This week sees Halloween Ends hit cinemas, bringing to a close the trilogy of legacy sequels from director David Gordon Green and horror uber-producer Jason Blum. It isn’t really the end, though; there will be more Halloween movies in the future, you can bet your pumpkin spice latte on it. But for now, this is it.
Horror franchises are a funny thing; beloved by fans but variable in quality, they tend to run and run until diminishing returns rather than dramatic necessity put a stop to production. There are a few final outings that really stick the landing, though. So, after you check out Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode take on merciless Michael Myers for the (allegedly) last time, consider how it stacks up against these other killer exits.
The Franchise: Halloween
Halloween’s continuity is messy as all hell, but without drawing a flowchart and excluding Rob Zombie’s divisive remake duology, we’ll say that the long-running adventures of silent slasher Michael Myers came to an end with…
The Movie: Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
Following a very successful, Scream-adjacent Halloween: H20, Resurrection instantly squanders all goodwill by perfunctorily killing off heroine Laurie Strode and sending a mixed bag of college students and crew members (including Busta Rhymes and a pre-Galactica Katee Sackhoff) into the old Myers house for a spooky reality show. Quelle surprise, Michael shows up. Audiences did not.
The Verdict: Literally the worst Halloween movie ever made.
The Franchise: A Nightmare on Elm Street
Wes Craven put a fresh spin on the slasher genre by giving us scarred and knife-fingered Freddy Krueger (Robert England), who stalks his victims in their dreams, slaughtering them while they sleep. A Nightmare on Elm Street spawned a huge multimedia franchise that ran until…
The Movie: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Returning to the franchise, Craven went metatextual, positing a story set in the real world with himself, Robert Englund, and Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy in the original film, playing themselves, while Freddy is actually an ancient demon trapped by the movies but now entering the real world. Yes, it’s very strange, and very ambitious, and a wild swing after several by-the-numbers sequels.
The Verdict: Just dreamy.
The Franchise: Friday the 13th
Kicking off in 1980, Friday the 13th quickly realised that the smart money was in hulking, hockey-masked Jason Voorhees and not the original killer (his mother, as Scream fans will know). Machete in hand, Jason butchered countless horny teens at Camp Crystal Lake over the years, right up until…
The Movie: Jason X (2001)
Cheerfully ignoring the fact that two separate prior films had promised to be the final instalment, Jason X goes for broke by resurrecting the silent slaughterer on a spaceship in the far future, juicing him up with nanotechnology, and setting him loose. Carnage naturally ensues. Yes, it’s ridiculously silly, but embracing silliness is a good thing at this late stage of the game, and an appearance by horror auteur David Cronenberg earns bonus points.
The Verdict: A rocket to the top.
The Franchise: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Tobe Hooper’s sleazy, queasy, 1974 classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, sees a vanload of young folks, including iconic Final Girl Marilyn Burns, run afoul of a clan of degenerate cannibals in the backwoods of Texas, including a big guy called Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), who wears a mask made of human skin and wields some manner of power tool. It was really too nasty and singular to support a long franchise, although remakes and reboots abound, and the original run only lasted four movies, ending with…
The Movie: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1997, sort of)
Directed by original Massacre co-writer Kim Henkel, this dire entry saw a brief release in 1995 and seemed destined to obscurity… until stars Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger hit it big. Recut and re-released, it still died a death. A jokey, awkwardly self-reflexive near-remake of the original, it sees Leatherface dabble in drag and hints at some kind of cultish conspiracy underpinning the clan’s carnivorous Texan activities. To be fair, Matt and Renee’s star power is quite evident, especially with the benefit of hindsight.
The Verdict: Amputate it.
The Franchise: Final Destination
If this sounds like a one-off X-Files episode, that’s because it started as one. After having a premonition of an air disaster, Devon Sawa hauls his friends off their flight, only for the bloody thing to actually crash. Bullet dodged? No, as it turns out you can’t cheat death, and thus a cast of talented young things proceed to die in a series of gruesome, inventive, Rube Goldberg-like accidents. Every single movie is the same, and it works a treat – especially in 3D. Also, Tony Todd shows up as a funeral director who may actually be the Grim Reaper.
The Film: Final Destination 5 (2011)
The joy in these things is in the surprising death sequences, each more fiendish than the last, and the final Final Destination (for now) pulls off a doozy. Having evaded certain doom for the entire length of the film, lovers Nicholas D’Agosto and Emma Bell seem to have actually beaten death at its own game, and jump on a plane bound for Paris. Their flight is interrupted by an upset passenger and… holy hell, it’s Devon Sawa! It’s the plane from the first movie! But that means…
The Verdict: A fitting epitaph.
