Horror is an endless genre. Like science fiction, a surplus of ideas run through our minds like the final girl runs from a slasher. Fears are ideas that take the form of evil machinations. They turn the imagination into an unthinkable, gnarled mess. The mind becomes a torrid hotbed for tumultuous terrors. Hesitation does the thinkers in, scares them straight and stiff as dead wood. Awareness helps them stay alive, long enough to get that running start.
Realizing those fears again, getting scared as bad as the first time, is why we return to horror films. We face our fears in a sense and get a taste of the trauma that resonates with us. Suffering an ill-fated event or being a victim is a universal theme. What’s worse is when it’s out of our control. What we can control is how we face the fear. Horror movies like Child’s Play evolved their scares (Chucky had so many ways to play) while others tend to overstay their welcome (time to go home, Michael Myers). Sequelitis can be its own horror, but sometimes a sequel can take the horror to darker places.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
10 Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Unidis
A design house of fashion models is terrorized by a masked killer hellbent on confiscating an incriminating diary. Entries detail the dirty laundry of each employee at the fashion house. Police suspect that one of the men had a sexual vendetta against the women. The managers of the salon, Contessa Cristiana Cuomo (Eva Bartok) and Massimo Morlacchi (Cameron Mitchell), plotted the murders in secret. Cristiana did it to kill her husband and marry Massimo, while Massimo did it to marry into Cristiana’s family fortune. The two were cut from the same cloth only to be yesterday’s fashion trend. The underbelly of the fashion industry could be adapted into a sequel, with a cutthroat, make-or-break tone, like a horror version of The Devil Wears Prada.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
9 Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Lux Compagnie Cinématographique de France
Father-daughter relationships are a special bond. That family tie is cut when Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is behind the wheel of a car accident that leaves his daughter Christiane (Édith Scob) disfigured. Being a plastic surgeon, he attempts to perform a skin graft to restore Christiane’s face, but not before luring young women to be her donors. After many failed face transplants, Christiane grows depressed, and resents her father’s well-meaning, but exploitative scientific pursuit. She frees herself from the physician’s laboratory-prison and enacts poetic justice on the faceless father. Christiane still wears her dollish face mask as she escapes, but what became of her is still a mystery. Maybe she followed in her father’s footsteps or became a beautician.
8 I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
American International Pictures
While Teen Wolf satirized the Universal Monster of the Wolf Man, high schooler Tony Rivers (Michael Landon) became an unwitting participant in the myth. Tony has a bad temper and a bad reputation for picking fights with his classmates. His peers and mentors advise that he sees a psychologist. The doctor he sees practices more than hypnotherapy; he tricks and treats Tony to a serum that reverts a person’s nature to a primitive, animalistic alternative. Manipulation of the innocents is a popular theme in horror. I Was a Teenage Werewolf has the right amount of teenage sadism and scientific experimentation to reinvent or revisit in a sequel.
7 Nightbreed (1990)
20th Century Fox
Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) is a mental patient escapee after being lied to and framed by his doctor (malpractice and doctors seems to be rampant in the genre) that he is a serial killer. He makes his way to a graveyard where the underground city of Midian exists, filled with a group of friendly outcasts and meek monsters called the Nightbreed hiding from humanity. Aaron’s visions of a monster society were true as he took the fall for the doctor’s murders. It’s man against monster in this ragtag horror film with some pivotal loose ends. Aaron is tasked with finding a new sanctuary for the Nightbreed, and there are plenty of graveyards to choose from.
6 One Dark Night (1983)
Comworld Pictures
The mysterious death of an occult and psychic vampire serial killer makes the news after six girls are murdered for their bioenergy. A sorority pledge must pass her sorority’s initiation by staying a night inside a mausoleum. Unbeknownst to her, the dead mystic has been entombed in the same mausoleum, and her presence has reawakened his powers, endangering the teen girl. At the climax, a corpse falls from its casket with a scream. This is a fake-out gag, but if a sequel did happen, it’s a smooth transition into the occultist’s undead supernatural powers.
5 The Innocents (1961)
Babysitting in a haunted mansion with possessed schoolchildren will make anyone unhinged. The wealthy guardian of the ghost kids couldn’t pay governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) enough for what she went through. Before her employment as a caregiver, she learns from the maid that two employees of the family estate were smitten with each other before their deaths. Miss Giddens puts two and two together to deduce the boy and girl’s possession come from the estate’s staff. The boy gets petrified to death, but the girl isn’t a worry somehow. Miss Giddens got along with her, which could mean she is a peaceful entity, but the ghosts still remain with the track record to prove it.
4 The Night Walker (1964)
Universal Pictures
The wife of an inventor ironically invents nightmares come to life. In this last black-and-white film from Universal Pictures, the overprotective husband accuses his wife of infidelity, which leads the wife to having fantasies of a dream lover. Her husband’s death was orchestrated by one of his lab assistants, and the dream lover was a detective, hired by the inventor, who followed her every move in case she should be unfaithful. The detective finds the assistant posing as the dead inventor as they both fall to their deaths. A sequel and a nice callback might deal with an invention that controls or influences dreams and nightmares.
3 The Terror (1963)
One of Roger Corman’s films made from nothing (a cosmic, Lovecraftian staple of the unknowable) has an equally confounding plot. To simplify, a series of identity crises take place thanks to bewitched devilry and a haunting ghost. The curse is lifted after mentally disturbed saboteurs, including Boris Karloff, make a castle crumble. A sequel would have to be inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe story, since Corman used the set from The Raven to make The Terror. Another act of guerrilla filmmaking with a plot that’s easier to follow would do this sequel good.
2 Them! (1954)
Warner Bros.
Nuclear warfare meets mother nature’s most important member who ensures our ecosystem’s survival: insects. When man introduces the first atomic bomb, the launch also introduces eight-foot-tall radioactive ants. The army of ants quickly becomes fire ants with the military’s flamethrowers. Call the sequel They! and let the nuclear threat be North Korea.
1 Witchfinder General (1968)
Tigon Pictures
Vincent Price is a 17th century witch hunter Matthew Hopkins, visiting village after village, torturing suspected witches for a fee. Hopkins is ambushed and at the receiving end of revenge for brutalizing a British cavalry officer’s beloved. The witch trials were pure insanity. It’s only fitting that witchcraft be at the center of a sequel, this time with unforgiving black magic.
