10 Ridiculous Times Horror Movie Franchises Jumped The Shark

It's a generally accepted fact that horror movie franchises only get worse over time. The original is great, the first sequel or two is decent, and then it all goes to crap from there. For fans looking back on these films the question becomes, when exactly did it all go wrong? How did Freddy turn from a scary murderer into a comedian?

While it's often a gradual decline, in some cases you can pinpoint the exact moment the franchise jumped the shark and became too ridiculous to handle. A few films in, the writers will make a decision so profoundly dumb that it's completely irreversible, and any further sequels are never able to recover. Sometimes it's the death and resurrection of a character, at which point it's been established that there are no stakes because anyone can be brought back. Other times, it's a plot turn so silly that audiences are unable to take anything after that seriously again.

Occasionally the next movie is able to course correct and get things back on track if the writers realize they screwed up. Usually that doesn't happen, though, and you can trace all the failures of the series to this one moment when it all went south. 

The Halloween franchise almost went in an interesting direction with Season of the Witch by turning the series into an anthology, but audiences demanded the return of Michael Myers. They got it, but the plot the filmmakers would come up with to stretch this thing out became more ridiculous than you could ever imagine.

In the original movie, part of what's so terrifying about Michael Myers is that there isn't a clear cut explanation for why he's killing people. Freddy and Jason both have somewhat elaborate backstories, but for Michael, he's just an insane person. That ambiguity makes the whole thing a lot more frightening.

That's all thrown out the window with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, in which it's explained that Michael is just evil because he's being controlled by a cult. Wait, what? The movie introduces The Cult of Thorn, a group that must sacrifice every member of a family in order to stop a curse. Michael Myers is under the cult's spell, and so that explains why he has to kill every surviving Strode. It also is meant to explain how he keeps coming back from the dead.

The franchise already had its fair share of dumb moments, but by revealing one of the great slasher villains of all time to be some guy a cult is manipulating, the series was officially dead.