Well, Halloween 2018 is having the resounding impact across the horror world that Avengers did for the superhero blockbuster in 2012. Everything now must be a trilogy if you want to reboot a franchise properly. The Exorcist was bought for $400m to make three films, and judging by The Exorcist: Believer, it’s not going to go well. David Gordon Green, the director that started this mess with the aforementioned Halloween film, has been kicked off the sequels. News has recently broken that Scream 7 was meant to be the third in a trilogy, which won’t happen now they’ve kicked out Melissa Barrera for her Israel/Palestine comments. Danny Boyle’s developing a trilogy of sequels to 28 Days Later. We had the Fear Street trilogy a while back on Netflix. So it seems that although Randy said in Scream 3 that trilogies were a rarity in the horror genre, he never saw this coming.
All this is important to note because The Strangers: Chapter 1 is the first part in a trilogy, which I believe has all already been filmed and is ready to go, and the trailer for this first film just dropped. They’ll all be released in 2024. Great, we say. The Strangers back in 2008 was one of the best horror films of that decade, and whilst Prey at Night wasn’t incredible, it also wasn’t the worst sequel in the world (although I forgot the ending completely, so I’ll have to go back and re-watch it, even though I only caught it for the first time in the past year or so.) Let’s do a little change here and there, refresh the story for 16 years after the first, and we’re all good to go. The films are theoretically fairly cheap to make, horror does well generally at the box office, so let’s make some money.
But when we watch the trailer, we’re confronted with the terrifying reality that this film isn’t in fact a sequel. It’s another remake in a sequel’s clothing. And whilst remakes aren’t inherently bad, and can be done very well (The Thing, The Fly, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc), the issue is that they’re not even hiding it well. Sure, the first remake in cinema history was the first film by George Melies, when he remade the Lumiere Brothers film Partie de Cartes, back in 1896, not even a year after film was invented, so they’re an inherent part of the filmic medium. The problem here is that it isn’t being done to upgrade or revamp a concept, as films such as The Fly did in 86, taking a concept and going in a new, interesting direction with it. To be fair to My Bloody Valentine, the 2009 remake did at least put a twist or two on the formula. The Town That Dreaded Sundown remake in 2014 was a nice meta remake sequel with some interesting additions to an influential original film. Maniac in 2012 took the 1980 William Lustig film and changed the entire sleazy tone by making it completely first person POV, adding an incredibly gross, perverted nature to it. Horror remakes can be done, if done properly.
In the trailer for this film, however, we get a glut of recreations of some of the most famous shots from the first film, including ending with the original film’s tortuous, existential final moments with our heroes tied to the chair asking why the strangers are doing it to them, only to be told ‘because you were home.’ Well, let’s give them props for changing the exact wording in this trailer to ‘because you’re here’. Congratulations. One slight moment of change. But there’s still the record being played, the car trying to be started, a character moving away to reveal Bag head man standing nearby, specifically a couple in a cabin (different circumstances to the first but still a couple in a cabin), and the list goes on. They all get thrown at us in the second half of the trailer, one minute of repeats of moments we’ve already had ingrained in us for years.
It is entirely possible that what is shown in the trailer only encompasses the first 30 minutes of the film, and they go ahead and do something radically left-field afterwards. What the trailer shows could just be the first act, as Knock at the Cabin/The Cabin at the End of the World did. But I have an aching, guttural feeling, that this won’t be the case. For all the flaws of Prey at Night, it understood that the genius of the original film was the simplicity of it, and the lack of information about the strangers themselves. This lack of answers, of understanding, made it work. Two films down the line and this third one, I doubt, will do much to change things. And it’s not like you’re going to kill one of them off like the end of Prey at Night; you’ve got another two films riding on people discussing which of the three masks they like best to generate Twitter interest. At that point, they didn’t foresee another film, so lets do something different. Three films made and ready to go, it won’t happen in Film 1.
So many films now rely on people pointing to the screen and going ‘Oh my god I get that reference! That makes this a good film!’ that even the trailers are now saturated with it. We live in the era of metatextuality, the fan theory, the reference spotter. This is the Easter Egg Era, and half of a film’s marketing is built into the film itself to generate YouTube videos pointing out references, callbacks, cameos, and ‘did you know’ TikTok vids and Instagram posts. What is seemingly forgotten is that one can keep the essence of the first film without directly referencing it. You may maintain the soul without calling attention to this film’s identity. Ironically, by doing that, you begin to degrade it, unless done very knowingly and specifically.
I truly hope the film doesn’t have too many of these moments, and keeps it simple, an old story with a fresh lick of paint with no more fan service than those moments shown in the trailer because that’s what the producers asked for. From shots out of context, it doesn’t look like it’s doing too much lore-work, so that’s a hopeful sign, and that leaves it open for the second and third films to forge themselves a new path and identity. However, I’m also worried for that precise reason. If the first film is awful, the sequels are screwed from the start. Making a trilogy hinges on the films being good and doing well, something The Exorcist: Believer seemingly forgot. More for the sake of the crews working on the second and third films in this upcoming trilogy, I hope it works, because I wouldn’t want to put them on my CV or my show reel if they’re bad. I’m not holding my breath for miracles, however.
Article by Kieran Judge
Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of this piece. Have you seen the trailer, and if so, what did you think of it? Let me know by dropping a comment down below, leave the post a like, and remember to follow the blog to be alerted for my updates and reviews.
KJudgeMental 