Less than three weeks until the Horror Sequel Marathon begins right here on MyVinylMuse.com! We’re almost halfway finished writing these reviews with plans to have nearly all of them ready to go by the first week of October.
In the process of writing these reviews, I’ve noticed an interesting trend– many of them contain confusingly or inconsistently titled sequels. For example, the Nightmare on Elm Street films were numbered up to the fifth installment. Then for the sixth, they called the movie “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.” But then three years later, Wes Craven returned as the writer and they called the seventh installment “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.”
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre series is similar. The first sequel was called “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.” That makes sense. But then in 1990, the third film was called “Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.” In addition to making the original title a subtitle, they also switched from numerical digits to Roman numerals. Then the fourth was called, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation” and serves as a loose remake of and quasi-sequel to the original.
To make things even more confusing, they rebooted the series in 2003 with “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” followed by a prequel “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” in 2006 and a sequel “Texas Chainsaw 3D” in 2013. And next year (2016), Millennium Films is releasing “Leatherface,” a prequel to the 1974 original.
My confusion with these sequels reminds me of an old Cinemassacre YouTube video from eight years ago, wherein James Rolfe documents a similar experience with movie and video game series. Check out the video here: