10 Horror Movie Sequels MASSIVELY Better Than The Original
These horror sequels pulled off a rare feat: HUGELY improving upon the original.
No movie genre loves a sequel quite like horror.
The vast majority of successful horror movies will end up with a sequel or twelve, though with this expectation for sequelisation comes the reasonable belief that the sequels will never fully one-up the original.
And while that's usually the case, it's not always the case.
Sometimes a sequel gives the filmmaker more money and tools to do something truly epic they wanted to do the first time, or perhaps the original was already a mixed bag in of itself.
Whatever the reason, these 10 horror movie sequels all ended up outdoing the original by a huge margin.
Perhaps they had a better understanding of the tone the story needed, introduced more compelling new characters and situations, or simply delivered what everybody wanted to see the first time around.
But in each instance, these sequels are exceptions to the rule that horror sequels almost never improve upon the original.
As such, these superior horror follow-ups are something of golden geese in the genre: the rarest of things that every filmmaker aspires to produce, yet so few truly can...
10. Wrong Turn 2: Dead End
2003's backwoods hillbilly horror flick Wrong Turn certainly isn't a bad film, yet aside from a few nasty kills fails to distinguish itself much, due to a relatively cliched script and forgettable array of central characters.
Expectations were low, then, for the straight-to-video sequel Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, which actually benefitted tremendously from ditching the original's self-serious tone for an altogether sillier, campier touch.
Directed with energy and charm by Joe Lynch in his filmmaking debut, Wrong Turn 2 manages to not only out-do its predecessor on the gore front but also serves up some worthwhile satire of reality TV alongside a number of memorable characters - best of all Henry Rollins' ex-Marine Dale Murphy.
For a film that most everybody expected to be a cynical cash-in on a moderately successful original movie, it was truly shocking that Wrong Turn 2 proved to be so much more fun than what came before.
Its success on home video, however, led to a glut of four increasingly terrible sequels, before the franchise was finally given a not-bad reboot last year.