10 Horror Movie Sequels That Were Just Too Cruel
These horror sequels got off on punishing the audience.
Now, most moviegoers will be acutely aware that horror movies aren't supposed to be cheerful, feel-good experiences. Even horror-comedies are generally going to explore some unpleasant topics, and likely festoon the screen with a fair share of the red stuff.
But there are certainly times where filmmakers perhaps push the harshness and cruelty too far, resulting in a picture which ends up putting off a large swath of the audience. This proves especially troubling where sequels are concerned, where a film pushes the envelope so far tonally that it risks alienating even those who enjoyed the original.
The following ten horror sequels all flirted with disaster by taking the mood established by their predecessor and forging ahead into a nastier, more mean-spirited direction altogether. Now, the audience's mileage surely varies wildly on how much meanness is too much, but for many, these films just took things too far and left even the most well-trained genre fan with a sour taste in their mouth.
Are they all terrible or even bad movies? Absolutely not, but the tonal whiplash felt by experiencing them is staggering...
10. Hostel: Part II
Now, the first Hostel movie was certainly not a compassionate picnic in the park - having birthed the so-called "torture porn" subgenre and all - but Part II takes the cruelty to a whole other level.
For starters, the sequel kicks off by brutally killing the rather likeable protagonist of the original movie, Paxton (Jay Hernandez), by having him be decapitated by a member of the "Elite Hunting Club".
But it only gets more agonising from there. Hostel: Part II's most memorable death scene sees the sweet, naive Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) kidnapped, stripped, and hung upside down, before a woman slits her throat with a scythe and nakedly bathes in the blood as it rains down on her.
Eli Roth easily endears the audience to Lorna and makes them root for her survival, only for her to die to the most prolonged and messed-up death in the entire movie.
Between that and Paxton's opening demise, this is a callously mean-spirited movie even for Roth's standards, and in a perhaps unrelated outcome went on to underperform at the box office compared to its predecessor.