which the franchise
would return in its subsequent entries.
Against this background, Martin Harris and Kathryn Conner Bennett read
Halloween III’s anti-consumerist message (popular masks as lethal weapons,
dangerously false advertising, robotically programmed consumers) as ironically
converging in the film’s own failed attempt to reboot the franchise as a feature-
length anthology series. Within the film, even the first Halloween becomes
reduced to yet another piece of televisual content abutted by commercials for the
trigger signal’s broadcast, implicating the series’ earlier entries as part of the
problem (Harris and Bennett 2004, 100–102, 105–106). And, ironically, the man
who unravels the evil conspiracy is played by Tom Atkins, who also played the
comic-confiscating father in Creepshow’s (1982) framing story, hence reprising
an anti-consumerist stance (albeit here in a heroic mode). If franchise horror
188 David Church
films are often critically derided as ‘bad objects’ for their repetition and redun-
dancy, we might surmise that anthology-style outliers would be championed for
their originality, yet Halloween III as a temporary aberration within an other-
wise identifiable franchise demonstrates how that is clearly not always the case.
Likewise, the Canadian television anthology Friday the 13th: The Series (1987–
1990) failed due to its marked difference from Paramount’s prolific slasher series.
Frank Mancuso, Jr., a Paramount executive who controlled the rights to the film
franchise, merely applied the franchise title to an unrelated anthology series ori-
ginally slated to be called The 13th Hour. Lacking any reference to the Jason
Voorhees character, the show instead uses the framing device of an antique shop
filled with cursed items (a conceit previously seen in Amicus’ From Beyond the
Grave), not unlike the room of cursed objects that The Conjuring franchise (2013–
present) frames as Ed and Lorraine Warren’s keepsakes from their various demo-
nological cases. The television anthology series Freddy’s Nightmares (1988–1990)
was, however, more successful, since Krueger plays a more central role and the
series shares the films’ transfictional setting of Springwood, Illinois. Krueger fea-
tures as a character within some episodes, but the shared setting also implies that
his supernatural influence is somehow behind even those episodes that do not
directly reference him.7 Likewise, his morbid trickster persona easily carries over
from the previous films to his Crypt Keeper-like epilogues for every episode.
Unlike the attempts to anthologize Halloween and Friday the 13th, then, Freddy’s
Nightmares foregrounds the monster’s role as the key element of its franchise,
using that character to frame the individual episodes as not only the anthology
series’ narrator/host, but also the active diegetic character already known from the
films. Unlike a franchise developed from an existing anthology format (such as
Inner Sanctum as an anthology series or Tales from the Crypt as an omnibus
anthology), then, these examples demonstrate how the gap-filled anthology film’s
status as a ‘gap’ in conceptualizing horror film franchises partly derives from its
potentially yawning disjuncture from fidelity to the expectations shaped by an
existing feature-film franchise.
Toward franchise self-consciousness

The aforementioned 1980s slasher series loom large in the history of horror film
franchises, though their pre-reboot use of sequelization as a linear chain of texts
better fits an older model of film franchises than the more horizontally dispersed
intertexts seen in newer franchises.8 Whereas some horror franchises like Phan-
tasm (1979–2016) and Insidious (2010–present) have used their supernatural pre-
mises about ghostly alternate dimensions to build backward and outward via
overlapping timelines, other franchises, like The Conjuring, have more organically
spawned anthology-type entries, in which any one cursed object in the Warrens’
artefact room might initiate a further Conjuring ‘chapter’ or its own forking paths
into spin-off films including Annabelle (2014), The Nun (2018), and The Curse of
La Llorona (2019), not unlike the Disney-era Star Wars franchise’s alternation
between official ‘episode’ films and the spin-offs/prequels about particular
characters like Han Solo. Unlike the 1980s slasher sequels’ tendency toward largely
‘resetting’ the killing spree with each new entry (though gradually fleshing out a
backstory or mythology for their monsters by later entries), the operative principle
here is the ‘shared universe,’ a marketing cliché with which Universal latterly flir-
ted for its now largely abandoned ‘Dark Universe’, a planned series of 1930s
monster movie reboots, as well as a throwback to the studio’s earlier ‘monster
mash’ films like House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) (see Chapter 1 in this volume).
Following the highly profitable example of Marvel’s Avengers saga, shared-uni-
verse sequels might also serve as franchise crossover films—as more recently used
in Freddy vs. Jason (2003) and Alien vs. Predator (2004)—but at the risk of feeling
more like mere gimmicks or fan service than as organic world-building
developments.
Nevertheless, this tension between repetition and gimmickry indicates the
generic self-consciousness that horror franchises can increasingly foster as they
shift their tone or generic register in ways more akin to different anthology seg-
ments. Consider, for instance, horror sequels that largely repeat the same narra-
tive beats of earlier films but veer closer to comedy, such as Friday the 13th Part
VI: Jason Lives (1986) or Evil Dead II (1987). Diffrient argues that the generic,
stylistic, and qualitative disunity among the various episodes in omnibus-
anthology films makes them a ‘meta-genre,’ since this variance not only involves
appeals to different generic tastes, but also encourages viewers to evaluate the
respective merits of each segment by reflecting upon genre distinctions in minia-
ture (Diffrient 2014, 65, 107, 210).
In effect, this is what film franchises as multi-entry, cross-media ‘supertexts’
do as well, and this dynamic has been amplified by a growing tendency toward
franchises that signal their self-consciousness as franchises. Ian Conrich, for
instance, identifies the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise as ‘post-slasher’ in its
blurring of reality and fantasy worlds and its humorous monster-as-entertainer;
whereas he deems the Scream franchise (1996–2011) as ‘neo-slasher’ in its self-
referential return to older slasher tropes that are bent but not wholly broken
(Conrich 2015, 111–113). Caetlin Benson-Allott also describes how horror series
become seen as franchises around the third or fourth entry, which is often when
these films begin self-consciously hailing the viewer as the franchise’s privileged
subject—someone who has ‘survived’ enough films to be knowledgably superior
to the interchangeable victims, yet who still requires enough novelty mixed with
the now-familiar pleasures of predictability (Benson-Allott 2013, 20–21, 25–26).
There is a gradual shift, then, from sequels in which characters lack horror
genre literacy (no one uses the word ‘zombie,’ for example, or knows the ‘rules’
of the slasher sub-genre) to sequels that begin internalizing the viewer’s own
ironic distance by offering more than merely the compensatory sadism of
watching stupid teens predictably die ad nauseum. Halloween III, for instance,
depicts a television advertisement for the first Halloween’s broadcast, demon-
strating that the Halloween franchise also exists as a work of cinema within
this anthology entry. Further, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) takes a
190 David Church
more meta-generic turn with writer/director Craven, New Line Cinema pre-
sident Robert Shaye, and original Elm Street stars Heather Langenkamp and
Robert Englund all playing themselves in a film that explains how Elm Street’s
sequelization was actually a means of ritually containing an ancient evil entity
that merely took Freddy Krueger as its modern incarnation across the fran-
chise—another example of storytelling as a means of ensuring ‘narrative mor-
tality.’ As she becomes sucked into Krueger’s dream realm, Heather finds her
‘real life’ increasingly intertwined with the very film we are watching, even to
the point of finding New Nightmare’s own script within Krueger’s lair and
reading from the very moment that the actual film depicts.
In such franchise entries, in other words, there is enough tonal variance and pre-
sentational aesthetic at play to signal these films as more than just another repetitive
link in a linear chain of sequels, but rather as generic paths not taken by other films
in their respective series; and it is this intertextual variation that ties the horror
franchise to the intratextual variation of horror anthologies. As a more consistent
example of this franchise self-consciousness, we can consider the Final Destination
(2000–2011) series, which spawned five films and a line of spin-off novels and comic
books, whose conceit involves teens who have cheated death by surreptitiously
avoiding a mass-casualty event (e.g., an airplane, roller-coaster, or bridge disaster),
but are now destined to die as Death gradually catches up with each of them in
elaborate set-pieces involving a plethora of everyday objects that interact like Rube
Goldberg contraptions to produce grotesque ‘accidental’ fatalities. Rather than
depicting a Grim Reaper-type personification of death, these films instead figure
Death as an invisible but inescapable force, with each ridiculously elaborate and
drawn-out set-piece building up suspense and dread by showing a variety of poten-
tially dangerous objects, creating a guessing game for the viewer to imagine whether
any or all of them will combine to render the victim asunder. In my estimation, the
fact that these films lack the sort of monster figure that typically unifies a horror
franchise, but arrange their narratives as a series of potentially rearrangeable set-
pieces—the Final Destination 3 (2006) DVD even allows the viewer to make inter-
active choices with his/her remote control as the film plays, altering the order and
style of the characters’ deaths (see Sperb 2009)—makes this franchise resemble
omnibus-anthology films like The ABCs of Death and its sequels, whose segments
may or may not feature monsters but are arranged as simply so many different (and
frequently outlandish) ways to die, one for each alphabet letter (‘A is for Apoc-
alypse,’ ‘B is for Bigfoot,’ et al.). Moreover, without a diegetically figured monster,
Death operates in the Final Destination franchise much like the narrator/host of
anthology films, albeit with more intradiegetic agency than simply an observing role.
Indeed, these films are so self-conscious because viewers can reflect upon how
‘Death’s design’ is actually the filmmakers’ creative design, the set-pieces serving as
‘presentational, not representational’ segments whose endless re-designability and
recombination becomes ‘the aesthetic force of possibility in the franchise’ itself
(Brinkema 2015, 301, 307; also see Benson-Allott 2013, 22–26).
What these various examples indicate, then, is that the seriality of both film
franchises and anthology films (and the points where these categories intersect)
need not depend on a continuing story arc, recurrent characters (including the
figure of the monster) or settings, or even sub-generic consistency. Rather, for
viewers, the episodic segments of both omnibus- and series-style anthologies
bear many of the same functions as the feature-length entries in film franchises,
separated less in overall generic kind than in mere running time. Where the
horror film franchise extends its more-or-less related series across both feature-
length and ancillary texts, the horror anthology film contains its abbreviated
narratives within a more-or-less bookended, single-sitting format, yet both
filmic categories privilege endings and chapter stops that are merely temporary
pauses en route to the next episode.
Much as the formats for disseminating anthologized fictions have long shifted
via changing trends in publishing and media venues, we may see anthology story-
telling’s ‘fun-sized’ segments become increasingly common in the contemporary
transmedia era, even as they also nostalgically call back to traditionally analogue
forms like the comic book, the mass-market paperback, and the VHS tape. As
major streaming services continue shifting away from the licensing of older filmed
content and instead pouring money into the development of proprietary, ‘original’
productions, horror anthologies will likely remain a promising distribution route
for shorter-form narratives by aspiring genre filmmakers, even as such anthologies
may serve streaming services as little more than fodder for their regular
announcements of ‘fresh content.’ While franchise storytelling continues to dom-
inate the multiplexes, then, perhaps it only makes sense that its shadow twin ever
more haunts our smaller screens. Recalling the oft-repeated Freudian argument
about the horror monster as a ‘return of the repressed’ (Wood 2003), the anthology
film is itself a textual form whose generic proliferation is repressed in most con-
siderations of the horror franchise due to its uncanny closeness to the franchise’s
textual diffusion and popular familiarity. Nevertheless, if we want to understand
how franchises unfold within the horror genre, we must properly account for the
anthology film as one of this particular genre’s most prolific—but critically over-
looked—sites for multi-narrative elaboration.
Notes
1 Key exceptions include the excellent articles by Diffrient (2002) and Harrington (2020).
2 Diffrient (2014) further distinguishes between related terms like the compilation film,
package film, and sketch film, but these more specific variants are not directly perti-
nent to this chapter.
3 The Twilight Zone is another high-profile example of this overlap between different
anthology formats, since it originated as a television anthology series, but was later
adapted as the omnibus-anthology The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).
4 At this time of writing, creator Ryan Murphy has announced a spin-off series,
American Horror Stories, which will narratively consist of self-contained, hour-long
episodes—therefore a ‘true’ anthology series in the Twilight Zone vein—to air on FX
on Hulu in 2021.
5 This comparison only goes so far, however, since the different directors of omnibus-
anthology films also tend to have much more creative autonomy for their individual
contributions; likewise, an omnibus film’s producer controls the sequencing of and
192 David Church
transitions between the differently authored episodes, whereas serialized television
episodes tend to follow a clearly defined and logical narrative progression to better
maintain viewer comprehension over a season-long arc (Deshpande 2010, 9).
6 Although industrially framed as a corrective reboot to Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of the
same title, Halloween (2018) is more accurately a belated sequel that ‘retcons’ away even
the 1981 direct sequel’s revelation that Laurie is Michael’s long-lost sister, instead picking
up Laurie’s story 40 years later with the clarification that she is no relation to Myers.
7 Freddy’s Nightmares is additionally interesting as an anthology series because each
episode is internally bifurcated into two related storylines, the latter half often
focusing on characters who only played a secondary or fleeting role in the first half.
With this dramatic shift in narrative focalization, each episode also contains elements
of the omnibus (portmanteau) style as well.
8 These series each received reboots, including the near-obligatory origin stories for
their monsters, amid a 2000s-era cycle of 1970s–1980s horror remakes: The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Halloween (2007), Friday the 13th (2009), and A Night-
mare on Elm Street (2010).
References
Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2013. ‘Old Tropes in New Dimensions: Stereoscopy and Fran-
chise Spectatorship’. Film Criticism, 37/38(3/1): 12–29.
Betz, Mark. 2009. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brinkema, Eugenie. 2015. ‘Design Terminable and Interminable: The Possibility of Death
in Final Destination’. Journal of Visual Culture, 14(3): 298–310.
Conrich, Ian. 2015. ‘Puzzles, Contraptions, and the Highly Elaborate Moment: The
Inevitability of Death in the Grand Slasher Narratives of the Final Destination and
Saw Series of Films’. In Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, edited by
Wickham Clayton, 106–117. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deshpande, Shekhar. 2010. ‘Anthology Film, The Future is Now: Film Producer as
Creative Director’. Wide Screen, 2(2): 1–14.
Diffrient, David Scott. 2002. ‘Narrative Mortality: The “Fragmegrated” Corpse of the
Horror Anthology Film’. Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, 17: 271–301.
Diffrient, David Scott. 2014. Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema. Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Fonseca, Anthony J. and June Michele Pulliam. 1999. Hooked on Horror: A Guide to
Reading Interests in Horror Fiction. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited.
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Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 68–69. New York: New York University Press.
Harrington, Erin. 2020. ‘Slicing Up the Boys’ Club: The Female-Led Horror Anthology
Film’. In Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre, edited by Alison
Peirse, 156–169. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Harris, Martin and Kathryn Conner Bennett. 2004. ‘You Can’t Kill the Boogeyman:
Halloween III and the Modern Horror Franchise’. Journal of Popular Film and Tele-
vision, 32(3): 98–120.
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British Film Institute.
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by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley, 131–144. London: Routledge.
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Anthology Films Analyzed. Montreal: Tales of Terror.
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ioning at Play in the Masters of Horror DVD Extras’. In American Horror Film: The
Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, edited by Steffen Hantke, 193–220. Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press.
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B. Tauris.
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verse’. In Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth, edited by Matthew Free-
man and William Proctor, 101–120. New York: Routledge.
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University of Texas Press.
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and Ava Preacher Collins, 103–119. New York: Routledge.
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Columbia University Press.
11 When a franchise is not a franchise
The case of Let the Right One In
Simon Bacon
A best-selling novel that spawns a cinematic art-house hit, multiple stage adapta-
tions, comic books, and a television series would seem to have all the hallmarks of a
successful franchise, yet very few people would consider Let the Right One In
(LtROI) as a franchise in the same way as Star Wars, The Twilight Saga, or Harry
Potter. This is a disparity that can, at least in part, be attributed to a tension that
exists within the franchise itself, comprised of two separate narrative worlds that
often seem at odds with each other. As explored in the introduction to this volume,
franchises involve ‘reproduction and multiplicity,’ and while this is typically
accomplished through ‘[f]ranchise systems [that] support serialization and sequeli-
zation to keep generating content over time’ (Johnson 2013, 45), LtROI is a fran-
chise that is comprised primarily of adaptations that seek to disavow prior entries
and initialize or inaugurate the franchise anew. The original novel, Let the Right
One In/Låt den rätte komma (2010) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, was adapted for the
screen as Let the Right One In (2008), directed by Tomas Alfredson in collabora-
tion with Lindqvist who insisted on developing the screenplay himself. It was then
adapted again as Let Me In (2010), a British/American co-production by Hammer
films as part of the resurrection of the British brand (see Hills 2014). This British/
American line inspired a limited four-issue comic book series, Let Me In: Cross-
roads (2010–2011), a collaboration between Hammer Films and Dark Horse
Comics, which acted as a prequel to the Hammer adaptation. While Linqvist
opposed the adaptation and contested the legitimacy of this series, he did produce a
script for a stage adaptation, ‘La den rette komme inn,’ that was directed by Jakob
Hultcrantz Hansson and performed in 2011 and 2012. Then there was another
stage adaptation by the National Theatre of Scotland written by Jack Thorne, and
although Lindqvist was not involved in the production of this, he welcomed it in a
way that was very different to the outright opposition he had with the comic book
series. Finally, a television series was commissioned by TNT, and although it never
made it past development, it demonstrates the ways in which producers have tried
to capitalize on a potentially valuable intellectual property. While each of these are
perhaps less well-known supplementary narratives, they each seek to extend a
narrative that consists of successful adaptations of Lindqvist’s original novel. This
process of near continuous adaptation is unusual, though not unique. Indeed, The
Evil Dead franchise follows a curiously similar trajectory with a prequel, Within
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-16
When a franchise is not a franchise 195
the Woods (1978), produced to secure backing for the first film which offered the
same basic narrative as the first film, as does its sequel, The Evil Dead II (1987) and,
of course, the 2013 remake. Even the many transmedia adaptations, such as the
computer game Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick (2003), or the various comic book
adaptations, follow a similar narrative trajectory. However, where LtROI differs is
that this process of continual adaptation, rather than serialized extension of the
narrative, is the result of the tension between the book’s author and other copyright
holders.
This chapter will examine this tension, looking first at the way in which the
original novel was developed into a film, before then considering how this and its
subsequent adaptation initiated a split in the intellectual property; one controlled
by the original author, with the other as the property of a production company
(Hammer). Whilst Hammer appeared intent on exploiting the potential of a
growing transmedia universe, the book’s author has often actively worked against
this, attempting to protect the integrity of his original ‘vision.’ This study focuses
on the ongoing animosity between these two narrative threads and the impact this
has had upon the perception of LtROI as an ongoing franchise.
From undying to unwanted

The Let the Right One In franchise begins in 2004 with Lindqvist’s best-selling
novel. It was his first novel and was surprisingly successful given its controversial
subject matter: an eternally 12-year-old castrated vampire who lives with a pedo-
phile, and who starts an unlikely romance with a 12-year-old boy who dreams of
stabbing the bullies who torment him at school. The novel was so successful that it
was quickly translated into other languages, including English in 2007. Its popu-
larity in Sweden saw it turned into a film directed by Tomas Alfredson from a
screenplay written by Lindqvist. At the time, vampires had been popularly repre-
sented in blockbuster movies such as Blade (1998), Van Helsing (2004), and
Underworld (2002), but LtROI was markedly different, and would go on to
become an art-house success.1 However, while the film was significantly different
from other vampire films that were dominating the sub-genre, it was also very
different from the novel on which it was based and it is worth looking at that
disparity as it is this sense of difference between the film and the original text that
creates irreparable dissonances in the narratively fractured LtROI franchise.
The novel is set in Blackeberg, a working-class superb of Stockholm, in the
1980s which is also the location and time period where Lindqvist himself grew up.
Lindqvist wrote about the period when he was a teenager and how he felt about
his home town (the title of the film refers to a Morrissey song, ‘Let the Right One
Slip In,’ from 1992). It is a bleak grey landscape, shabby, brutalist apartment
blocks paint the area as soulless, a feature that is reinforced in the book which
describes that there are no churches in the area, intimating, perhaps, that Blacke-
berg was unable and unprepared for the vampire that was about to take up resi-
dence. The narrative focuses on Oskar, who lives with his mother in one of the
apartment blocks. He only has one occasional friend in Tommy, a teenager who
196 Simon Bacon
sometimes hangs out in the basement of the building. Oskar is mercilessly bullied
at school, suggesting a cycle of loneliness and disaffection that sees him collect
newspaper cuttings about murders while fantasizing about scenarios in which he
could exact revenge on his persecutors with a knife he has stolen.
One night, whilst staring out his bedroom window, he spots a young girl and
(what he assumes is) her father moving into the apartment next door. As the story
unfolds, we discover that there is a girl living next door called Eli, who we learn is
a centuries-old vampire. She lives with Håkan, a man who is not her father, but the
latest in a long line of pedophilic human helpers whom she enlists to keep her safe
during the day and collect blood for her at night. Oskar befriends Eli in the play-
ground outside the apartment block, ostensibly by offering her his Rubik’s Cube to
play with (she passes much of her time solving puzzles).
Håkan is growing careless in choosing the victims he drains of blood to give to
Eli, and one night he accidentally spills the blood and leaves her hungry. In a rage
with Håkan, Eli goes out and kills a local to satiate her thirst, starting a chain of
events that will eventually cause both children to leave Blackeberg. Eli teaches
Oskar how he might fight back against the bullies insisting he should ‘hit them
more than you really dare’ (Lindqvist 2010, 115), which he does, splitting the lead
bully’s ear open. Håkan becomes increasingly jealous of the time Eli is spending
with the young boy and this jealousy leads to carelessness on one of his blood-
gathering trips, resulting in his arrest by the police. In a bid to protect his identity
and therefore protect Eli, Håkan pours acid over his face. Eli later visits him in the
hospital by scaling the outside walls of the building until she reaches his window
and beckons him toward her. Once there, he offers her his throat and she drains
him of blood before letting him fall from the window to the road below. However,
because she did not manage to break his neck, he returns as a kind of vampire-
zombie hybrid who takes up residence in the basement of the apartment building
where they live. He later traps Eli in the basement and tries to rape her, but the
vampire escapes and locks Håkan in there, where he is later set on fire and killed
by Tommy.
Immediately after leaving the hospital, Eli goes to Oskar’s bedroom and gets
into bed with him where she agrees to be his girlfriend. In a later scene, Oskar sees
her naked but she has no genitalia, only a horizontal scar between her legs. During
this period, Lacke, a friend of the man Eli killed, starts to investigate what hap-
pened and has narrowed his search to Oskar’s apartment building. He breaks into
Eli’s apartment during the day whilst Oskar is there, but the young boy hides,
allowing the drunk man to stagger around the apartment looking for the young
girl. He finally enters the bathroom, where the windows are covered in paper and
the metal bathtub covered in cardboard (as is traditional, sunlight makes vampires
burst into flames). As Lacke starts tearing the paper down, Oskar bursts in
screaming at Eli to wake up, which she does, and carnage erupts in the room. In
one last attempt to escape, Lacke reaches out to Oskar, but the little boy shuts the
door leaving Eli to complete her task. It’s an important point in the film, signaling
that Oskar has made a moral choice to join Eli, and one which is reciprocated by
the vampire kissing the boy with her bloodied lips whilst whispering ‘be me a little’
(Lindqvist 2010, 383). This blood effectively carries Eli’s memories so that Oskar
can experience them as well.2 We discover that the vampire was originally a boy
named Elijah who was a victim of the vampire Gilles de Rais (the historical figure
Baron de Rais was born around 1405 and died in 1440, a renowned occultist and
serial child-killer). Elijah was raped, castrated, and left for dead, but came back to
life as a vampire (the book suggests he is approximately 300 years old and not 600,
which he would need to be if killed by the actual Gilles de Rais). Eternally stuck at
12 years old, Elijah became Eli and took on the guise of a girl to more easily lure
predatory men into becoming her helpers.
Returning from his vision, Oskar feels a greater pull toward Eli than before,
but she insists she must leave as the police will have to investigate Lacke’s sudden
disappearance.3 Once Eli has gone, Oskar is accosted by the lead bully Jonny
during a swimming class, who wants revenge for having his ear cut open, but has
his older brother with him on this occasion. They lock the doors to the pool area
and attempt to drown Oskar when a ceiling window suddenly smashes and,
while Oskar has his eyes shut under the water, the gang of boys are ripped to
pieces by Eli. Later, we see Oskar leaving Blackeberg on a train, and in his com-
partment is a large cardboard box, within which we assume is Eli. As the story
ends, the boy and the vampire exchange messages via Morse code tapped out on
the box. Whilst the novel never overtly suggests that Oskar has been groomed to
take Håkan’s place—indeed he would be rather young and weak to go and col-
lect blood for her—there is certainly a possibility that this is the case.
Apparently, Tomas Alfredson read the book and liked it so much he went to see
Lindqvist to ask if he could make a film adaptation. Coincidentally, Alfredson is
only three years older than Lindqvist and both were brought up in the surrounds of
Stockholm. There is a strong possibility that they share similar memories of the
1980s and what it was like growing up on the periphery of the city at that time. The
two men appeared to have gotten on so well that Lindqvist wrote the screenplay for
the film, which was released in 2008. Unsurprisingly, the film removes much of the
extraneous elements of plot that make the characters of Oskar and Eli ambiguous.
And so, Oskar has no friends and spends most of his time in the playground outside
the apartment block. Håkan does not become a zombie and Eli’s backstory does not
make the translation to film—she is now just a girl that has been 12 years old ‘for a
long time.’ Jonny’s backstory of being abused at home is also largely removed giving
him less reason to be a bully other than just being inherently nasty. What Alfredson
does do is make the whole affair more poetic and romantic. To help with this, the
director depicts the two as ying and yang, two parts that make a whole, with Oskar
(Kåre Hedebrandt) being extremely pale with blond hair, while Eli (Lina Leanders-
son) is his visual opposite, less pale and with black hair.
This idea of opposites is quite interesting in relation to the historical period
within which the film is set. In the 1980s, Sweden received a substantial number of
refugees from Iran due to conflict in the region. Many of these were housed in the
suburbs of Stockholm, which became problematic when unemployment was
increasing in those areas. The actress who plays Eli is of Iranian descent, suggest-
ing that she might have been purposely chosen to represent the vampiric (read:
198 Simon Bacon
Iranian) outsider coming into the suburbs, creating havoc and corrupting the youth
of Sweden (represented by Oskar).
Although this is never made explicit in the film, their compatibility as two
halves of a whole is more clearly signalled. Eli, even though obviously a mon-
ster, does not enjoy being seen as such and purposely protects Oskar from
herself and exhibits shame when he sees her in her ‘true’ state. She equally saves
Oskar from the bullies, just as he saves her from Lacke. Similarly, they both
have bad parents that ultimately abandon them leaving them to the mercies of
the world, a place that constantly wants to corrupt them of their innocence
which they can only repair through their relationship (Alfredson makes Eli and
Oskar equally childlike).
The ending of the film is also suitably dreamlike. After the massacre at the
swimming baths, Oskar seems to face no inquisition from the authorities, and
we next see him on a train in a compartment of his own. In fact, the train could
be completely empty except for him and the box in front of him. Outside the
snow is falling, and yet a breeze seems to be gently blowing a curtain in the
corridor. This sense of ‘unreality’ continues as Oskar hears tapping from inside
the box and he dutifully responds by exchanging ‘kisses’ in Morse code. It
could as easily be a dream of the dying boy still submerged in the pool as it is a
dream ending for the two lovers.
The film was an enormous success, even more so for a foreign language film that
began on the art-house cinema circuit. Unsurprisingly, this greatly increased sales
of the book and promoted Lindquist’s own continuing work in horror-related fic-
tion. More so, it created an appetite for more such films, yet Alfredson and
Lindqvist were not interested in making a sequel—Alfredson had announced he
was giving up filmmaking for the foreseeable future having grown tired of the
industry in Sweden (Skawonius 2008), and Lindqvist had moved on to other pro-
jects. As such, there were no plans to extend the universe of the characters or story
through spin-offs or merchandizing, etc. It has been claimed that films such as Not
Like Others/Vampyrer (2008) by Peter Pontikis, which is also Swedish and set in
Stockholm, was an attempt to cash-in on the popularity of LtROI. However, its
production timeline belies this, and its story, about two teenage vampire sisters
living in the city, is very different in tone and intent.4
After a successful screening at the Tribeca Film Festival later in 2008, Over-
ture Films and Hammer Films acquired the rights to make an English language
version of the film. This would again seem to be the next step on establishing
LtROI as a franchise in seeing the story picked up by a much larger production
team with far greater distribution and marketing support. More so, they
brought in the internationally acclaimed director, Matt Reeves, to take the
helm, who had just finished the hugely successful and highly acclaimed found-
footage monster film, Cloverfield (2006).
Originally, Alfredson had been approached, but had no interest in getting
involved even though this would be an international film, arguing that ‘[r]emakes
should only be made of films that aren’t very good’ (Moriarty 2008). In contrast,
Lindqvist was keener on the idea, with Matt Reeves having been brought in on the
project. His enthusiasm increased as Reeves had told him that they would be
making a new film from his book rather than a remake of Alfredson’s film. Indeed,
Reeves himself said as much at the time, however, with the perspective of hindsight
we are able to see nuances that perhaps suggests that the director had a slightly
different reading of the story than the author:
I said … that we shouldn’t remake it. I read the book too and was completely
taken with it and I was really intrigued how personal the story felt. I thought
John Lindqvist had written this terrific story, and he also adapted it for the
film … I wrote Lindqvist and told him that it wasn’t just that I was drawn to
the story because it was a brilliant genre story—which it is—but also because
of the personal aspect of it. It really reminds me of my childhood.
(Harley 2010)
One can clearly see that it was the idea of shared experience that brought
Lindqvist and Reeves together, joined by a somewhat nostalgic view of the
1980s when they were both teenagers. Yet it would become apparent that
Reeves’ experience of adolescence in the city—in his case Los Angeles—was
rather different than Lindqvist’s experience of Stockholm. This difference was
not immediately obvious, when, early in production, Simon Oakes spoke of the
planned film, suggesting that, ‘If you call it a faithful remake, I think that’s true
to say that’s what it is. It’s not a reimagining; the same beats [are there], maybe
the scares are a little bit more scary.’ Yet by 2010, this had changed: ‘I call it his
[Reeves’] version. I don’t call it his remake or his re-imagining of it’ (Radish
2010), implying an authorial break between Reeves’ version and the source
material. This sense of Reeves as the author of Let Me In can be seen in
Lindqvist’s input to the film. Curiously, unlike authors such as Stephanie Meyer
(Twilight) or J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter), Lindqvist had no control over what
happened to his story, and although producers from Alfredson’s film were
involved with Let Me In (LMI), they seemed to have little input over the final
cut. Consequently, LMI is very much a Reeves film, and although Lindqvist is
noted as one of the writers, Reeves produced the screenplay himself.
LMI itself makes many similar decisions in the handling of the material from
the novel as Alfredson’s movie did, jettisoning most of Eli’s backstory, the
zombification of Håkan, and the ambivalences regarding the motivations of the
bully, Jonny. Whilst ostensibly keeping the key characters and situations from
the first film, Reeves makes significant and crucial changes that vastly alter the
possible meanings of the story.
The setting of the film is moved from Sweden to America, and swaps snowy
Blackeberg with Los Alamos in New Mexico. Although Los Alamos can get
very cold, it has two other features that set it apart from Blackeberg: first, it is
indelibly linked to America’s Manhattan Project, the center of their nuclear
development program, with the town being home to most of the workers at the
facility; and second it has more churches per head of population that any other
city in America. Reeves also makes important changes to the main characters:
200 Simon Bacon
Oskar is now Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who has dark hair and looks less
unambiguously innocent than Kåre Hedebrandt; Eli becomes Abby (Chloë
Grace Moretz), who is also dark-haired but more obviously a girl; Håkan
becomes ‘Father’ (Richard Jenkins)—though since the original release, his
character has been renamed Thomas, and it is in his renaming that a significant
shift occurs that makes him more of a symbolic figure. In similar fashion, Lacke
is replaced with ‘The Policeman’ (Elias Koteas). Thus, the symbolic nature of
these two roles are key to understanding the film, but the context is equally
important.
LtROI is set during an ongoing international altercation with Russia, or the
Soviet Union as it was in the 1980s, involving a submarine discovered in Swedish
waters. It provides minimal background to both novel and film, but suggests an air
of imminent danger from which the vampire emerges. Reeves positions this tension
more central to his filmmaking at the start of (then) President Ronald Reagan’s
infamous speech about the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire,’ and the real fears
about Soviet forces invading America, equally highlighting Los Alamos’ place
within the ongoing nuclear standoff between the two countries. In many ways, this
is indicative of the change in scale of the two films—Alfredson’s is more intimate
and oddly confined to Blackeberg, whereas Reeves hints that the evil from Los
Alamos will affect all of America, if not the world.
Once this context has been put in place, LMI then focuses on the figure of
Owen, a lonely, bullied boy, largely ignored by his separated parents, but acts out
revenge on his tormentors in much more sinister ways. Oskar was shown as an
awkward boy only wearing baggy Y-fronts as he confronts his imaginary bullies
with a pen-knife in his bedroom. In contrast, Owen wears an odd clear plastic
mask (actually taken from the face of Richard Jenkins who plays Abby’s Father)
and uses a larger kitchen knife to threaten the bullies, giving it the feel of malicious
premeditation. When he stops playacting, it is not just to peer out the window, as
Oskar does in the comparable scene, but to spy on his neighbors using a telescope
he has set up to look in the windows of those living across from him (if Oskar has
had his innocence blighted by life, Owen was never that innocent to begin with).
Conversely, Abby remains largely herself, with the emphasis on ‘her’ as we
are never given a reason to doubt that she is female, and that she genuinely
loves all her helpers when she first meets them. This fact alone is interesting as
it marks a significant shift in how we view her Father, and the world within
which she lives. Håkan is clearly identified as a pedophile in the novel, and
though never touched upon that much in Alfredson’s film, as an aging adult
male, he has an unhealthy affection for a young girl. The fact that Eli seems to
find replacements for her helpers quite regularly suggests that the society she
inhabits, i.e., Sweden, has many pedophiles in it.
In contrast, Father is shown as having met Abby when he was very young
(around the same age of Owen), and so he is not explicitly shown as a pedo-
phile, but the person that has always loved Abby (even though she has not aged
since they met). In this sense, he becomes a far more tragic figure, and one
whom the vampire has preyed upon rather than the evil pervert that gets
everything they deserve. This informs the symbolic importance of the name
‘Father’ in the film, as he is not really an individual, but a blank slate, merely
the current person fulfilling that role. Hence, when Owen discovers the faded
photos of Abby with Father when he was a young boy, he realizes that this is
probably the fate that awaits him too.
Interestingly, Reeves has commented that Abby, even given her long life, has
mentally stayed at 12 years old, thus retaining the mind of a prepubescent girl. Abby’s
actions in finding a new helper are therefore not intended as malevolent or vindictive,
but just something she needs to do, partly because she finds herself attracted to people
her own age. As noted above, a symbolic role also applies to The Policeman. In both
the novel and Alfredson’s film, Lacke takes up the role of detective, but mainly
because he misses his old drinking partner. Represented as something of an aggressive
drunk, our sympathies never really lie with him, not least because he’s trying to break
up the story’s star-crossed lovers. The Policeman, on the other hand, who is more of a
detective, is definitely on the side of law and order. We only ever see him trying to
solve the murders in the area, specifically those committed by Father. From this per-
spective, he is much more representative of good, and subsequently gives Owen’s
action of closing the bathroom door to let Abby kill him a greater significance. In fact,
when Owen does that, he literally closes the door on his own chances of becoming
anything other than a killer, and when Abby comes out and kisses him with her
bloody mouth, it is not a way for the vampire to share her memories with the young
boy, as in Alfredson’s film and Lindqvist’s novel; rather, it is a ratification of a blood
pact between them. He is now hers to do with as she wants.
This shift in tone is given a final confirmation at film’s end with Reeves’ version
of the pair leaving the town by train. Again, we see the young boy sitting on a
train, though now it is in a carriage with many seats rather than a separate com-
partment. The light is bright and cold; it is neither dreamy nor ethereal, just
normal daylight flooding in through the windows. A train conductor checks
Owen’s ticket and asks if the box belongs to him, which he confirms. Owen taps
on the box and hears the expected response in return. He puts a sweet in his mouth
and stares out the window where the view is not dreamlike or blurry, but sharp,
alongside dark trees with a sprinkling of snow on them. None of this is massively
different but the change is significant as this can in no way be read as a dream
sequence like the first film, but instead shows two cold-blooded killers leaving Los
Alamos to travel out into the world to find new blood for Abby.
In many ways, Reeves’ earlier comment about following Lindqvist’s book is
basically accurate—the author and Alfredson were pulled more to the sympathetic
and romantic side of the tale by seeing the pair as a kind of Romeo and Juliet,
whereas Reeves saw them as a prepubescent Bonnie and Clyde. At this stage, at
least Lindqvist seemed quite happy with the film, even going as far as to say:
I might just be the luckiest writer alive. To have not only one, but two excel-
lent versions of my debut novel done for the screen feels unreal. Let the Right
One In is a great Swedish movie. Let Me In is a great American movie.
(Graham 2010)
202 Simon Bacon
Yet, this is a view that was about to change dramatically.
Spinning off
Originally it seemed LMI was meant to be a standalone film. But later in 2010,
Hammer Films and Dark Horse Comics announced they would be releasing a four-
issue comic mini-series titled Let Me In: Crossroads, which would act as a prequel to
the film (Andreyko and Reynolds 2011). Crossroads was written by Marc Andreyko,
who had big ideas about considerably adding to what already existed in the fran-
chise: ‘I think it’ll allow us to do things impossible in either of the previous incar-
nations. We’re planning a big program, with a unique scope to it’ (Bentley 2010).
This would have included both prequels and sequels, though to LMI rather than the
narrative from LtROI. The first one in this possible longer program tells of Abby
and Father’s journey before arriving in Los Alamos. Most interestingly, it shows her
trying to entice another young boy to take the place of Father, before the older man
scares him off. This confirms the idea from Reeves’ film that Abby has no real feel-
ings for Owen other than being the next in a long line of helpers, more clearly
separating it from the earlier iterations of the story where Lindqvist and Alfredson
saw the relationship between Oskar and Eli as authentic.
Crossroads incensed Lindqvist. He did not support the project and he immedi-
ately threatened legal action to stop publication of the series, claiming that he had
plans to extend the story himself with a prequel (Bentley 2010). He soon discovered,
however, that the documents he had signed concerning the rights to the story gave
him no power over what Hammer did with the intellectual property (Lindqvist
2010). Indeed, it seems that as long as Hammer and its affiliates focus on the char-
acters created in their version of Lindqvist’s narrative, they can do what they want
with it. Whether Lindqvist’s reaction prevented this or not is difficult to ascertain,
we do know that Crossroads remained the only part of the planned series to
emerge. As something of a final riposte to this, and in an attempt to take back
control of his own story, Lindqvist published an English language volume of short
stories, Let the Old Dreams Die, in 2011. Whilst much of the collection consisted of
short stories from six years previously, the tale from which the title of the book was
taken concerned a Swedish traveler going to Barcelona and spotting two figures in
the crowd that looked just like Eli and Oskar, not as they would look now but just
as they did in the 1980s, the inference being that Eli has broken her cycle of
recruiting pedophiles and so loves Oskar that she has turned him into a vampire as
well.
However, you cannot keep a good vampire franchise down and this definitive
ending was derailed when Lindqvist himself revisited the characters to expand on the
story, this time on the theatrical stage. He produced a script for a play, ‘La den rette
komme inn’ that was directed by Jakob Hultcrantz Hansson, and was performed at
the Uppsala Stadsteater in March 2011, and later at the Nord-Trøndelag Teater in
Steinkjer, Norway in November 2012. Reviews suggest it was well received but
nothing further came from it other than the occasional touring performance (Nystøyl
2012).
One might imagine that another source of frustration for Lindqvist would be the
more successful theatrical version commissioned by the National Theatre of Scot-
land, written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany. This was first performed
at Dundee Repertory Theatre in June 2013, moving to The Royal Court in London
later that same year. The performances were that well received that the show traveled
to New York and South Korea in 2015 and 2016, respectively. It seems to be a show
that is regularly performed around various parts of the world from Australia to South
Africa. Somewhat curiously, it appears that, in writing the script, Thorne never con-
tacted Lindqvist, but worked up the narrative and dialogue from the original novel
and Alfredson’s film; it would seem that under Swedish copyright law, filmmakers
have no rights over their work and others are free to copy and adapt as they want
(The Local 2008). Consequently, it very much follows the romantic theme of Alfred-
son’s vision—Eli and Oskar are social outcasts that find love and support in each
other. More so, the stage production does much to try and capture the poetics of the
film, with magical portrayals of snow falling alongside sudden and brutal interrup-
tions of violence; indeed, it is probably the ‘horror’ aspect of the production that
prevents it from becoming a bigger hit. However, Lindqvist praised the play and
described it as ‘excellent,’ one imagines because it largely follows his vision of the
story (Ho 2017).
Again, one would think that maybe that would be the final nail in the coffin, the
idea of LtROI continuing as a viable franchise, but this has not been the case. Whilst
the theater show was still traveling the world, the production company, A&E, took
out an option with Hammer Productions to make a television series of the story.
Show runner, Jack Davis, who had created Teen Wolf (2011–2017), and screenwriter
Brandon Boyce, took the helm to begin developing the series and making a pilot.
Outlines of what was intended suggest the story would have come from Reeves’ film
and provided backstories for certain characters, such as The Policeman, and with the
action moving to Vermont. The show itself was cast with Thomas Kretschmann
starring as Inspector Eriksson—one assumes this would have been the role of The
Policeman—and the pilot was due to be aired on TNT in 2017. However, in April
2017, it was reported that TNT had decided against the show without the pilot
having been made (Squires 2017), a report that Lindqvist was pleased to hear, com-
menting that: ‘I hated the idea from the beginning … But there was nothing I could
do, due to contract reasons’ (Ho 2017). Yet this might not be the end as Tomorrow
Studios, who are part of the production setup, are reportedly still trying to find an
outlet for it either in ‘its current iteration or as a potential redo of the concept’
(Squires 2017).
Conclusion
LtROI is then a story about a franchise that is not quite franchise, or rather a
franchise that is in fact two franchises, with authors who have very separate
visions that appear to be actively working against each other. One vision for the
franchise is controlled by Lindqvist, an author who retains the rights to the origi-
nal novel, a writer who does not think of his work as a franchise opportunity, but
204 Simon Bacon
rather a completed story that can be retold across other media but that is otherwise
narratively complete. Then a second vision for the franchise, a vision that seeks to
build upon the success of Reeves’ Let Me In to actively expand its narrative world
through serialization and transmedia narratives. Ironically, given Lindqvist’s
opposition to the franchising of his work, the work to which he has given his
blessing, Reeves’ reimagining of the novel and the two theatrical productions, seem
to have offered the most successful examples of the extension of the novel as a
franchise property, though they function as self-contained narratives and do little
to extend the storyworld. While the second vision, and model to which Lindqvist
was so vehemently opposed, seems to get stymied at every turn, possibly as a result
of Lindqvist’s opposition. As a footnote to all of this, after the release of the comic
series, Crossroads, Lindqvist released his short story, ‘Let the Old Dreams Die’
(2011). The story deliberately and directly contradicted the storyline of both the
comic and the film, creating a splintered narrative that perhaps complicated the
franchise world too much. To date, no further comic series appeared as planned.
Notes
1 Curiously the first Twilight (2008) film came out later the same year yet appealed to a
very different audience than either traditional fans of the vampire genre or those that
liked Let the Right One In.
2 The idea of blood memory is not hugely rare in vampire narratives and the Under-
world series makes frequent use of it.
3 The book is more ambivalent about the attraction between the two in showing it as
an innocent love rather than any budding sexual attraction—there is a suggestion that
Oskar’s father left his mother because he is homosexual though nothing explicitly
suggests that Oskar might have the same sexual orientation.
4 There was much written at the time about LtROI being the first Swedish vampire film,
which it is not. Frostbiten by Anders Banke (2006) is the first fully Swedish vampire film and
before that there had been the Anglo-Swedish Sleep of Death (1980) by Calvin Floyd.
Though before that a vampire child had appeared in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf
(1968).
References
Andreyko, Mark and Patric Reynolds. 2011. Let Me In: Crossroads. Milwaukee: Dark
Horse Books.
Bentley, David. 2010. ‘Let The Right One In Author Furious about Comic Book Adapta-
tion’. Coventry Telegraph, April 27. https://web.archive.org/web/20110715200413/http://
blogs.coventrytelegraph.net/thegeekfiles/2010/04/let-the-right-one-in-author-fu.html.
Graham, Bill. 2010. ‘LET THE RIGHT ONE IN Author Praises Matt Reeves’ LET ME
IN As “Excellent”’. Collider.Com, October 10. https://collider.com/let-the-right-
one-in-author-praises-matt-reeves-let-me-in/.
Harley, David. 2010. ‘Let Me In: Director Matt Reeves’. Bloody Disgusting.Com, March 17.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100322195732/http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/interview/
630.
Ho, Olivia. 2017. ‘What Terrifies Horror Writer John Ajvide Lindqvist?’. The Straits Times,
November 14. www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/what-terrifies-horror-writer-john-ajvide-
lindqvist.
Hills, Matt. 2014. ‘Hammer 2.0: Legacy, Modernization, and Hammer Horror as a
Heritage Brand’. In Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema, edited by
Richard Nowell, 229–251. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Culture Industries. New York: New York University Press.
Let Me In (Hammer Films, 2010), Matt Reeves (dir.).
Let the Right One In (Magnet Releasing, 2008), Tomas Alfredson (dir.).
Lindqvist, John Ajvide. 2010. Let the Right One In. Melbourne: The Text Publishing
Company.
Lindqvist, John Ajvide. 2012. Let the Old Dreams Die and Other Stories [2011], trans.
Marlene Delargy. London: Quercus.
The Local. 2008. ‘Swedish Copyright Laws “a Joke”’. November 26. www.thelocal.se/
20081126/15946.
Moriarty. 2008. ‘Moriarty Sits Down With Tomas Alfredson, Director Of “Let the Right
One In”!’. Ain’t It Cool News, October 26. http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/38870.
Nystøyl, Karen Frøsland. 2012. ‘Vampyrisk ro’. NRK, November 19. www.nrk.no/
kultur/vampyrisk-ro-1.8401488.
Radish, Christina. 2010. ‘Hammer Films CEO Simon Oakes Interview LET ME IN; Plus Info
on THE WOMAN IN BLACK and HANDLING THE UNDEAD’. Collider.com, 4
August. https://collider.com/simon-oakes-interview-let-me-in-hammer-films-ceo-comic-
con-the-woman-in-black/.
Skawonius, Betty. 2008. ‘Vill vandra vidare’. Dagens Nyheter, October 19. https://web.
archive.org/web/20090609235104/http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/film-tv/vill-vandra-vida
re-1.473120.
Squires, John. 2017. ‘TNT Drops “Let the Right One In” TV Series’. Bloody Disgusting.Com,
April 13. https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3432350/tnt-drops-let-right-one-tv-series.
12 ‘A match made in heaven (or hell)’
Franchise experiments between the horror film
genre and virtual reality media (2014–2020)
Sarah Thomas
In 2014, a trend emerged where Hollywood and other major global entertainment
industries began expanding their franchise properties onto new virtual reality (VR)
platforms. The new technological platforms required innovative media content to
showcase what separated VR from both traditional broadcast media and conven-
tional video game practice. VR content was developed around existing cinematic
assets including franchise-led genres such as science fiction and superhero films, but
particularly visible were VR texts associated with the horror film. It seemed like the
affective qualities of horror made VR a logical extension for the genre, a develop-
ment characterized by one reviewer as ‘a match made in heaven (or hell)’ (Grudzien
2017). VR’s ability to offer intensely frightening experiences for the spectator was
quickly identified as an effective way to showcase the new medium’s unique selling
points, offering a fresh assault on the senses where a new form of sensory encounter
could be created through horror-based immersive media. During this period, a vari-
ety of horror film based VR content was produced, including tie-ins, spin-offs, or
adaptations based on a panoply of horror franchises, including: the Alien films, The
Conjuring Universe, Crimson Peak, The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, It, the Saw fran-
chise, Lights Out, The Mummy, Ouija, Paranormal Activity, The Ring, Train to
Busan, Hotel Transylvania, The Strain, The Walking Dead, Stranger Things, and
Night of the Living Dead. 1 Looking at this period, and where it has led, enables a
consideration of the valuable intersection between horror aesthetics and immersive
VR experiences; how this drives the franchising and marketing of the cinematic text;
and how entertainment industry infrastructures explore emergent technologies (and
the way in which audiences consume them) through the relative stability of the
established franchise property.
The move toward immersive media such as VR is illustrative of contemporary
convergence cultures, which take interaction, gamification, mobile technologies,
and digital content as key markers, and of franchise cultures that use secondary
sites of production to explore intellectual property (IP) resources. Therefore, sig-
nificant investment in growing interactive technologies like VR (and also aug-
mented reality and mixed reality) into viable consumer media products has typified
some of the major diversification of the entertainment industries over the last
decade. Powerful tethered head-mounted displays (HMDs), such as the Oculus
Rift, the HTC Vive, and Sony PlayStation VR, have the capability of supporting
DOI: 10.4324/9780429060830-17
‘A match made in heaven (or hell)’ 207
fully interactive immersive experiences constructed in gaming engines, where
players use controllers to interact with scenes much like conventional video-game
play, but in a three-dimensional, room-scaled environment. Also available via
untethered android mobile technology, HMDs (such as the Samsung Gear) offer
360° video experiences which rely on directional interaction where users move
their heads to decide what to focus on within a specific 3D setting. The rise of
horror VR coincided with a refocus on horror cinema itself in public discourse and
box office success where the genre’s ‘deja-vu boom’ also relied on upon franchis-
ing, reboots, remakes, adaptations, and multiverses, with a generic focus on an
intensity of ordeal (Proctor 2018). As such this shift into VR content reflects wider
production trends surrounding the horror franchise (and franchising more gen-
erally) during this era, building on the economic and textual successes of new
horror IP since the 2000s.
Between 2014 and 2020, over 30 VR experiences based on horror film fran-
chises were produced, in addition to examples adapted from TV, as well as
video-game horror and non-franchise horror films. The majority of these were
officially licensed products tied to the identity of the established franchise, or
standalone, film text, with a minority being unofficial adaptations made by
independent media producers or even fans. The VR format used was varied,
ranging from 360° gaze-led films that offered short-form episodic extensions into
films’ existing diegeses, to fully interactive gaming experiences lasting hours;
some resembled conventional DVD extra content, such as behind-the-scenes foo-
tage shot in an immersive format; and others utilized mixed reality (XR) formats,
including location-based VR hardware or augmented reality (AR) immersions.
This chapter will consider the impact of this VR content on discussions of genre
and franchising from an aesthetic and economic perspective, examining also how
meaning around these texts have been discursively constructed by the trade press,
reviews and marketing material that seek to position film-based horror VR
within an emergent VR field and a wider changing entertainment landscape.
Whilst work such as James Fleury’s (2019) has examined the connection between
VR media and franchise promotion, this chapter looks specifically at these inter-
sections from the boundaries of the horror genre and what those structures con-
tribute to the tentative mainstream experiments with VR. I consider the VR
content made between 2014 and 2020 and discursive responses from a range of
franchises, historical and contemporary, including Alien, It, The Exorcist, The
Conjuring, Saw, Night of the Living Dead, and Hotel Transylvania. Text and
discourse reveal three elements that will form the chapter’s structure. First, a
sense of shifting textual affect and aesthetic that considers how franchising into
VR creates an alternative horror experience that extends an already-known media
experience. Second, this textual experimentation is embedded within, and enabled
by, business structures, marketing economies, and horizontal integration that
characterizes contemporary convergent media landscapes. And third, the way in
which these VR experiences reflect the changing complexities around horror and
immersion, as well as sensory experiences and infrastructures of adaptation or
franchising-building.
208 Sarah Thomas
A new kind of horror experience: the textual qualities of VR horror
Despite its virtual nature, what VR experiences inherently generate is a distinct
feeling of presence in the artificial world that is entered into by the user or player.
The freedom of movement in an endless, frameless, and ‘realistic’ world offers a
sense of embodiment that is different from the immersive qualities of film or gaming;
and it is this freedom when applied to the horror genre that Adam Daniel states
‘intensifies the push-pull imperative of the desire to look versus the trepidation about
doing so’ (2020, 176). Daniel also suggests that as it cannot direct the user’s attention
as much as rigid narrative cinema does, the frameless format of 360° video con-
centrates on an intensity of immersion and affect over narrative depth (179). Irre-
spective of genre, virtual environments create a ‘response-as-if-real’ (RAIR) reaction,
even when levels of fidelity (such as photorealism) are absent. In practice, this has the
potential to render what might be quite rudimentary aesthetics—in terms of con-
ventional genre expectations—into a more powerful media experience. It also
enables media content to be produced that, whilst less sophisticated than traditional
cinematic visuals, does not compromise the quality of the affect experienced; some-
thing important to producers when ‘producing premium VR content can run up to
$1 million per minute’ (Donnelly and Pressburg 2017).
In horror-VR, this translates to questions like: does the user dare to turn around
or to peer into the shadows when the danger feels real and elicits a real bodily
response? The format amplifies the ‘real’ sense of movement, fear, and tension, and
the bodily sensations and paradoxical pleasures that have long been associated
with horror cinema are transformed by the immersive platform, as the embodied
experience of the screen media content often takes precedence over the content
itself. It: Float: A Cinematic VR Experience (2017) illustrates this premise. Pro-
duced as paratextual material to promote the release of It: Chapter One (2017), It:
Float is a CGI animated 360° video running for 4.5 minutes, designed for easily
accessible mobile HMDs that allows the user to look where they wish but controls
their movement through space and makes effective use of horror conventions of
sound, shadow, and space to direct the user’s attention, producing jump scares and
ratcheting up the tension. It places the user in the darkened, storm-soaked streets
of Derry where the film is set, situating them first as a witness to the act that kick-
starts the narrative, the disappearance of young Georgie Denborough, but then
repositions them as the focus of the action as the user takes on the search for the
missing boy in Derry’s grimy sewers. Hearing Georgie’s cries for help, but unable
to find him as they navigate the corners of the rat-infested atmospheric environ-
ment, the user comes face-to-face with Pennywise the Dancing Clown (a filmed
performance by the character’s actor, Bill Skarsgard, rendered into the CGI envir-
onment). Lights flicker on and off and the three-dimensional sound shifts from
orchestral to jarringly abstract, rendering the space ominous and claustrophobic.
Pennywise then pursues the user through the sewer and torments them with red
balloons until they nearly escape upwards (floating with the balloons), before they
fall and are trapped with him forever. When viewed from a flat traditional screen,
even when using the inbuilt gyroscope that enables the experience to be seen in
360° on a mobile phone without the aid of an HMD, this is a rather technical
exercise of horror spectatorship that makes overt use of established genre conven-
tions. Dark spaces inevitably lead to the sudden appearance of something mon-
strous; one hears the atmospheric music, and one may recognize the scene
of Pennywise’s entrance in the sewer opening. But it is perhaps unlikely that
viewers—particularly experienced horror fans—will feel anything in this format,
especially fear. By contrast, when using an HMD, the sensory experience, the
feeling of presence and emotional affectiveness of the horror conventions, are far
greater. It offers the unique experience of encountering a famous scary scene—that
of Pennywise first appearing in the sewer—as an embodied experience where the
user is literally the focus of his interaction and really feel the floating, disorientat-
ing movement, or flinch at rats scurrying past. Genre knowledge takes on a more
ominous effect since users recognize conventions and yet experience them anew
and more intensely.
In VR, horror becomes an overwhelming almost ‘hellish’ experience, even for
the seasoned horror fan. Away from the relative simplicity of It: Float, more
complex game-based experiences of franchise horror VR only appear to intensify
the paradoxical pleasures of the genre, and of the franchise experience, further.
Empirical studies have compared players’ responses to traditional survival horror
video games with VR games and adaptations, including both VR and non-VR
versions of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (both 2017) and the VR game The Broo-
khaven Experiment (2016), concluding that the VR versions provided greater sense
of affect where, due to the levels of presence and self-efficacy that the format
affords, its overwhelming sensory overload increased both fear and pleasure in
many players (Lin and Wu 2018; Pallavicini et al. 2018). This perspective can also
be seen in discursive responses to the long form game-based VR adaptation,
Exorcist Legion (2017). This officially licensed VR experience extends the Exorcist
franchise began by The Exorcist—William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel and William
Friedkin’s film adaptation in 1973—that also includes two film sequels and two
prequels, one further novel, Legion (1983), and a television series (2016–2017). The
game mixes horror with investigative/detective tropes that follow a series of occult-
based murders and draws from the canonical texts Exorcist III and the novel
Legion. It unfolds over five separate episodes with each one devoted to the
exploration of a different location and demon.
Unlike 360° video, VR horror’s focus on sensation over story, and the game-play
centred style of an adaptation like Resident Evil 7 VR, here the establishment of
narrative development and depth within the new franchise property is identified as
crucial, with publisher Fun Train’s CEO Douglas Nabors’ observation that ‘The
Exorcist seemed like a great IP to tackle over multiple episodes,’ and, ‘while
interactive, The Exorcist: Legion VR put a bigger emphasis on narrative than
gameplay’ (Rottgers 2019). Reviews of the experience have been widely positive,
recording its ‘overwhelming sense of terror’ and ‘utterly suffocating atmosphere’
(Jagneaux 2018), and its problem-solving investigative gameplay marries well with
the complex sound design and creepy atmospheric scares. As it has been only
designed in VR (unlike Resident Evil 7), many also note that the format and
210 Sarah Thomas
platform adds a new dimension for horror fans regarding the experience of terror,
both in terms of the relative slowness of the gameplay where ‘VR is nearly always
best when you can soak in the ambience and take your time, and that’s a great
strength of Legion’ (Bolt 2018), and the effectiveness of the sense of presence since
‘the Exorcist VR feels like a horror title that just simply couldn’t exist or be worth
playing without VR … [it] will turn even the most hardened horror fans into
whimpering piles of fear’ (Jagneaux 2018). In doing so, the game’s reception sug-
gests that the legacy of the Exorcist franchise has been significantly enhanced, and
possibly even revitalized for a contemporary generation, by the creation of Exorcist
Legion VR where ‘in an uneven Exorcist extended universe, Legion tells one of its
finest stories’ (Bolt 2018). Story and atmosphere are praised because it uses VR’s
medium specificity in a thoughtful and meaningful way to add to the Exorcist
franchise, extending the brand via a new kind of gamification, narrative direction
and sensation.
This alignment with the wider franchise through a sense of authenticity and
realism suggests that VR adaptation can enable different textual experiences for
fans of the franchise, becoming a crucial part of the VR remediation process. Here,
realism is defined not by an aesthetic, but in the feeling of authentic sensation and
literal presence: a sense that one is experiencing something oneself. Much like how
It: Float puts the user in front of Pennywise, Exorcist Legion VR gives the player
key props from the films to use, such as a crucifix and holy water, inviting their
presence in the reconstruction of an iconic filmic homage replayed in virtual first
person format; ‘so you can shout “The power of Christ compels you! loud enough
to wake the rest of your household”’ (Bolt 2018). Some of the pleasures of these
VR experiences are related to a nostalgic recognition of one’s own immersive entry
into a familiar cinematic moment that, in doing so, creates a kind of ‘reality effect’
through an authentic connection to the franchise and one’s own memories of
experiencing it. Concepts of nostalgia, authenticity, and realism in horror game-
play have been discussed in relation to the traditional video-game and remediation
across digital formats, with Ewan Kirkland’s analysis of the Resident Evil fran-
chise highlighting that the lack of the real in digital video media is a central pro-
blem for ‘horror video games whose affect depends on evoking a tangible
experience of imperilment, embodiment, and spatial depth’ (2009, 116). With
reference to the Alien Isolation video-game (2014), Robin Sloan examines how
franchise remediation from film-to-game relies on a combination of the uncanny
and the nostalgic, which are reconciled as authentic connections to original texts in
their paradoxical construction of ‘warm feelings’ of familiar experiences alongside
acute ‘feelings of dread and anxiety’ (2016, 212). For both authors, references to
the cinematic signify the authentic—replication of prop, set, or situation, or the
metaphorical replication of the sensations of film spectatorship—and authentic
encounters equal successful remediation.
Alien Isolation’s 2014 release also supported VR play via the first-generation
Rift HMD, and when new hardware no longer supported this version, fan interest
led to the development of an unofficial, unlicensed modification in VR mode. One
review of the VR modifications discusses how the original game’s faithful
authenticity to the films’ essence created a successful VR experience through
medium-specific encounters with realism, memory, presence, and nostalgia, and a
new modality of fear, citing that the VR modification was ‘one of the few games
ever to make me feel like I was “really” someplace else,’ that they had ‘walked the
entire space station, multiple times … truly appreciating all the detail that went
into the game’s great level design.’ This changed the experience of play for them
beyond that of traditional gaming into a more embodied experience, ‘more like a
memory of being somewhere than just playing through a video game.’ The impact
that this process of VR remediation had on the intense sense of horror and genre
consumption was acute, as
being discovered by the Alien in VR is something that made my heart skip

a beat … and that as I ran I could actually turn my head and look behind
me as the Alien was bearing down on me is something that could never be
experienced in standard flat 2D gaming.
As such, the experience of horror shifted into a realm beyond both gaming and
cinema, toward a literal and physiological reaction of a lived experience: ‘The
sense of fear is much more palatable in VR … I felt like a survivor’ (all quotes
from Grudzien 2017). VR’s strength is the articulation of the bodily sensations that
horror relies upon. With its ability to create an authentic embodied experience, and
to place the user in an interactive, first-person perspective of the media they are
encountering, VR steps beyond gaming formats in conceptions of direct experience
and the really tangible, and in its most successful iterations can use the satisfaction
of franchise-based nostalgia and intertextual knowledge to create a medium-spe-
cific mode of emotional connection. Players can almost literally live through their
original emotional responses to specific filmic moments in their sensorial intensity
as well as creating new sensational connections to a text. Genre and franchise fans
are therefore offered something distinctly authentic and unique in VR that compels
them to engage with the new format for a complete franchise experience.
Film marketing, risk management, and horizontal integration: the

economic ecosystems of VR horror, 2016–2017
As impressive as the textual qualities of the VR experience may be, one question that
has plagued the entertainment industry is how to effectively monetize the expensive-
to-produce immersive format. Standalone economic success for VR has proved
enormously difficult, with tethered HMDs still not in extensive public circulation;
full room-scale experiences are almost impossible to achieve for a home market,
with 360° video struggling to become an established media format. Although the
emphasis has somewhat shifted away from VR content as the main driver of the
immersive industry, it was identified as a significant locus of experimentation
between 2015 and 2019 for the entertainment marketplace (especially in Hollywood),
which led to collaboration and investment between established studio forces and
independent interactive media companies. This was paralleled by the growth of
212 Sarah Thomas
specialized networked divisions within conglomerate structures. The move toward
immersive media conformed to broader shifts in parameters of popular franchises in
the twenty-first century, which relied upon advancements in interactive technologies
to position franchise cultures as sensory experiences where new digital sites, like
social media and interactive practices, emphasize a significant affective consumer
expression of kinetic, cognitive, emotional, physical, and financial attachment to
franchise adaptations across a variety of screens (Meikle 2019, 23). In order to
negotiate the high cost and relative low rate-of-return of VR production, the eco-
nomics of film franchise-based horror VR seemed to make sense, with focus resting
on how VR could be incorporated as a promotional tool for cinematic releases,
subsidizing it through large advertising budgets and practices which integrate pro-
duction and marketing. The production of VR horror paratexts tied to major studio
releases suggested that VR’s significance might lie in the boundaries of the attention
economy, where its value as a novel form was measured in how these new experi-
ences (such as It: Float) could drive attention toward franchise films through
experiential or affective connections to IP content. As Kira Kitsopanidou suggests,
since ‘attention’ emerged as a significant economic resource in an increasingly com-
petitive marketplace, Hollywood has shifted toward a ‘diversified multi-platform
approach … designed to increase the marketing and business synergy between the
different company divisions’ (2014, 118). Kitsopanidou also notes that as virtual and
augmented reality forms expanded, ‘advergames [branded video games] emerged as
an essential component of transmedia storytelling and alternative marketing strate-
gies’ (130). As such, VR production reflects changes in contemporary film marketing,
defined by clear promotional intentions, but possessing a status beyond advertising
or communication material (such as trailers). These paratextual expressions often
contain original story and action, but financed through a film’s promotion budget as
controlled by established studios in their role as major distributors. The marketing
investments associated with Hollywood franchise properties were able to afford a
significant level of funding in entertainment-orientated interactive VR material and
provide a wide marketplace ripe for experimentation with the format.
This position can be seen in the example of Sunny Boy Entertainment, a company
specializing in movie-based multi-platform immersive content, who have created
media content for extended marketing campaigns around a central IP— horror and
otherwise—for major studios such as Warner Bros., Disney, Universal, HBO, and
Sony. Through their work with Warner Bros., creating paratextual immersive
experiences for both the new It adaptations and The Conjuring Universe, they
illustrate this collaborative marketing enterprise and integrated business practice.
The Conjuring film franchise is produced by New Line Cinema (a subsidiary of
Warner Bros.), The Safran Company, director James Wan’s Atomic Monster Pro-
ductions, and are distributed by Warner Bros. The VR content produced to promote
the franchise includes The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Experience 360° VR (2016), The
Conjuring 2: Visions (2016), Annabelle Creation VR: Bee’s Room (2017), and The
Nun: Escape the Abbey VR (2017). Sunny Boy produced the first three of these
(along with other promotional content for the films), and although they were not
credited as producing Escape the Abbey VR, they remained involved in other digital
creative content that accompanied the release of The Nun and Annabelle Comes
Home (2019). The company characterized its multi-platform production for The
Conjuring 2 as an innovative, collaborative promotional campaign between them-
selves, the studio and an ‘auteur’ director, describing on their website that ‘this was
an incredible journey with Warner Bros. and an extremely talented filmmaker in
James Wan,’ resulting in ‘Warner Bros. first ever VR experience.’2 The integration of
production and marketing was emphasized in their work on Annabelle: Creation, as
Sunny Boy ‘were behind the scenes crew’ on location in Los Angeles, working con-
currently with the main film work. The function of Annabelle Creation VR was
defined as driving footfall toward the film’s theatrical release in urban markets with
a novel location-based experience, where ‘our cinematic VR experience was rolled
out as an activation across 10 cities prior to the release of the film.’3
Characterizing the VR experience as an ‘activation’ emphasizes its status as a
dynamic interactive experience beyond ordinary marketing content, whilst also
identifying its importance in building brand awareness for a central focus point,
that being the film’s theatrical release. These supplementary ludic experiences help
consumers achieve brand participation, and extend revenue streams and access
points to franchise cycles through active, innovative audience engagement. Horror
cinema’s ‘déjà vu boom’ and potential over-saturation of the marketplace with
genre productions made this strategy especially valuable. As one marketing trade
publication commented on the release of The Nun and its VR paratext:
the market is flooded with horror movies, and it’s becoming … necessary
for studios to do something … to stand out from the competition. [With]
an opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of The Nun before it
gets released, Warner Bros. has a chance to scare potential audiences,
making them more likely to purchase tickets when the movie hits theaters.
(Anon 2018)
The combination of an extensive universe mythology created on film and across

media, a successful integration of promotion and production practices (as well as
ongoing audience engagements) have made The Conjuring films and spin-offs one
of the most successful horror franchises in history, with a combined worldwide
gross of over $1.9 billion.4 Within the franchise system, there is a symbiotic infra-
structure in place to support each factor—film, marketing, multi-platform con-
tent—where business strategies emphasize the establishment and continuation of a
franchise as a tentpole investment property; studio financing structures allocate
large budgets for marketing and promotion; and independent immersive content
creators are hired to produce expensive but cutting-edge content that attracts
audiences to the core franchise asset. Sunny Boy’s VR experimentation was
enabled through franchise identity, and Warner Bros’ Conjuring franchise dis-
tinguished itself within the marketplace partly through innovative media market-
ing content that exploited VR’s novel way of experiencing horror.
Extensions into interactive media also formed the basis for recent horizontally
integrated studio expansions into divergent divisions and acquisitions, as
214 Sarah Thomas
illustrated by the smaller studio Lionsgate. Already a successful film distribution
studio by the 2010s with major successes like The Hunger Games films and (fol-
lowing their acquisition of Summit Entertainment in 2009) the Twilight franchise,
Lionsgate created an interactive division in 2014 with experienced digital enter-
tainment producer Peter Levin as President of Interactive Ventures, Games and
Digital Strategy. Focused primarily on video-game development, Lionsgate Inter-
active Ventures and Games also incorporated interactive digital marketing, and
between 2015 and 2019, concentrated on developing both VR and AR content as
part of its promotional strategies for the studio’s main assets, which also included
Divergent (2014), John Wick (2014), and the Saw franchise (2004–). In 2017,
Lionsgate commissioned the first installment in the Saw franchise for seven years,
Jigsaw (2017), hoping to reinvigorate consumer interest in the property. The studio
perceived this IP to be an exciting way to align film with the new interactive divi-
sion especially since, as Mark Bernard observes, ‘the Saw films are designed to
resemble interactive, new media products that encourage audience interaction’
(2014, 9). James Wan, director of the original Saw film (2004), had moved onto
other ventures like The Conjuring films, but, as Bernard also argues, the massively
profitable Saw franchise was never defined by a director-led brand identity, instead
being perceived as ‘an openly collaborative enterprise’ with this effacing of auteur
status coming ‘precisely because of—rather than in spite of—the blockbuster
status of the film franchise’ (143). This sense of a multi-authored, media-divergent
blockbuster text continued in the design and execution of the studio-produced
paratextual interactive material created around Jigsaw by Lionsgate’s new Inter-
active Division, showcasing both the significance of both film and the new division
with Lionsgate’s wider business structure.
This reflects an integrated infrastructure where different studio divisions work
together on the same franchise brand across different media formats in order partly
to manage investment and risk within the industry. James Fleury notes that ‘his-
torically, the industry used marketing initiatives to capture and test new trends …
[and] because of VR’s challenges, studios sought to avert risk by prioritizing pro-
motions over riskier, original content’ (2019, 280–281). This is mirrored by Peter
Levin’s own comments in 2016, describing how VR’s potential was safeguarded by
tying it to existing financially viable assets through promotion: ‘we have a big
initiative with our marketing and promotional vehicles based on some of our big-
gest IP. What a great way to bring attention to a nascent market like VR’ (Taka-
hashi 2016). Later, Levin continued to identity VR as significant for studio
investment, although implicitly suggested that the financial risk was still not
resolved into a fully manageable VR-based strategy: ‘A company like Lionsgate,
when we’re able to adapt IP into multiple formats—film, television, games—they
support one another. [We’re] very bullish on the VR medium … but at every turn
we’ve brought in players to mitigate our financial downside’ (Takahashi 2018).
The stable studio infrastructure and value of the central IP enabled experi-
mentation into the viability of VR content, not just at a textual level, but also
through research into consumer responses to the emergent interactive platform.
Jigsaw Virtual Room (2017) is a VR advergame created to publicize Jigsaw, and
was released online in addition to other conventional 2D promotional material.
The experience is a 60-second 360° CGI video in the form of a virtual escape
room, with a simple premise that refers to the textual detail of the franchise films
and relies on VR’s achievement of realism through presence and efficacy in its
theme of choice and consequence. The user enters the game to find themselves
encased in a head-mounted trap, with another imprisoned figure in their view,
and two levers in front of them. A beeping countdown starts to work its way
down to zero, and Jigsaw (voiced by actor Tobin Bell, who plays Jigsaw across
all franchise installments) informs them that pulling one lever will release them
but destroy their companion, and vice versa. It was first released as an installa-
tion at the 2017 New York Comic Con and then subsequently online leading into
the film’s theatrical release.
Lionsgate worked with software giant Unity to create the VR film, and also with
digital agency Isobar to undertake specific metric market research into how audiences
responded to the VR and 2D content. Production discourses around the project
foregrounded its primary goals as a combination of the financial and the emotional,
designed to ‘reignite fans and reach a new audience’ after a seven-year gap in the Saw
franchise.5 The market research was conducted on a large scale, with Unity tracking a
sample of 275,000 users and Isobar conducting an emotional efficacy study that
measured the sensory responses of watching the advert in 2D or with a VR headset.
Isobar described their role as helping to ‘measure the experience and quantify the
investment required by brands who aim to reach the next generation of users,’ and the
results suggested the investment in VR promotion was a profitable one, with market
research ‘proving … for Lionsgate Films that things worked better than expected and
that the VR experience ruled over the more traditional 2D online video trailer.’6 Unity
recorded that their digital-metric results ‘far surpassed traditional advertising bench-
marks,’ and their Vice President of Advertiser Solutions, Julie Shumaker, observed
that the experiment with horror VR and franchise IP proved that ‘broad-reaching,
deeply immersive ads are possible. The Jigsaw Virtual Room is just the beginning …
Brands will have the opportunity to tell their story in a way that elicits emotional,
memorable interactions’ (Hills-Duty, 2017b). Lionsgate’s tracking of their immersive
content explicitly measured its value as an investment, the results suggesting that this
created a successful channel for innovation in storytelling for immersive advertising
content. Here, a further cyclical relationship can be observed, where Lionsgate’s
horizontally integrated infrastructure allowed for extended investment into expensive
digital marketing practice and market research on consumer behavior, something not
available to all producers of immersive content. These measurable results have been
deemed as significant achievements in advertising due to the novel format and plat-
form of the VR text. In both cases, this new mode of audience engagement sustains
the financial imperative to create more immersive media content through its success
in growing franchise audiences via interactive location-based and/or home entertain-
ment paratextual content in an otherwise saturated theatrical film market. Addition-
ally, because of the inherent logical correlation between horror and VR, as a result of
the intensified sensory experience that horror VR generates, horror franchises such as
the Saw series can then take a vitally important role in driving industry innovation
216 Sarah Thomas
around immersive media in general, amidst an otherwise packed landscape of fran-
chise properties.
Blurring the boundaries: shifts within horror franchising, immersive

thrills, and film-led VR, 2018–2020
Looking at how horror texts, filmmaking, and VR experiences intersected between
2014 and 2020 also reveals changes in film-centered franchise properties of the decade
and the role played by immersive media and horror-influenced sensorial experiences
in directing these franchise cultures. First, in how the position of the film text as
franchise center may be lessened in studio structures that are increasingly favoring
investments in gaming over cinema; and second, how different modes of franchising
have moved into alternative areas of sensory experiences that target audiences in
ways that draw on horror, but in more expansive ways that move beyond distinct
genre boundaries. Regarding this first shift, and the way that it complicates ideas of
horizontal studio integration, a division like Lionsgate Interactive Ventures and
Games have partly turned away from determining how Lionsgate’s film IP can be
gamified, toward how the studio subsidiaries can work with existing video game
assets to further extend franchise content (and thus stand apart from filmic content as
the main franchise driver). In 2019, it announced a partnership with Scottgames, the
developer behind the popular horror game series, Five Nights at Freddie’s (2014–), to
finance and develop a VR adaptation of the video-game. As before, the financial
backing derived from established studio structures remains vital in developing
investment in the VR format (and the prevailing centrality of horror in immersive
development); yet here the impetus comes not through the pathway of a horror film
adaptation, but from a horror game adaptation that extends the franchise brand into
the emergent platform. As Senior VP of Lionsgate Interactive Daniel Engelhardt
explained: ‘Lionsgate [has] dreamed of helping bring Five Nights at Freddy’s to
VR … The original games are tailor-made for VR. It’s a beloved franchise’ (Hannon
2019). This move sidestepped Lionsgate’s film division and the proposed film adap-
tation of the video-game (an adaptation that Lionsgate Films have never been
involved in). The original game mixed first- and third-person perspectives that
potentially suggested effective adaptation into both the VR and cinematic form as it
combined both filmic and immersive techniques where the player technically embo-
dies the onscreen role of a security guard, alongside a reliance on point-and-click
gameplay with a fixed frame that predetermined screen information (Perron 2018,
271–272). The film version has been languishing in development hell since 2015, when
it was announced that Warner Bros. had acquired the film rights to the property. The
following year, Blumhouse, the independent film studio particularly associated with
the horror boom of the 2010s (see Chapter 6 in this volume), announced its purchase
of the film rights, but even with a studio identity and investment potential that
seemed to align well with the franchise IP, the film has reportedly not moved further
than script stage (Meers 2019). This development of a game-to-film franchise adap-
tation appears to have stalled even as the VR, AR, and game series continue to thrive,
and it can be seen as one way that gaming is driving investment into VR media
franchising in more ways than cinema, especially now that interest in 360° video has
dramatically lessened.
Even prior to this recent strategy of Lionsgate’s, other major studios had identified
gaming and other interactive business as the key to establishing a successful franchise
property, moving beyond the realm of the predominantly film-oriented franchise,
although maintaining an interest in the horror text itself. In 2017, in Universal’s bid
to create the Dark Universe based around their existing holdings of the classic Uni-
versal horror texts, they rebooted The Mummy with Tom Cruise, and looked to
interactive media as a means of supporting a franchise property that was clearly
influenced by a different genre for its inspiration, that is, the superhero-based Marvel
Cinematic Universe (MCU). Whilst Universal’s reboot strategy remained focused on
harnessing useful horror iconography, the sensational appeal associated with hor-
ror’s genre specificity was diminished in favor of considering horror’s value through
its status as a centrally-owned recognizable IP that a diverse media-world could be
built around. The Mummy’s two VR experiences showcase this studio diversifica-
tion of genre and medium, where the novelty of the VR format is less about an
extension of authentic horror experiences that one might expect from material pro-
duced around a reworking of a classic horror film, and more about aligning to
interactive platforms and a sensory effect that moved beyond fear and scares.
The location-based game experience of The Mummy: Prodigium Strike
(2017) echoes the film’s narrative trajectory, but with a strategic aim of showing
how well the film, and therefore the Dark Universe, could be gamified. As Chris
Heatherly, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Games and Digital Platforms
for Universal Brand Development, noted in promotional discourse:
as Universal makes a strategic push into gaming, we felt The Mummy was the
perfect place to start … We worked with the best developers in their fields and
took creative risks to imagine exciting new ways for fans to enter the Dark
Universe.
(Hills-Duty 2017a)
Similarly, the second experience, The Mummy: Zero Gravity VR, a behind-the-
scenes 360° video showing Cruise and other performers filming the zero gravity
and freefall sequence in the film, produced a paratext that aligned more to an
authentic connection to the star persona of Cruise himself (another form of brand
extension) in its emphasis on his adrenaline-fuelled real stunt work. Numerous
examples of behind-the-scenes promotional footage of Cruise’s films repeat this
aesthetic, including another VR text produced to accompany the release of Mission
Impossible: Fallout (both 2018) where viewers could experience the star’s heli-
copter piloting stunt work, again from a 360° perspective. Almost working against
the obvious sensory alignments between horror and VR, The Mummy’s para-
textual VR material downplayed its genre status and ability to generate intense
fear—the very elements that horror-based VR could be uniquely sold on—in favor
of an alternative experiential affect and an original older text’s ability to be trans-
formed into contemporary interaction and gameplay.
218 Sarah Thomas
Whilst Universal’s Dark Universe initially stalled as a viable franchise, the same
Universal horror iconography was reworked into one of the most successful recent
horror-based franchises, Hotel Transylvania (2012–), made by Sony Pictures Ani-
mation. The series belongs to the sub-genre of child-orientated horror, and it
places Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and other horror icons into an animated
form designed to appeal to family audiences. Conceived as a franchise from the
outset by the concept creator, Todd Durham, the property was sold to Columbia
Pictures and its owner Sony Pictures, and Hotel Transylvania is now an established
asset that has grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide (second only to The Conjuring
in terms of a successful horror-based franchise) with film sequels, a television car-
toon series, video-games, theme park rides, and immersive VR and AR content.
The two VR experiences produced by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality for the fran-
chise, concurrent with the release of Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation in 2018,
similarly shift the immersive, affective qualities of the VR format away from sensa-
tions of terror and toward modes of interactive enjoyment that reflect the family-
orientated audience and the third film’s storyworld, whilst also illustrating advance-
ments in the VR field itself. Hotel Transylvania 3 Virtual Reality Activity App (2018)
explores the monsters’ vacation environment either through a 360° video or as a
mixed reality experience to be used with a VR compatible book, reflecting a wider
move away from solely VR into augmented and mixed reality games. Hotel Trans-
ylvania Poptastic VR (2018) stays with the tethered HMD VR format, but is a music-
based rhythm game similar to the standalone VR game Beat Saber, which was a sur-
prise hit in 2018 and continues to be one of the highest selling VR experiences
worldwide. Here, the film paratext has taken influence from established successes in
the wider VR field, and the experience aims to attract young consumers cognizant
with both media formats. Catherine Lester characterizes Hotel Transylvania as indi-
cative of the ‘impossible genre’ of the children’s horror film where the genre’s primary
intention of scaring audiences is rendered controversial or negated, while these hybrid
texts instead allow children to explore a wide range of emotional responses—from
disgust to amusement and relief (2016, 25–26). The Hotel Transylvania VR experi-
ences similarly represent hybrid shifts in VR content, where the experiences still rely
on instilling acute emotional, physical, or sensory responses for the user, but unlike
many VR horror experiences, they promote that these affective responses generate
pleasurable engagement with horror texts without utilizing fear-based reactions.
Here, and in line with the franchise as a whole, the VR content is less about scaring
the player and more about a remediated alternative access point for younger audi-
ences to engage with horror iconography and history, much like other examples of
transmedia youth-orientated horror like the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine
(1958–1983), Groovy Goolies TV show (1970–1972) or The Monster Squad film
(1987).
Although not directed at children, but inherently connected with a nostalgic
connection to horror of the past and a function aligned with new modalities of
access to horror cinema, a similar discourse is present around Night of the Living
Dead VR (2020), released at the end of the VR horror film cycle. The unlicensed
experience makes use of the original 1968 film property’s public domain status and
was developed by interactive content developers, Pyramid Attack, and published
by the Canadian television company, Hollywood Suite, who specialize in broad-
casting classic movies from the 1970s to the 2000s. The experience digitally recon-
structs the film’s main environment around the house that the main characters are
holed up in as the zombie attack advances, striving toward the realism discussed
earlier around the reproduction of accurate filmic detail to create an authentic
immersive remediation. Here though, the unique sensory remediation process that
VR promises is aligned to the remit of Hollywood Suite’s own brand identity as a
site of contemporary access for old films. The VR experience is promoted as a
connection built on genre appeal, fan appreciation, and classic movie nostalgia.
The accurate digital mimicry of original filmic details is identified as appealing to
existing fans who can explore details of costume and layout at their own pace, but
the makers are equally keen to stress that expansive fan knowledge is not necessary
to enjoy the experience as an appreciation of the genre’s ‘spooky moments’ in
general may be enough.7 Unlike some of the other VR experiences discussed here,
Night of the Living Dead VR’s aesthetic function does not aim for a total immer-
sive horror experience, with producers also suggesting that it will not scare audi-
ences too much. Instead, its agenda is orientated toward making old media appear
new, with an emphasis on the reworking of the original film’s use of radio and
television broadcasts in VR to allow the user to consume this content in an alter-
nate way. Similarly, the immersive genre experience may be disrupted, as
when you’ve had enough zombie mayhem, head down to the basement and
flick on the old projector to watch new and exclusive interviews from
Night of the Living Dead actors and crew [that] enrich the experience with
insights into the horror classic.8
As with Hotel Transylvania, but markedly different to the experience of Alien Iso-
lation VR the VR franchise entry moves beyond a textual reproduction or extension
of genre-based fear, toward different emotional responses around authenticity and
nostalgia, and the sense of interactive fun and immersive exploration enhances the
franchise experience beyond the film text. Almost oddly for a VR experience, given
its medium specificity, Night of the Living Dead VR strives to emphasize the plea-
sure of film spectatorship and nostalgic reconnections of (re-)watching, rather than
immersive intensifications of horror’s paradoxical viewing position. However, the
VR experience is funded and developed by a classic TV channel franchise who, in a
similar strategy to the film studios, are using immersive marketing to draw audience
attention in a saturated market (only here the product is television spectatorship
rather than film).
Conclusion
Later entries into the film-based horror VR cycle, such as Night of the Living
Dead and Hotel Transylvania, identify that the continuing value of VR is in
how it enables audiences to experience horror iconography as modern media
220 Sarah Thomas
content and through immersive qualities that foreground pleasurable sensations
of re-connection, comfort, and familiarity by looking at known properties from
a new remediated perspective. It is telling that as significant and successful as It:
Float was as promotional VR content in 2017, by the time the next film IT:
Chapter 2 was released in 2019, no VR experiences were produced to accom-
pany it, suggesting the continued decline of Hollywood’s interest in 360° video
as paratextual content. Instead, VR investment has shifted toward fully realized
gaming experiences, and Hollywood marketing has moved toward big budget
location-based VR gaming experiences or XR promotional material. But horror
and VR remain a match made in heaven (or hell), with VR horror franchising
remaining buoyant, even if it is less connected with film adaptation than pre-
viously, with Half-Life: Alyx (2020), the VR-only sequel to the video games
Half-Life (1998) and Half-Life 2 (2004), and the VR spin-off to the Walking
Dead graphic novel and television universe, The Walking Dead: Saints and
Sinners (2020), all receiving widespread consumer excitement.
VR adaptations of Hollywood films continue to be produced and appear to have
taken some of the key lessons of the horror VR experiments to the next level,
including Sony Picture’s development of Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son
(2019) for the PSVR which makes use of VR’s slow pace, its contemplation of
detail and emotional connectivity, to explore the time-trapped repetitive environ-
ment of the film of the same name. Perhaps more indicative of where the future of
VR lies as a convergence between narrative and gaming is LucasFilm’s Vader
Immortal (2019–2020), a Star Wars extension developed by their immersive enter-
tainment division, ILMxLAB, and released over three episodes. This was designed
for and first released on the Oculus Quest, an HMD introduced in 2019 that offers
an untethered but high-end experience; a development that potentially might
increase VR’s home entertainment market. Vader Immortal makes full use of
LucasFilm’s massive investment capabilities to produce an impressive boundary-
pushing mixture of acutely detailed worlds, character development, storytelling,
music and sound, and nostalgic thrills of actually wielding a light-saber for real in
virtual battle. It also adapts the crucial characteristic articulated so well from
horror VR of using presence and embodiment to generate genuine fear in its
remediation of Darth Vader, which enables the player to experience (what genu-
inely feels like) the real imposing physical presence of the Sith lord for oneself, with
the palpable anxiety mimicking the original shudder felt on seeing his first
appearance in Star Wars (1977). Even for those who have never experienced that
sensation, it has the potential to make the Star Wars universe newly frightening,
with one reviewer commenting: ‘Darth Vader was never scary to me. [But in VR]
Facing down the dark lord is, to be frank, utterly terrifying’ (Feltham 2019).
Even as attention has shifted away from horror film-based VR experiences to
sell the genre’s franchises and showcase contemporary interactive technologies, it
remains an axiom that immersive media is now an integral part of fully realized
multimedia franchise encounters, and that VR and similar modes of augmented or
mixed reality formats help characterize the sensorial effect central to franchise
media and processes of remediation. For VR, genre and platform coalesced to
effectively communicate the power of immersive media formats—away from other
modes such as social media and viral circulation—where the recognized conven-
tions of horror, especially the importance of bodily sensation, quickly articulated
how the new media format could enhance and extend traditional media con-
sumption through features of presence and embodiment. What began as a logical
harnessing of one genre’s affective properties of generating fear within a new
medium’s innovative technical capabilities has evolved into different ways of
thinking through how immersion, pleasure, and affect works for audiences. This
was partly enabled via the economic structures that the horror film itself occupied
just as interest in VR was piqued; that of franchise properties, reboots and adap-
tations, coherent asset management, massive investment in promotion and mar-
keting, and integrated studio divisions. Horror film was driving forward
innovation in terms of intensity of textual affect, nostalgic and intertextual re-
encounters with genre iconography, marketing economies, and the appeal to
audiences of extensive franchise and/or multiverse texts. At this moment, there
existed a landscape ripe for exploitation where platform, genre, and economic
infrastructure (VR, horror, and franchising) could support each other in a sym-
biotic relationship of investment, production, and promotion. The reliance on
franchises, intertextuality, and remediation by the entertainment industries (and
consumer audiences) of the twenty-first century systemically opens up a space for
investment and experimentation across new media formats; as long as they work
toward a wider function of franchise support.
Notes
1 Alien [films: 1979, 1986, 1992, 1997, 2012, 2017; VR: Alien Isolation VR (2014), Alien
Covenant In Utero (2017)], The Conjuring Universe [films: 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018,
2019; VR: The Conjuring 2 – The Enfield Experience (2016), The Conjuring 2 – Visions
(2016), Annabelle Creation VR – Bee’s Room (2017), The Nun – Escape the Abbey VR
Experience (2018)], Crimson Peak [film 2015; VR: Beware Crimson Peak VR (2015)], The
Evil Dead [films: 1981, 1987, 1992, 2013; VR: Evil Dead Virtual Nightmare 2018], The
Exorcist [films: 1973, 1977, 1990, 2004, 2005; VR: Exorcist Legion VR (2017)], It [films:
2017, 2019; VR: It: Float – A VR Experience (2017), It: Escape from Pennywise (2017)],
Saw franchise [films: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2017; VR: Escape Jigsaw
Virtual Reality Experience (2017), Jigsaw Virtual Room (2017)], Lights Out [film: 2016;
VR: Lights Outs 360° Experience (2016)], The Mummy [film: 2017; VR: The Mummy –
Prodigium Strike (2017), The Mummy – Zero Gravity VR Experience (2017)], Ouija [films:
2014, 2016; VR: Ouija 2: Origin of Evil VR (2016)], Paranormal Activity [films: 2007, 2010,
2011, 2012, 2014, 2015; VR Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul (2017)], The Ring [films:
2002, 2005, 2017; VR: The Ring – VR Experience (2016)], Train to Busan [films 2016, 2020;
VR: Train to Busan VR Tour (2018)], Hotel Transylvania [films: 2012, 2015, 2018; VR:
Hotel Transylvania Popstic VR (2018), Hotel Transylvania 3 Virtual Reality Activity App
(2018)], The Strain [TV program: 2014–2017; VR: The Strain – Survive the Strain VR
Experience (2015)], The Walking Dead [TV program: 2010–; VR: The Walking Dead
Onslaught VR Game 2019, The Walking Dead – Saints and Sinners (2020)], Stranger
Things [TV program: 2016–; VR: Stranger Things VR Experience (2017)] and Night of the
Living Dead [film: 1968; VR: Night of the Living Dead VR (2020)].
2 https://sunnyboyentertainment.com/immersive/2019/1/31/the-conjuring-2-2s5d5
3 https://sunnyboyentertainment.com/immersive/2019/1/31/annabell-creation-xlyex
222 Sarah Thomas
4 www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Conjuring-The#tab=summary
5 https://unity.com/case-study/jigsaw
6 www.isobar.com/global/en/work/lionsgate-filmsunity/
7 https://hollywoodsuite.ca/livingdeadvr/
8 https://hollywoodsuite.ca/livingdeadvr/
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Index
3D films 45, 61–63, 88, 207 Barker, Clive 1, 24

4K cameras 101, 102 Barker, Martin 94
Bay, Michael 60
Abbott and Costello 19, 35, 44, 45, 189 Becker, Howard 17
Ackerman, Forest K. 46 Bedau, Hugo 160, 161
advergames 212 Bell, Tobin 215
Akkad, Malek 69, 74, 121 Bennett, Kathryn Conner 187
Akkad, Moustapha 69, 71, 78, 121 Benson-Allott, Caetlin 189
Alfredson, Thomas 194, 195, 197–203 Berlinger, Joe 6
Alien franchise 94–107, 147, 189, 210, 219 Bernard, Jami 56
Allen, Tom 67 Bernard, Mark 23, 138, 214
Amazon 154, 155, 186 Betz, Mark 179–182, 184, 186
American Horror Story (TV show) Bindel, Julie 163, 164
183, 191 Biskind, Peter 11
American Nightmare, The 128, 129, 140 #BlackLivesMatter 136
Amicus Productions 182, 188 Black Mirror (TV show) 186
Andreyko, Marc 202 Blade (1998 film) 195
Andy Hardy films 33, 179 Blade Runner (1982 film) 94
anthologies 23, 68, 69, 179–191 Blair Witch Project films 6, 60, 115, 123
Argento, Dario 17, 149, 151 Blatty, William Peter 209
Armitage, Mat 118 blockbusters 9–11, 15, 21, 23, 32, 53, 54,
Arrow Video 12, 13 112, 120, 147, 154, 195, 214
art-house cinema 17, 74, 184, 185, 194, Bloom, Harold 19, 165
195, 198 Blum, Jason 66, 74–76, 111, 113–118, 121,
atmosphere 23, 57, 58, 63, 69, 94, 96–107, 122, 129, 130, 138
118, 208–210 Blumhouse 23, 48, 74–76, 111–123, 129,
Atomic Monster Productions 212 130, 138, 186, 216
augmented reality (AR) 207, 214, 216, 218 Bogdonavich, Peter 11
Aurora Plastics 47 Bordwell, David 32
Austin, Mark 164 Bourdieu, Pierre 3, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18
auteurism 1–5, 11, 13, 16–19, 21, 66, 67, boutique packaging 12, 13
72, 73, 75, 94, 105, 106, 114, 115, 121, Boyce, Brandon 203
155, 158, 184–186, 213, 214 Braunstein, R.D. 166, 172
authenticity 7, 11, 54, 55, 58, 61, 115, 146, Bright, Graham 21
149, 156, 158, 202, 210, 211, 217, 219 British Board of Film Classification
(BBFC) 151
bad objects 1, 2, 13, 22, 188 Brooker, Will 15, 94, 95, 106
Bakhtin, Mikhail 185 Brown, Michael 136
Balun, Chas 57, 58 Brown, Simon 165
Index 225
Browning, Todd 30, 37, 40, 43, 48 Connery, Sean 153
Bryanston Pictures 53 Conrich, Ian 189
Buckland, Warren 24 continuity 18, 31, 33, 34, 36–42, 44, 45, 58,
budgets and budgeting 3, 6, 7, 30, 34, 53, 68–70, 75, 88, 97, 121, 136, 150, 152,
55, 58, 106, 111–117, 119, 120, 123, 129, 154, 156, 157
130, 154, 212, 213 Coppola, Francis Ford 11, 21, 74
Burkholder, Max 132 Corbucci, Sergio 147
Burns, Marylin 55, 60, 62 Corman, Roger 111
Burr, Jeff 57, 58 costume horror 74
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 33 COVID-19 120
Bustillo, Alexandre 62 Cozzi, Luigi 148, 149
Butler, William 58 Craven, Wes 1–4, 11, 13, 18, 19, 21, 23,
72, 81–85, 87–90, 128, 163, 166, 189,
Caldwell, John 54, 55 190
cameos 88 Creature from the Black Lagoon films 35,
Cameron, James 101, 105, 106 45, 47
Campbell, Ramsey 47 Creepshow (1982 film) 180, 182, 186, 187
cannibalism 54–56, 58, 60–63 Criterion Collection 13
Cannon Films 55 Cronenberg, David 128
Carew, Christy 135 crossovers 42–44, 189
Carpenter, John 5, 23, 66, 67, 69–78, 115, Cruise, Tom 217
121, 122, 128 Culda, Gabriela L. 162
Carradine, John 41, 43, 46 Cullors, Patrisse 136
Carter, Oliver 15 cult 1, 2, 5, 13–19, 56, 69, 155, 160;
Castle Rock 184 cultification 5, 107
Catsoulis, Jeannette 167 Cundey, Dean 67
computer-generated imagery (CGI) 102, Cunningham, Sean 4
103, 208, 215 Curtis, Jamie Lee 67, 70, 71, 75, 76,
Chaney Jr., Lon 39–41, 44, 46, 181 121, 187
Chapman, James 21 Cushing, Peter 45
Chaskin, Davi 84
Child’s Play films 22, 37 D’Alessandro, David 114
Choose Your Own Adventure 68, 186 D’Amato, Joe 152
Christensen, Kyle 2, 8 Daniel, Adam 208
Church, David 11, 23 Dark Horse Comics 47, 194, 202
Chute, Hilary 16 Dark Universe 48, 122, 189, 217, 218
Clarke, Donald 167 Davis, Jack 203
cliffhangers 33, 39, 70 DC Comics 16, 43
Clockwork Orange, A (1971 film) 131, 168 Dead franchise 11–13, 23, 145, 149–151,
Clover, Carol 4, 131, 165, 173 153, 154, 156, 157, 207, 218, 219
Cohen, Larry 11, 72 DeArmitt, Grant 122
colour 88 DeMonaco, James 114, 115, 119, 120, 130,
Columbia Pictures 60, 218 137–140
comics 16, 25, 27, 31, 43, 47–50, 182, 186, De Palma, Brian 10
194, 202 Deshpande, Shekhar 180
Comics Code Authority 182 Devine, Zanne 121
commercialism 1–4, 6, 7, 11–16, 18, 19, Dickens, Charles 15, 32
21, 30, 32, 35, 37, 48, 56, 58, 63, 67, 74, Diffrient, David Scott 180, 181, 184, 185,
101, 102, 112, 115, 117, 123, 129, 130, 189, 191
138, 140, 146, 147, 149, 153, 155, 157, Dimension Films 70, 72, 73
179, 185, 187 distributive franchising 23, 146, 150, 155,
Compass International Pictures 69 157, 158
Conjuring franchise 24, 117, 119, 188, 206, Dixon, Emily 5, 6
207, 212–214, 218 Dixon, Thomas 33
226 Index
Dixon, Wheeler Wilson 73 Frankenstein (novel) 31, 48
Django films 147 Frankenstein films 19, 20, 29–31, 34–49,
Donner, Richard 7 122, 189, 218
Dracula 19, 20, 29, 30, 34–38, 40–48, 72, Freeland, Cynthia 56, 82, 85
123, 189, 218 Freud, Sigmund 191
dread 97–100, 102, 103, 171, 190, 210 Friday the 13th franchise 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 22,
DreamWorks 115, 116 37, 45, 53, 83, 88, 115, 162, 181, 184,
Dudgeon, Piers 47 186–189
Durham, Tod 218 Friedkin, William 209
DVD 12–14, 34, 69, 101, 105, 112, 115, Friedman, Lester D. 31
166, 190, 207 From Dusk Til Dawn films 5
Fulci, Lucio 149, 151, 152, 155–157
easter eggs 74 Fuller, Brad 138
Easy Rider (1968 film) 11 Fun Train 209
Ebert, Roger 8, 67, 164, 167
EC Comics 182, 186 Gardner, Jared 33
Ejogo, Carmen 136 Garris, Mick 121
elevated horror 11, 129, 138, 140 Garza, Alicia 136, 140
Ellis, Kate Ferguson 170, 171 Gatiss, Mark 67
Engelhardt, Daniel 216 Gein, Ed 54, 61
Englund, Robert 82, 89, 190 Genette, Gerard 107
Etchison, Dennis 69, 77 Geraghty, Christine 157
Evil Dead films 14, 147, 148, 189, 194, Get Out (2017 film) 74, 76, 111, 113, 121,
195, 206 129, 130, 134, 136, 138
Exorcist franchise 19, 206, 207, 209, 210 Giallo 148, 151
exploitation films 1, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14–16, Gianopulos, Jim 117
30, 53, 72, 135, 140, 146, 147, 151, 154, Giler, David 105
163, 164 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The
(novel) 146
Facebook 116 Globus, Yoram 55
fandom 15, 160; fan films 77 Godzilla 47, 62
Fargeat, Coralie 160, 172 Golan, Menahem 55
Fellini, Frederico 13, 184 Gordon-Green, David 69
feminism 8, 75, 76, 133, 146, 161–163, gore 14, 21, 55–58, 61, 63, 67, 101, 102,
167, 171 118, 155, 156, 158
FilmDistrict 118 gothic 4, 23, 36, 169–171, 173, 183
filone 23, 148, 149, 158 Grant, Oscar 137
Final Destination films 22, 190 graphic novels 16, 47, 182, 186, 220
final girls 161, 173 Gray, Freddi 75, 136
Fincher, David 104–107 Gray, Joanathan 75
First National 33 Green, David Gordon 66, 74–76, 121
Fisher, Terrence 20, 45 Grey, Brad 117
Five Nights at Freddie’s 216 Grillo, Frank 120, 135
fleming jr, Mike 118 Gross, Jerry 163
Fleury, James 31, 34, 112, 113, 207, 214 Groundhog Day (1993 film) 220
flexi-narrative 40, 41, 183
Florey, Rober 35 Halberstam, Judith 168
formulae 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 21, 53, 63, Half-Life (video game series) 220
74, 82, 83, 112, 113, 119, 129, 147, 166, Hall, Stuart 18
169, 170; formula fallacy 4, 5, 8, 12, 21 Halloween franchise 5, 9, 19, 23, 37,
Foucault, Michel 18 53, 62, 63, 66–77, 69, 70, 72, 75–77,
found footage 60, 71, 115, 129 83, 111, 115, 116, 121–123, 184,
Francis, Robert 164 186–189, 192
Franco, Jess 152 Halloween Unmasked (podcast) 75
Index 227
Halpernin, Victor 145 I am Legend (novel) 151
Hammer Films 20, 21, 31, 45, 46, 194, 195, ILMxLAB 220
198, 202, 203 Insidious films 74, 111, 114, 115, 117–119,
Hanich, Julian 97, 98, 100 123, 188
Hannibal (TV series) 183 instalment fiction 32
Hansson, Jakob Hultcrantz 194, 202 International Films 69, 74
Hantke, Steffan 6, 129 intertextuality 30, 31, 44, 60, 61, 74, 179,
Happy Death Day films 74, 111, 114, 117 181, 186, 188, 190, 211, 221
Harlin, Renny 82 Invisible Man, The 19, 29, 34, 35, 42, 44,
Harrington, Richard 83 46, 48, 111, 122, 123
Harris, Martin 187 isobar 215
Hart, Marcus 68 I Spit on Your Grave franchise 8, 14, 23,
Harvey, Colin B. 31 159–164, 166, 167, 169–173
Harvey, Dennis 54 It: Chapter One (2017 film) 208
HBO 24, 136, 182, 212 It: Float (VR film) 208–210, 212, 220
head-mounted displays (HMDs) 206–211, Italy 23, 146–155, 157, 158
218, 220
Heatherly, Chris 217 Jacobowitz, Florence 128, 141
Heffernan, Nick 11 James, Stan 83
Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra 162, James Bond franchise 41, 153, 179
165, 171 Jancovich, Mark 3, 8, 15, 17
Henderson, Stuart 31, 34, 44, 146, Jaws (1974 film) 10, 147; Jawsploitation
148, 150 films 147
Henkel, Kim 53, 58, 59 Jenkins, Henry 15, 47
Henry, Claire 162, 165, 172 Jess-Cooke, Carolyn 2, 9, 32, 33, 53, 58
high art 9, 17 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 106
high concept 53 Johnson, Derek 22, 29, 30
Hill, Debra 67, 69, 71 Johnson, Tom 20
Hills, Matt 4, 5, 8, 12, 45 Johnston, Joe 48
Hills Have Eyes films 2, 13, 71 Jones, Alan 164
Hise, James Van 84 Jones, Darryl 6, 7, 10, 169, 170, 173
Hitchcock, Alfred 18–20, 63 Jones, Duane 145
Hoberman, J. 10 Joost, Henry 116
Hodge, Edwin 132 jump scares 118, 129, 166, 208
Holiday, Billie 145
Hollywood Suite 219 Kaleidoscope Entertainment 14, 159, 160
home invasion 119, 120, 130–132, 134, Kant, Immanuel 163
135, 138 Kapsis, Robert E. 18
home video 47, 54, 112, 186 Karloff, Boris 20, 36, 39, 41, 47
Hooper, Tobe 7, 11, 53–56, 60, 62, 63, Kavey, Allison B. 31
72, 128 Kehr, Dave 67
Hopper, Denni 11 Kent, Jennifer 160
Hopper, Frederick Burr 33 King, Martin Luther 145
Hotel Transylvania 24, 206, 207, 218, 219 King, Stephen 19, 165, 180
House of 1000 Corpses (2003 film) 72 King Kong 47, 62
HTC Vive 206 Kirkland, Ewan 210
Hugo, Victor 44 Kitsopanidou, Kira 212
Hugo Awards 17 Klein, Amanda Ann 107
Hulu 113, 184, 186, 191 Knipfel, Jim 44, 45
humour 55, 56, 71, 106, 185, 189 Koven, Mikel J. 148
Hunchback of Notre Dame 44 Kozloff, Sarah 40
Hunter, I.Q. 146, 147, 157 Kubrick, Stanley 131
Hutcheon, Linda 146 Kuhn, Bob 59
Hutchings 4, 5, 30, 34, 35, 37, 39 Kutzman, Alex 48
228 Index
Laemmle, Carl 30, 35, 36 MGM 150, 179
Land, Christopher 114 Million Hoodie March 133
Landon, Christopher 116, 117 Miramax 73, 74, 111, 121
Langenkamp, Heather 84, 87, 190 misogyny 164, 165, 171
Langley, Donna 114 Mission Impossible franchise 10, 179, 217
Laporte, Nicole 122 mixed reality (XR) XR 206, 207, 218, 220
Last House on The Left films 18, 19, model kits 29, 47
163, 166 Monroe, Steven R. 160, 166, 168, 169,
Lee, Christopher 45 171, 172
Legendary Pictures 62 monsters 1, 8, 23, 29–31, 34–41, 43–48, 98,
Leitch, Thomas 60 99, 102, 115, 123, 133, 139, 183–191,
Leone, Sergio 147 198, 218
Lester, Catherine 218 Moore, Demi 163
Let The Right One In franchise 194–205 Morgan, Chris 48
Levin, Peter 214 Motion Picture Association of America
lex talionis 23, 160, 161, 163, 166, 168, (MPAA) 57
171–173 Motion Picture Producers’ and Dis-
Liebesman, Jonathan 61 tributors Association (MPPDA) 36
Lindqvist, John Ajvide 194–199, 201–204 Mummy films 29, 34, 35, 41, 42, 44–48,
Lionsgate 61, 62, 214–216 123, 145, 206, 217
Lippe, Richard 128
Loach, Ken 21 Nabors, Douglas 209
loopholes 37, 39 National Film Registry 19, 67
Lowenstein, Adam 139, 161 National Riflemen’s Association
Luca, Michael de 82 (NRA) 139
Lucas, George 10, 11, 46 National Theatre of Scotland 194, 203
Lucas, Tim 150 Naylor, Alex 36
LucasFilm 220 Ndalianis, Angela 6
Lugosi, Bela 20, 37, 39–41, 43, 44, 46, 72 Neale, Steve 165
Needham, Gary 148
Maguire, David 172 Nehme, Farran Smith 36
Malle, Louis 184 Neibaur, James 36, 41
Mancuso Jr., Frank 188 Nelson, Andrew Patrick 70
Mann, Craig Ian 131 Nelson, Robin 40, 183
marketing 10, 11, 14, 15, 18, 33, 53, 58, neo-horror 8, 11, 20, 128
62, 113–116, 118, 138, 154, 160, 179, neoliberalism 8, 23
182, 189, 198, 206, 207, 211–215, neo-slashers 71, 72, 77, 189
219–221 Netflix 112, 113, 186
Martin, Trayvon 133, 136 Newby, Richard 73, 122
Marvel 16, 21, 43, 88, 113, 146, 189, 217; New Line 3, 57, 58, 61, 82, 83, 190, 212
Marvel Cinematic Universe 43, 88, Newman, Kim 164
113, 217 New York Film Academy 66
Masters of Horror (TV show) 183 Night Fright (1967 film) 154
Matai, Bruno 155 nightmare on elm street 4, 8, 9, 17, 81,
Matheson, Richard 151 186, 188, 190
Maury, Julien 62 Nightmare on Elm Street franchise 1–4, 8,
Mazzocone, Carl 61 9, 17, 21, 23, 37, 45, 57, 68, 69, 71,
McClory, Kevin 153 81–90, 122, 162, 184, 187, 189, 190
McMurray, Gerard 130, 137, 138, 140, 141 Nispel, Marcu 61
Mee, Laura 166, 167, 169 Nolan, Christopher 21, 41, 62
merchandise 22, 32, 46, 57, 102, 103, Nolan, William F. 98
161, 179 non-sequitur sequels 150
Merino, José Luis 152 novelizations 29, 47, 69, 77
Meyer, Stephanie 199 Nowell, Richard 54, 75
Index 229
Oakes, Simon 199 Raven, The (1935 film) 20, 34
Obama, Barack 132, 133, 137 Rawlings, Terry 106
Obscene Publications Act 152 Read, Jacinda 165
Ochonicky, Ada 66 Reagan, Ronald 8–11, 55, 200
Oculus Quest 220 reboots 6, 7, 24, 41, 45, 48, 61, 72, 77,
Oculus Rift 206 121, 122, 129, 179, 187, 189, 192, 207,
Ojeda, Michael S. 172 217, 221
Oller, Tony 132 Redbox 112
Omen, The (1976 film) 7, 9, 122 Reed, Tom 35
omnibus films 180–186, 188–192 Reeves, Matt 198–204
One Thousand and One Nights (book) Rehak, Bob 47
181, 185 remakes 4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 24, 36, 45, 48, 54,
Ordoña, Michael 167 58–63, 66, 71–74, 77, 78, 88, 113, 115,
Outcault, Richard 32, 33 116, 121, 129, 147, 153, 160, 166–169,
Overture Films 198 171, 172, 179, 192, 195, 199, 207
Resident Evil franchise 145, 209, 210
Palmer, R. Barton 107 response-as-if-real (RAIR) 208
Paramount 115–117, 188 retitling 146–150, 152–155, 157, 159
Paranormal Activity franchise 23, 45, 74, retribution 23, 159–163, 166, 168, 171–173
111, 113, 115–119, 123, 129, 130, 206 retroactive continuity 38, 39, 70, 88, 90,
parodies 35, 44, 56, 68, 77, 147 121, 192
Parody, Claire 57–59 return of the repressed (Freud) 132,
pasticcio 56 133, 191
Peary, Danny 54 Risher, Sarah 3, 82
Peckinpah, Sam 131, 168 Rodriguez, Robert 5
Peele, Jordan 74, 114, 134, 138 Rogers, Charles 30, 36
Peli, Oren 115–117 Romero, George A. 11–13, 23, 72, 128,
Penny Dreadfuls 32, 183 145, 148–153, 155–158, 180
Perry, Michael 116 Rose, Steve 129
Pesce, P.J. 5 Rosenthal, Rick 69, 71
Phillips, Tom 94 Roth, Eli 72
Pirates of The Caribbean franchise 113 Rough House Pictures 74
Platinum Dunes 60, 61 Rowling, J.K. 199
Platts, Todd K. 140 Rubin, Rebecca 122
Plotkin, Gregory 116 Russo, John 151, 153
Poe, Edgar Allan 19, 34, 181
Poltergeist (1982 film) 55, 118, 131 Safran Company 212
Pontikis, Peter 198 Saint-Gelais, Richard 30
pornography 12, 77, 147 Santo, Avi 30
portmanteau films 180, 192 Saunders, Ben 16
post-horror 129, 138 Savini, Tom 55, 153
post-slashers 9, 23, 70, 189 Saw franchise 22, 24, 37, 45, 113, 118, 206,
Production Code Administration (PCA) 36 207, 214, 215
pseudo-sequels 149, 157 scariness 66, 70, 98, 111, 129, 199, 209,
Psycho (1960 film) 63 218, 220
Purge franchise 23, 74, 76, 111, 114, 115, Schow, David J. 57, 58
119–121, 123, 128–140, 142 Schulman, Ariel 116
Pyramid Attack 219 Sconce, Jeffrey 4, 8, 13, 187
Scorsese, Martin 11, 21
race and racism 23, 76, 133, 135–137, Scott, Ridley 101, 105, 106
140, 150 Scottgames 216
Rais, Baron de 197 Scream Factory 12
Ralph, Sarah 94 Scream franchise 2, 22, 70, 71, 189
rape 159–168, 170–173, 196, 197 scream queens 75
230 Index
Selznick, David O. 36 Summit Entertainment 214
Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Sundance Film Festival 115
Delinquency 182 Sunny Boy 212, 213
September 11 (9/11) 131, 134, 145 superhero films 16, 21, 43, 179, 206, 217
seriality 2, 12, 16, 22, 23, 30–36, 39–42, supernatural horror 6, 70, 74, 76, 83, 117,
81–83, 90, 146, 148, 150, 156, 157, 129, 131, 181, 188
179–183, 185, 190, 192, 194, 195, 204 survival horror video games 209
Serling, Rod 181, 187 suspense 4, 19, 97, 103, 104, 118, 140,
sex criminals 164 166, 190
Sexton, Jamie 14 SyFy Network 130
sexual assault 159, 162, 163, 172
sexualisation 162 Talalay, Rachel 83
sexual violence 162, 169 Tales from The Crypt (TV show)
Shaye, Robert 3, 81–83, 88, 90, 190 182, 188
Shelley, Mary 31, 37, 47, 48 Tarantino, Quentin 5
Sherwood, Seth M. 62 Tarzan 33
Shimabukuro, Karra 3 Teague, Lewis 180
shock 14, 19, 98, 160, 167, 173 terror 98, 101, 132, 133, 170, 171, 209,
shockers 20 210, 218
Sholder, Jack 84 Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise 7, 23,
Shone, Tom 11 53–64, 71, 72
short stories 1, 36, 180, 181, 183, 184, Thailand 149, 152, 155
202, 204 Thompson, David 10, 11
Shudder 186 Thompson, Kristen 22, 100, 161, 183
Shumaker, Julie 215 Thorne, Jack 194, 203
Siodmak, Curt 40 thrillers 18, 46, 48, 76, 100, 120, 131, 147,
Siskel, Gene 8, 67 148, 160, 164
slasher films 5, 8, 9, 11, 14, 23, 53, 54, Thwaites, David 121
56, 62, 67, 69, 70, 77, 82, 83, 121, 169, Tiffany, John 203
187–189 TNT 194, 203
Sloan, Robin 210 Todorov, Tzvetan 39
smart horror 129 Tohill, Andy 63
Snyder, Zak 153 Tohill, Ryan 63
Sobchak, Vivian 131 Tometi, Opal 136
social commentary 76, 129, 138, 139, 145 Tomorrow Studios 203
Sony 118, 212, 218, 220; PlayStation Tompkins, Joe 66
VR 206 Torneur, Jacques 145
Spadoni, Robert 97–101, 104, 105 toronto International Film Festival
Spiegel, Scott 5, 166 118, 128
Spielberg, Steven 10, 147 torture porn 19, 20, 113, 161, 166
spin-offs 23, 63, 68, 94, 179, 182, 186, 188, Towlson, Jon 20
190, 191, 198, 206, 213, 220 toys 29, 31, 46, 102
splat pack 72, 78 Trancas International Films 69, 73
Split (2017 film) 111, 121, 122 transfictional storytelling 30, 31, 34, 36,
Staiger, Janet 13 39–45, 47, 184, 188
Standard Capital Corporation 36 Transformers franchise 113
Stand Your Ground law 134 transtextuality 106, 107
Starr, Marco 165 Tribeca Film Festival 198
Star Trek franchise 15, 47, 75, 179 Trump, Donald 120, 137, 138
Star Wars franchise 10, 11, 46, 47, 67, 75, Turner Broadcasting System 3
94, 179, 188, 194, 220 Twentieth Century Fox 101, 104–106
Strange, Glen 41, 44 Twilight franchise 7, 10, 194, 199, 214
Straw Dogs (1971 film) 131, 168 Twilight Zone franchise 181, 182, 191
streaming services 186, 191 Twitter 116
Index 231
unhorror 7 Whiplash (2014 film) 113
Unity 215 Whitehead, Nathan 135
Universal 20, 23, 29–31, 34–38, 40, 42–48, white privilege 132, 133
114, 115, 117, 119–121, 123, 154, 181, Williams, Caroline 56
189, 212, 217, 218; monsters 23, 29–48 Williams, Michael Kenneth 136
USA network 130, 140 Williams, Tod 116
Williams, Tony 131
V/H/S (2012 film) 186 Williamson, Kevin 66, 70
Vadim, Roger 184 Wilson, Patrick 118
vampires ch11 40, 43, 46, 48, 145, 151, Wire, The (TV show) 136
195–198, 200–202, 204 wokeness 76
VHS 66, 186, 191 Wolf, Mark J.P. 40, 97, 102, 105
Viacom 117 wolf man 35, 38, 39, 41–44, 46–48, 123
victim blaming 162, 172 Wood, Robin 7–12, 17, 19, 128, 129, 132,
video nasties 14, 19, 21, 151, 152, 154, 161, 133, 135, 139, 140
164, 167 Work, Cliff 36, 37
Video Recordings Act 14, 21 worldbuilding 23, 31, 43, 45, 54, 57, 59,
Vinegar Syndrome 12 62, 70, 97, 102, 105, 189
VIPCO 151, 152 World of Video 2000 154
virtual reality (VR) 206–221 Wrightson, Bernie 182
Virtue, Graeme 129 Wyrick, Laura 82
voodoo 145, 182
X-Files, The (TV show) 183
Waggoner, George 42
Wakefield, Rhys 132 Yablans, Irwin 67
Walking Dead franchise 145, 206, 220 Yagher, Kevin 88
Wallace, Tommy Lee 67 Young, Alison 172, 173
Wan, James 72, 114, 118, 119, 213, 214
Warner Bros. 3, 62, 117, 212, 213, 216 Zarchi, Meir 14, 159–161, 164, 168, 169,
Weinstein, Bob 72 171–173
Wells, Paul 1, 2, 6 Zimmerman, George 133, 134, 136
Wertham, Fredric 182 Zombie, Rob 66, 72, 73, 76, 77, 121
Wetmore, Kevin J. 131, 134 Zombie, Sheri Moon 73
Whale, James 20, 30, 35, 36, 38, 42 zombies 4, 12, 14, 23, 113, 129, 145–158,
Whannell, Leigh 48, 72, 78, 114, 118, 171, 189, 197, 199, 219
119, 123 Z Video 152, 153

Horror Franchise Cinema

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Horror Franchise Cinema

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Horror Franchise Cinema

Mark McKenna is Lecturer in Film, Television and Radio at Staﬀordshire Uni-

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bour-

Hollywood Remembrance and American War

Film Noir and Los Angeles

Australian Genre Film

Trans New Wave Cinema

Love in Contemporary Cinema

Horror Franchise Cinema

Philosophical Theories of Political Cinema

ISBN: 978-0-367-18327-1 (hbk)

Introduction: The death and resurrection show: horror franchise

1 Building imaginary horror worlds: Transﬁctional storytelling and

3 If I were a carpenter: Prestige and authorship in the Halloween

4 If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming: The Elm Street series as

5 Allowing ‘us just to LIVE there’: Atmosphere and audience

9 Horror heroine or symbolic sacriﬁce: Deﬁning the I Spit on Your

12 ‘A match made in heaven (or hell)’: Franchise experiments between

3.1 A meme parodying the Choose Your Own Adventure books.

an overwhelming dismissal of the sequel on aesthetic grounds, and on

Although Loock’s ‘good’ work-bound/‘bad’ serial opposition is often applied to

reappear everywhere. It is the generative principle of most of the judge-

Shimabukuro’s ‘denial of the “economy”’ regarding Craven’s ‘auteur ﬁlm’ com-

Dixon’s account of post-millennial horror cinema is replete with moralistic and

The romanticization of neo-horror

taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by

horror aﬁcionados often struggle for a sense of cultural distinction by

a level of generality, the Romero zombie ﬁlms—in particular the trilogy—

processes of cultural distinction have historically separated these cinemas

is objectively condemned to deﬁne itself in relation to legitimate culture …

As with the binary between ‘horror-as-art’ and mass-produced commercial

the critical marginalization of other comic-book genres is justiﬁed. The only

If we replace ‘literary comics’ or ‘graphic novel’ with ‘cult horror’ or ‘low-budget

popular forms become enhanced in value, go up the cultural escalator—and

Similarly, Wes Craven may nowadays be viewed by many horror scholars as a

Aims and structure of this book

Derek Johnson explains that entertainment franchises are ‘not equivalent to

Series, serials, sequels

overt reference might be made to events, relationships and characters from

Mapping continuity in imaginary horror worlds

the problem confronting Universal, therefore, was how to bring back a

The retrospective ‘ﬁnding a loophole’ that Hutchings points toward is illustrated by

a narrative process wherein the creator(s) and/ or producer(s) of a ﬁctional

beings or things that appear in two or more universes or worlds, suggesting

Conclusion: monster culture

almost no kind of consumer product or novelty that could not be enhanced by

‘A curiously isolated phenomenon’

Parodic apocalypse: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

World-destroying: The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Reinventing the steel: twenty-ﬁrst-century chainsaw

Who was that masked man? The Halloween franchise from

Michael Myers walked with a Zombie

Halloween in the house of Blum

Conclusion: you can’t kill the boogeyman

Bad reputation: ‘diminishing returns’ versus oneiric qualities

Caught in a dream: Elm Street as recurring nightmare

We dream the same dream

Figure 5.1 Rating for each ﬁlm in comparison to Alien

Breakdown of Age in the Atmosphere Group