10 Horror Movies That Saved Bad Franchises

Long-running horror franchises are built around endless resurrections. The final girl defeats the evil slasher and sends him to the bottom of a fetid lake. Then 18 months later the next installment comes out and it turns out you can’t drown a zombie because the undead don’t need to breathe. (D’oh!) One fishing mishap later and boom, the killer is back and the body count is bigger than ever.

But bigger does not mean better, especially in long-running horror franchises. It’s easy to up the splatter factor; it’s hard to make audiences care about characters who seem destined for an early grave at the business end of a dude with knives for fingers and a face that looks like burned lasagna. As a result, so many horror sequels fail to live up to their predecessors. They skate by thanks to their loyal fanbases and a target audience willing to accept almost any product provided it’s playing at their local movie theater on a Friday night.

But every so often a filmmaker with some vision gets their hands on a franchise that’s gotten so bad, its studio stewards are willing to try something a bit more creative. That’s when you wind up with stuff like the ten movies on the list below, the horror sequels that took struggling series and brought them back to life not just literally but metaphorically as well.

In some cases, these revivals were short-lived; by the next sequel, they were back to releasing reheated leftovers. In others, they continued on their new, and more creatively rewarding paths. Either way, for better or for worse, the resurrections continued until the money dried up. That’s the only thing that can truly kill a slasher villain.