10 Movie Franchises Saved From Extinction By Sequels

10. Dream Warriors Put Freddy Back Where He Belongs (In Nightmares)

The late great Scream helmer Wes Craven made a habit of reinventing the horror genre once a decade during his prime. First he set the scene for the gritty, hyper-realistic social commentary horror of the post-Vietnam seventies with the unsparing The Last House on the Left, then by the nineties he was ready to reignite the then-ailing slasher craze via the hugely successful meta-horror Scream and its subsequent sequels.

But his most well-remembered contribution to the genre has to be 1984’s fusion of fantasy and the slasher subgenre, A Nightmare on Elm Street. The film melded inventive, trippy dream sequences which took advantage of its villain’s reality-bending abilities with gruesome scares, and won over both audiences and critics as a result.

However, Craven declined the opportunity to shoot a hastily thrown-together sequel, and 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street Part II: Freddy’s Revenge was a laughable disaster, reviled for abandoning the unique “dream killer” premise and losing any effective scares in the process. Fortunately, future The Blob and The Mask helmer Chuck Russell was on hand to save the day with the third instalment, Dream Warriors.

Cartoon-ier, gorier, and more creative than its predecessor, the flick brought the series back to the heights of the first film and reignited the franchise’s fire.