10 Biggest Movie Tropes Of 2017
8. Nobody Was Interested In Yet Another Resurrection For All These Horror Icons
Seen in: The Mummy, Rings, Alien: Covenant, Jigsaw, Leatherface, Amityville: Awakening
Horror has always been a genre that has been quite happy desperately to attempt to breathe that last bit of new life into the tired, dessicated corpse of the genre's past icons. In 2017, however, when put up against a huge array of intelligent, creative and original horror projects (Get Out, It Comes At Night, Raw, Prevenge, The Love Witch and Mother! to name but a few) yet another attempt at an origin story for Leatherface just didn't cut it with most audiences.
This time last year, the original horror icons - the Universal monsters - were all set for their own version of the lucrative Marvel-style shared universe. The so-called Dark Universe was set to give a whole new audience to the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. Just one movie into the ambitious project and the Dark Universe already looks dead in the water. Incoherent and sloppily put together, The Mummy failed to hold its audience's interest for its own run time, let alone get them hooked on the prospect of an on-running franchise.
After the mixed response to Prometheus, especially in it not committing actually to using the iconic xenomorph, Alien: Covenant was an attempt to go back to basics with the franchise's horror roots and the inclusion of some actual aliens. After its alien action failed to connect with fans, the latest news on the probably-not-going-to-happen sequel to Covenant is that its focus will be almost entirely on the artificial intelligences of its world and not on the aliens at all.
Meanwhile, lank-haired ghost girl Samara was back to crawling out of screens in Rings, but the belated third film in the US franchise made only around half the box office of its predecessor. Some tricksy use of time frames also allowed former Halloween fixture Jigsaw to return in the eighth film of the torture trap franchise. Earning the second lowest box office of the series (only the dire Saw VI performed worse), Jigsaw showed that audiences haven't missed the Saw series as much as the producers might have hoped.
At least all of those films turned some kind of a profit, though. Cinema's most iconic haunted house in Amityville, New York was back for the eighteenth (yes, really) time in Amityville: The Awakening, but the movie only managed to pick up a meagre $742 on its US open weekend.
There was, however, one obvious exception to the failure of old horror icons this year...