Final University Junior Year: Breaking Habits

One of the reasons the Scream franchise (which just released its fourth sequel) is so successful is that it plays off of tropes, and slasher movies are positively riddled with some of the worst tropes in genre filmmaking. Often, you can predict when a franchise is going to jump the shark, when it's going to focus on humor over horror, when it's going To Space, etc.

This installment is all about breaking rhythms. Some of them are franchise entries that just don't seem to fit in with any of the other films in the series. Some change the series for the better (we're going to skip the ones that changed their series for the worst). And we're going to throw in some one-shot films that stand out from their peers.

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1. Friday The 13th: Jason Lives

The first four installments of the series are Fuck Around And Get Killed. Jason and his mom being absolute prudes. The death scenes are a little creative but it's mostly Terrifying Unkillable Man terrorizes sexy teens. In this movie, we mix it up. The little kid from The Final Chapter has grown up, and he wants to kill Jason again. A lot of this film is pre-Scream Scream. Metahumor, creative deaths, etc. This is also when the series gets supernatural as (at the end of the previous film) the protagonist accidentally resurrects Jason, making him a sort of zombie for the rest of the franchise. This time when the death scenes are funny, they're meant to be.

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2. Freddy's Revenge

Oh, did you think we were going to skip this movie? Hellllll, no. This is the weirdest metaphor for growing up gay ever commited to film as Freddy, instead of just attacking people in nightmares, takes over a kid's body and uses him to kill people while they're awake. It's a bonkers movie, and has the most accidental subtext of any other movie in the course.

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3. Bride Of Chucky

Jennifer Tilly makes everything better. Here, she plays a jilted lover of Charles Lee Ray (the guy stuck inside the Chucky doll) who brings him back to life only for him to kill her and trap her in a different murderous doll. It's weird. And, like Jason Lives, brings a different style of humor into the narrative.  There isn't any Andy in this movie, but don't worry, he'll be back.

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4. Get Out

We've had subtextual metaphor, now let's go for something more Overt. Get Out is, without hesitation, the Best Movie in the whole Final Girl course. It's satirical horror about racism with easily the smartest script in modern horror. This is the kind of horror movie you can safely recommend to people who hate horror movies. And it's definitely a change of pace from all the movies that surround it.

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5. Alone In The Dark

This is an almost Twin Peaks style of horror. A psychiatrist decides to work in an asylum with dangerous patients, and one of the patients decides that this new psychiatrist killed the psychiatrist he liked, and he convinces his most dangeous peers to escape the hospital and terrorize the psychiatrist's family. It's super creepy.

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6. Final Destination 3

Death goes to the fairgrounds! There are no recurring characters from the first two films. A whole new batch of survivors flee from death with varying amounts of success. The story is really shunted to the side to focus on elaborate death scenes, which really are the highlight of all the Final Destination movies.

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7. The Funhouse

Oh, we're staying at the faire, as this almost Ray Bradburyan tale of teens getting murdered because they didn't obey their parents takes place almost exclusively in a funhouse. These teens are much more likable than your Friday The 13th types, but it's still fun watching them get picked off after they witness a murder. 

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8. Urban Legends

The actors who played Freddy, Chucky, and the Well-Manicured Man from the X-Files are just some of the interesting characters in this meta-meta movie. That's right, people who are watching these movies as a course guide, this movie is about maybe serial killings that take place around a cirriculum about urban legends. It's very Scream-like. Thus, we'll be skipping a Scream entry this semester.

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9. Happy Death Day

We Stay In School for Groundhog Day The Slasher Flick. Yeup, a girl keeps reliving the same day, and she and her friends keep getting murdered. It's a Time Loop story! So much fun.

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10. Wes Craven's New Nightmare

At the beginning of the season, we saw Nightmare On Elm Street switched up into a subtextual coming of age gay film. Now the franchise gets rejuvenated again as we focus on the actors from the original film, as well as its creator (Wes Craven) dealing with the PTSD of the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise. Oh, and Freddy might be real.