The Scream
franchise helped to revitalize the teen slasher more than can described with
words. This is with the knowledge that
the franchise revitalized a dormant subgenre.
There is no way to value transferring something from apparent death to
prosperity. Anyway the most important
character within the original Scream trilogy
was Randy Meeks. Obviously Neve
Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette had more importance to the actual
trilogy, but Randy, as the film geek, was the most important character to any
discussions on the subgenre. As most
understand the scream trilogy had a self-reflexivity and a heightened degree of
intertextual referencing incomparable to any film that may have preceded it. Randy was the epitome of these aspects of the
franchise. Before he is brutally
murdered in the back of a news van in the Scream
2, Randy begins to describe the rules of sequels to horror films. He states, “…number 1: The body count is
always bigger. Number 2: The death
scenes are much more elaborate, more blood, more gore, carnage candy, your core
audience just expects it. And number 3:
If you want your sequel to become a franchise, never ever…” boom Dewey cuts him
off. This paper would have been so much
easier if that didn’t happen. However,
since we will never know, let’s look at his first two rules. Is this the case of the average sequel to a
teen slasher?
The original A Nightmare on Elm Street has 4 deaths. The sequel has 6 deaths. Every kill in the original film has a
connection to the main story. The sequel
has random deaths that would suggest that Randy’s rules have some serious
merit. The next two Nightmare films also have more kills than the original. Similarly
the sequel to Halloween also has a
higher kill count, in addition to the fact that blood is shown for the first
time in the series. The sequel to Friday the Thirteenth has a similar kill
count to the original, but it seems necessary to explain that the franchise
shifts after the first film; the killer is no longer Mrs. Voorhees, and is now
her son Jason Voorhees. When speaking to
the brutality of the kills, Tom Savini, the special effects guy for the
original film did not work on the sequel due to his involvement with a similar
film, The Burning. It is fairer to compare the second Friday the Thirteenth with its sequels,
which were much more brutal than its predecessors.
It is also important to suggest that the
deeper themes of the films were now secondary.
Sure there were final girls in both Halloween
II and Friday the Thirteenth II and III, but at this point this seemed formulaic rather than hitting on the deeper meanings the subgenre was
supposed to represent. To further
express this idea, the “hero” of A
Nightmare on Elm Street 2 was a male.
As these films would continue with further sequels the “hero” of the
films would also change. In the fourth
and fifth installments of the Halloween series
the series was a child similar to the third and fourth films of Friday the Thirteenth. The sexual inhibitions of the “final girl” were no longer important.
