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Horror

Postscript of the Dead

Postscript of the Dead

On Some Hard Numbers, Honourable Mentions, and Making a Perfect Sequel

The opening credits of David Fincher's Se7en or the contents of my brain in October?

All done! Here's some quick links if you, very understandably, missed any of these as they were hitting your inboxes throughout October:

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Scream 4 (2011)
  3. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
  4. Doctor Sleep (2019)
  5. The Guest (2014)
  6. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
  7. Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)
  8. The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
  9. A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
  10. The Forever Purge (2021)
  11. The Exorcist III/Legion (1990)
  12. Return of the Living Dead (1985)
  13. The First Omen (2024)
  14. Prey (2022)
  15. Inferno (1980)
  16. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
  17. Aliens (1986)

If you'd like to look through the 50+ illustrations of all these posts in one place, they can be found here. I'm very proud of these illustrations and they are often quite small in email/newsletter form, so this is a nice way to see them a bit bigger.

Get the Table of Contents for the first Grave Offerings (all 31 illustrated daily film essays from October 2023) here.

What Happens Next?

Have sequels always been viewed negatively within the critical consensus of the their time? Or has it just been in the age of the cinematic sequel that they've acquired such a dire reputation? Major Hollywood studios wedding audience's natural desire to know What Happens Next with a cold, commercial formula (thing people liked once + again = money) that is so nakedly mercenary that it immediately puts critic's backs up.

It's not like the sequel is new. You could argue that 2026's biggest critical and commercial success is a sequel, or at least, adapted from a sequel. The Odyssey (originally titled, would you believe, The Iliad Part II: Electric Boogaloo) is one of the oldest and most influential stories ever told. Classicist Edith Hall calls it "the very birthplace of literary fiction." A sequel. A sequel that is based on oral traditions and Greek mythology. That mythology is itself a continuing narrative - an expanded universe of interlocking fables that most closely resembles contemporary soap operas or the ongoing shared universes of superhero canons.

Is the New Testament a sequel? Sort of? The Testaments aren't really two books. They're actually a collection of 60-90 books (depending on your own head canon) authored by many authors, editors, and translators. Halloween has some catching up to do.

Cervantes' Don Quixote: Part Two is now published with Part One as a collected novel but was originally released separately, ten years later. In a tidy piece of metafiction that would make Scream proud, the protagonists meet characters who have read the first book. It is now widely regarded as the superior half of Don Quixote.

I say all this to underline the fact that sequels don't have to be bad or uninspiring. Diminishing returns is not a given. Critical consensus has not always had an aversion to the idea of a continuing narrative.

Our desire to know what happens next, no matter how satisfying or complete a story we are given, is seemingly insatiable. Conan Doyle was so bored of writing Sherlock Holmes that he killed him off, only to be forced, by popular demand, to resurrect him. We always want more. More of the same, but different.

Horror sequels are a difficult beast though. We want more, but do we want more of the monster, or the survivor? The kills, or the narrow escapes? Are we just chasing the dragon of our last scare? Is there even a continuing narrative to be told?

For what it's worth, here is my list of the most successful approaches to a horror sequel:

The Spiritual Successor
This includes it's cousins: The Anthology, and The Standalone. In which a franchise trades on it's popular IP and name to Trojan horse an all-new, original story onto our screens. These require no prior knowledge from the audience.
See: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The Guest, Prey, Inferno, The Silence of the Lambs.

The Genre Switch
In which a franchise avoids unfavourable comparisons to the previous film/s and a retread of the same thematic ground by shifting genre conventions.
See: Aliens, Happy Death Day 2 U, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Exorcist III, The First Omen.

The Low Bar
In which a franchise can only improve after a bad/mediocre earlier entry that still made enough to warrant a sequel. Or a film that finally perfects a formula.
See: The Forever Purge, Ouija: Origin of Evil, A Quiet Place: Day One, Final Destination Bloodlines, Prey.

The Antagonist
In which a franchise reinvents itself by either being at odds with it's predecessor/s or employing post-modern, metatextual commentary to pastiche/problematise it.
See: Scream 4, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Doctor Sleep, The Exorcist III, Return of the Living Dead.

The Classic
Just be an undisputed classic.
See: The Silence of the Lambs, Aliens, The Bride of Frankenstein.

"We're going to need a bigger divorced parent."

I think it's worth broadening what we even think of as a sequel. Because, ultimately, I'm less interested in what happens next as I am in what more is left to say. Perhaps this is an issue of semantics. Calling Spielberg's oeuvre a continuing story because he consistently returns to scratch the same thematic itches (the fracturing of the modern American family, his own parent's divorce, recreating the trauma of childhood) might feel facetious or a reach, but he himself has called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial, and Disclosure Day his "Alien" trilogy. Jaws is arguably a spiritual sequel to Duel - dealing, as they both do, with masculinity in crisis, class conflict, and an unstoppable antagonising force that brings these preoccupations crashing together.

Yes, it's probably absurd to call Close Encounters and The Fabelmans spiritual sequels just because they're both films in which Spielberg attempts to process, on screen, his parent's divorce. But I suppose what I'm hoping for in modern sequels is a bit more of that auteur contextualisation. If finding out what happens next produces diminishing returns, can we not find more success chasing the dragon of theme? I often think of an artist's body of work as being a case of someone picking at the same emotional/thematic scab again and again. I think sequels and franchises should have different creators, new characters, original ideas, but be picking at the same emotional/thematic scab as the original film.

The pool scene in It Follows. A lovely nod to Cat People.

I recently rewatched It Follows and what struck me on this watch was how much it feels like the true successor, the true follow-up, to John Carpenter's Halloween. Not just in the aesthetics of a coldly patient, aloof, widescreen camera or the retro synth score from Disasterpiece. The themes are there too: a puritanical America punishing its own youth for having sex, an unstoppable evil that can't be bargained with, the lack of true safety within a crumbling facade of suburbia. All of which is tied into modern concerns of a post-crash economic downturn, a broadly sex positive message, and a generation coming to terms with a environmental reality they can't escape but just have to adapt to. This, to me, is much more in conversation with Halloween (1978), than Halloweens 2 through 13. But would it be canonised as a modern horror classic if it had been called Halloween 11? I doubt it.

The use of dappled, diffused and reflected light in It Follows is A+.

This whole month-long project has been my attempt at finding some appreciation for horror sequels and I've both succeeded and failed. I've found lots to adore in these continued franchises. I've genuinely had fun watching creative, passionate people trying to squeeze every last drop of juice from a concept. But I've remained frustrated with a lot of them struggling to find reasons to exist outside of the financial incentives.

My advice? Approach the next horror sequel with a cautious, but open heart. It could be Hannibal Rising yes, but it could also be The Silence of the Lambs.

Honourable Mentions

Due to time constraints and my desire to watch franchises in their entirety before I weighed in on my favourites, there are so many film series that I didn't even make a start on. I've still only seen the first or second film of all of the following. At some point I'd like to try and do one-off posts for these franchises if I can dedicate the time: Jaws, Saw, Hellraiser, Chucky, Paranormal Activity, Friday the 13th, Ring, Resident Evil, Ginger Snaps.

There are 11 Hellraiser films. Intimidating.

Some other sequels I like and almost wrote about but didn't for a variety of reasons: Happy Death Day 2 U, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Evil Dead 2, Creep 2, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Endless, Dracula's Daughter, Quatermass 2, Dawn of the Dead, The Curse of the Cat People, Pet Semetary 2.

I keep hearing defences of Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows so I need to revisit that one too.

Some Hard Numbers

When I last did something like this, I did it in 2023 and I posted daily. At the end of the month, I'd drawn 42 illustrations and written 30k words across 31 posts. I remember finding that process quite stressful and keeping to the schedule increasingly difficult as the month went on. It also dawned on me that a daily newsletter was hard for readers to keep up with.

So this year, I was very proud of myself for deciding to do it every other day. Just 16 posts (17 with the introduction). Easier for me, and easier for you, the reader, to keep with! But inevitably, with discussion of entire franchises, and (I like to think) being a better writer, these posts got a little out of hand. I ended up sometimes drawing five illustrations per post, never less than two, and writing an average of 2k words per post. All told, I wrote 40k words and drew 57 illustrations.

It became all-consuming. In order to write about a sequel, I felt I needed to have seen every entry in the franchise. Mission creep set in. It dominated my October entirely. I had a number of friends say some version of: "I'm reading and enjoying your newsletter. You are mad for doing this. But I am enjoying it anyway."

I won't lie, I hit a wall a couple of times, but I genuinely loved doing it and definitely want to try it again another year. How can I truly complain about spending a month watching, drawing, and writing about/researching horror films? I just may have to reduce the output even further next time (every three days? weekly?) Though given current trends that will just mean I'll end up writing a novella about each film.

The bigger problem is that in order to avoid the problematic (but free) Substack, I'm hosting this newsletter on Ghost and paying about £260 a year to do so. Thankfully, a few of you have signed up to be paid subscribers (thank you so much for that) but to be totally transparent, I'm still left paying about £40 a year to run this newsletter. A reality that felt especially pronounced this October.

I think my plan going forward will be to eventually switch over to Patreon at some point. That's a free platform that won't cost me anything. But I may introduce a few additional paid tiers to make this newsletter sustainable and a source of income in an era where illustration work is drying up. One tier will be $2-3 a month and allow access to posts where I share my sketches, life drawing, and insights into my process - nothing too fancy or regular and nothing that paywalls these pop culture essays.

A recent life drawing. This was 20 minutes. I've been enjoying playing with crayons.

But I'd also like to introduce a higher tier that will provide early access to comics I'm working on. I've been developing my next graphic novel - a horror comic about Hollywood, regret and ageing - and I think I'd like to release it in chunks via Patreon on a schedule rather than necessarily wait for permission from a publisher (that said, if you're a publisher reading this and are interested in having a look, get in touch!)

A couple of early test panels for my next book.
A character design for my next book.

Currently, there's no easy way to import my archive of newsletters to Patreon, so I'm going to be doing that manually over the next couple of months before I officially launch it. So stay tuned!

In the meantime, if you've enjoyed this month of horror sequels and would like to say thank you/support me, you can send me a tip here:

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You can also support me by buying my zines, comics and prints from my online shop here.

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Exhumed Contents

  • This final postscript took a bit longer than expected. Immediately after Halloween I had to travel to London for a few days and then finish illustrating Edinburgh Filmhouse's Christmas Season. An absolute dream job. But one that meant this post had to go on the back-burner for a few days. You can see all the illustrations I did for it here, but here's the big quad poster design which I cannot wait to see in the cinema lobby:
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