A Friday of the Living Dead Nightmare

The Method

Primary objective: to reexamine five representative horror-movie franchises released on the heels of horror cinema’s Golden Age (1968–1981), beginning with the first installments: Friday the 13^th (released in 1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham), Halloween (released in 1978, dir. John Carpenter), Hellraiser (released in 1987, dir. Clive Barker), A Nightmare on Elm Street (released in 1984, dir. Wes Craven), and Night of the Living Dead (released in 1968, dir. George A. Romero).

 

Criteria

(1) To reexamine only horror-movie sequels that progress from the original to the last installment; this criterion necessarily excludes remakes and “reboots,” such as Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), Marcus Nispel’s Friday the 13^th (2009), or Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), among others.

(2) To reexamine horror-movie franchises comprising six sequels or more, three of which must have been widely released in theaters.

(3) To reexamine the franchises whole-cloth within a viewing period of twenty-four hours or less in the company of as many interested parties as possible.

The Justification

It’s 8:45 p.m. on a hot night in June. I’m watching a scene from Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), wherein Pinhead, the franchise’s S&M villain, stands upon an altar and addresses his victims. “I am the way,” he says, head tilted, and the stained glass behind him explodes. “Down the dark decades of your pain this will seem like a memory of heaven.”

This scene operates on a number of levels, but given that I’ve bound myself to watching all eight of the Hellraiser films, one after the next, over twenty-four hours, perhaps I’m primed to think so. Not only will Pinhead repeat these same words—“I am the way”—in Hellraiser: Deader (2005), but at the end of the fourth film (Hellraiser: Bloodline, 1996), he’ll proclaim to the cosmos that he is “forever.” “I cannot die,” he yells, before dissipating in the blackness of space.

But Pinhead hasn’t left me numb. Pinhead, rather, has me thinking.

Since what many would consider to be horror’s Golden Age, the thirteen years bridging the ’70s that heralded such classics as Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Jaws, The Omen, Carrie, The Shining, and An American Werewolf in London, horror films boasting smarts and scares have become as infrequent as a sexually...