When the Classics Won’t Stay Dead

On October 19th, forty years after her original performance, Jamie Lee Curtis reprised her role as Laurie Strode in the latest installment of the Halloween horror franchise. Horror fans are probably not surprised to see the commercially successful series return to theaters, in spite of the intervening eight or eleven sequels (depending on how you count). After all, Netflix has ushered in countless revivals of classic TV series, and we need look no further than Star Wars — revived twice in the past twenty years — to see the same phenomenon on the silver screen. Still, no other genre has embraced the sequel more enthusiastically than horror; it is a rare horror film that stands alone.

Even though the audience knows before entering the cinema that the Final Girl will once again survive the murderous onslaught of a savage killer, they are nevertheless entertained as the narrative unfolds. In this sense, modern horror fans are not unlike ancient audiences: every listener or reader of the Iliad knew that Troy would fall, but that knowledge has probably cost Homer few audience members. Over the millennia, we, both ancient and modern audiences, have read not only the Iliad, but also the Odyssey, and then Vergil’s Aeneid, all of which tell subsequent parts of the same story, a story we already know. Most readers don’t think of either the Odyssey or the Aeneid as derivative claptrap, inferior to the Iliad solely because they are “sequels.” The poems are read, analyzed, and enjoyed in their own right.

The same is not true for horror. The Exorcist was widely acclaimed when it was released — it was even the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture — but did anyone bother to see The Exorcist 2 and 3? Somehow, in horror, the audience assumes the sequels will be derivative, at best a desperate attempt from a film company looking to make a buck. But for all the flack that horror films get for (re)producing repetitious plotlines in sequels, they draw on many of the very same strategies that ancient literature and myth do. By looking at the ways in which modern horror’s propensity for sequels mirrors ancient literary practice, we can enrich our understanding of horror sequels and appreciate the sequel as a pillar of the horror genre.

Remake the original

In ancient literature and modern horror, people have tried to simply recreate a successful original. Think of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), or Varro of Atax’s fragmentary Argonautica, a translation of Apollonius’ Hellenistic original. Although these efforts are often justified as an homage to the original or a means to introduce a new audience to a cultural touchstone, they rarely achieve critical, or indeed popular, acclaim. It isn’t difficult to understand why. The impulse to be like the original is necessary for every successor, but there also must be some novelty. You can’t out-Vergil Vergil (or out-Hitchcock Hitchcock).

Gore it up

Latin literature doesn’t have direct sequels in a modern sense (we have to wait for Maffeo Vegio’s Aeneid 13 in the fifteenth century for that), but texts frequently advertise a self-conscious interest in their status as successors to the literary past — or, in other words, sequels. Scholars often speak of this awareness as “anxiety of influence,” manifested most clearly in the epic tradition’s inheritors of the first century CE. The burgeoning culture of gruesome punishment in the amphitheater, which puts violent death at the center of imperial spectacle, informs the literary context. Violence becomes an almost obsessive focal point for writers as they strive to outdo their predecessors. Therefore, Lucan’s De Bello Civili, Statius’ Thebaid, and Seneca’s tragedies exhibit an obsessive interest in intra-familial violence and gore as spectacle, and thus present themselves as good comparanda for horror sequels.

Seneca’s plays, reworkings of earlier Greek and Roman tragedies, regularly elicit disgust through gratuitous body horror and gore. Thyestes’ infamous belch, for example, is disgusting and horrifying; the burp itself is gross enough, but it is made truly revolting since it is a gastrointestinal reaction to digesting the flesh of his own children. Similarly, epic of the first century CE is filled with scenes of grisly violence. In Lucan’s De Bello Civili, Erictho, a Thessalian witch, reanimates the corpse of a dead soldier with spells and blood ritual, and a Roman soldier is graphically dismembered, hyperbolically fighting even beyond the point of death. Statius’ Thebaid begins its action by focusing on Oedipus’ gouged-out eye sockets as he summons a demon from hell to avenge himself on his sons. The poem’s gory climax comes when Tydeus delights in dining on the still-warm brain of Melanippus. The list could go on.

Likewise, blood and gore are hallmarks of the horror genre, especially since the popularization of the slasher in the 1970s and the 1980s. It comes as no surprise, then, that filmmakers cash in on the popular appeal of gore when creating sequels. If the original film was successful and contained a great deal of blood, the thinking seems to go, a second film will do just as well, or better, with more gore. Torture porn series like Saw delight in extreme cruelty and preposterous methods of death to the tune of multiple sequels. In this subgenre, the films’ raison d’être becomes spectacle rather than plot, and the gore increases with each iteration. Just as in the case of the imperial Latin epic, violence begets still more extreme violence.

Take a brainy philosophical angle

Torture porn’s reputation for spectacle over substance has overshadowed the horror genre, leading to critiques that horror isn’t intellectual enough — it is all gore and exploitative violence. Some sequels try to head off this criticism by adding a cerebral veneer to their originals. While Alien (1979) began as a straightforward sci-fi/horror film, its sequel Prometheus (2012) intellectualized the franchise by introducing a creation story for its universe. Accordingly, the focus of the film shifts to deep philosophical reflection, touching on questions about a creator’s/god’s power, the limits of that power, and the relationship between creator and created. Prometheus finds itself philosophizing between jump scares while simultaneously juggling the generic constraints of sci-fi, horror, thriller, and action films.

As early as Homer and Hesiod, epic exhibited an abiding interest in philosophizing and the nature of truth, but this tendency reached a fever pitch when Christian epic repurposed the genre as a celebration of divine truth. Christian epic proselytizes, rather than narrates, and is more interested in the “higher” purpose of delivering philosophical truth than, as Horace defines epic, celebrating the “deeds of kings and leaders and awful wars.” Juvencus contrasts his goal of spreading Christian truth explicitly with the “lies” of pagan epic in the preface (Preface lines 16–20) to his fourth-century Evangeliorum Quattor Libri. The pursuit of philosophical truth becomes the defining feature of Christian epic. Although it disavows pagan epic, Christian epic retains traditional epic’s trappings: meter, structure, language, allusivity, and epic diction are all repurposed for the exposure of theological truth.

Exploit an unresolved plot point

The most common approach to crafting a sequel comes from the exploitation of threads that are left hanging in the original. Unresolved plot points provide narrative opportunities for sequels: George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) offers no closure on the zombie epidemic, and Dawn of the Dead (1976), its immediate sequel, picks up during the same epidemic. A similar relationship exists between Homer’s Iliad and Vergil’s Aeneid: in Iliad 21, Poseidon prophecies a vague but certain future for Aeneas and the Trojan race, an ambiguity which Vergil leverages to craft his own Trojan narrative.

Focus on a minor character

Creating a backstory for a tangential — even merely implied — character is another popular way to forge a path for a sequel. Scream 2’s antagonist is the mother of Scream’s antagonist; her existence is only passingly acknowledged in the original film, but in the sequel she drives the action of the film. The Odyssey, at first look, does not seem to provide much room for tangential sequels, since Odysseus’ entire crew is lost on his journey. This proves to be no issue for Vergil, and subsequently Ovid, who create the characters Achaemenides and Macareus, companions of Odysseus, to incorporate and expand on the Odyssey’s adventure narrative. In doing so, Ovid and Vergil signal their inheritance of the Homeric tradition — with modification.

Give background on a major character

A related strategy for sequelization in horror films is to explore the background of a character, usually with the purpose of explaining the villain’s motivations. Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007) takes just this approach and fleshes out the character of Michael Myers. In the original, his background is left unexplored and his motivations for homicide non-existent. In Zombie’s film, he is bullied at school, abused by his alcoholic stepfather, and his overwrought-but-caring mother is mostly absent. Zombie implies that these are the underlying motivations for murdering his family; no longer are Michael Myers’ murders senseless killings.

Zombie’s film, at one point, had the blessing of John Carpenter, the co-writer and director of the original Halloween (1978). However, as the film was finished, Carpenter rescinded his approval, saying “He [Zombie] took away the mystique of the story by explaining too much about [Michael Myers].” In essence, Zombie had over-aetiologized Michael Myers. Initially, Michael Myers did not even have a name; he was simply The Shape, a murderous force of nature in human form. His masked face is uncanny, an attempt at a human disguise that only shows just how far from human he is. The terror of Michael Myers/The Shape resides in his inexplicability.

Statius’ unfinished Achilleid proceeds along much the same biographical lines. At the poem’s onset, Statius vows to tell the whole story of Achilles’ life. Although Homer has made many of Achilles’ deeds famous, Statius says, “more remains untold.”The poet goes beyond the circumscribed narrative of the Iliad all the way back to Achilles’ childhood. The poem comes down to us incomplete, but, even in its current form, it already shows facets of Achilles unexplored in the Iliad. Instead of the bold, fearsome warrior, we see a draft dodger in drag. Achilles’ pubescent transvestism is known from the biographical tradition, yet Homer suppresses this tradition by omitting it in the Iliad. It’s as if Achilles’ martial career at Troy strives to erase his effeminized uprearing.

When in doubt, retcon

The newest Halloween film has chosen to navigate its relationship with the eight (or eleven) sequels that precede it by completely ignoring them. This kind of revision, called retroactive continuity (or “retcon” for short), erases traditions that were established in earlier stories to allow for alternative storylines. In the case of Halloween, retconning unburdens the writers of Laurie Strode’s and Michael Myers’ mythological baggage that accumulated over the past forty years. In the retconned narrative, Laurie Strode has only faced Michael Myers once; she has presumably lived a normal life otherwise — or, at least, a life without annual attacks every October 31st. Are we to follow the narrative spun in the sequels that were produced between 1980 and 2009, or the story that the recent Halloween produces? For a coherent timeline of Laurie Strode’s life, both cannot coexist. Has Michael Myers been attacking her incessantly or just once?

Parallels for such radical retconning are rare in ancient literature — Vergil and Ovid’s Achaemenides and Macareus, tangential characters in their own stories, are fundamental rewritings of the Odyssey’s story arc — but the practice is embedded in the marrow of the epic tradition itself. The mythic material that constitutes so much epic is fluid and myths have alternate versions. All epicists have to make decisions about which mythological narrative to follow, and these decisions entail ignoring or erasing variants without compunction. To judge exclusively from Homer, Achilles was never a princess on Scyros; to judge from Statius, that’s all that he ever was.

What we see in the literary canon is the unbridled success of retcons. Coupled with the loss of literature in transmission, the canon represents the most “successful” texts from antiquity. Indeed, retcons are sometimes so successful that they do not even appear to be retcons, but firmly established canonical material. If a retconned narrative is successful, it can spawn its own sequels, thus creating alternative traditions — but one tradition will remain dominant.

Acknowledge alternate traditions

This is not to say that alternate traditions are erased entirely. The weight of tradition is heavy, and traces of previously existing versions are often visible in the dominant narrative. Halloween II (1981) established Michael Myers as the brother of Laurie Strode, and that relationship persisted through the rest of the sequels. The retconned Halloween’s trailer acknowledges this relationship, but immediately signals that it is ignoring and rewriting that tradition: “No. It [Michael Myers] was not her brother. That was something that people made up.” The overt dismissal of the previous tradition, delivered in a derisive tone, clearly showcases Halloween (2018)’s antagonistic relationship with the the non-retconned tradition and its ambition to establish itself as the dominant tradition.

We can see similar awareness of the tradition’s weight in epic: Statius’ Antigone is outraged when Argia, Polynices’ wife, performs his burial rites. Hundred of years prior, Sophocles made canonical the narrative that Antigone alone buried Polynices. Yet in the Archaic tradition that predates Sophocles, it is Argia alone, or Argia and Antigone together, who bury Polynices. This once standard mythic variant, however, became alternative after Sophocles’ wildly successful Antigone and leaves traces only in fragments and mythographers like Hyginus. The prominence of Statius’ Argia in the burial rites signals the alternative version to the audience and, in so doing, defies the dominant tradition.

Classicists are well positioned to appreciate the subtleties of the horror film genre, since both Classics and horror depend so heavily on telling a slightly different story with the same cast of characters—in other words, sequels are integral and dynamic parts of both traditions. Classicists know that sequels are not derivative, but an active part of the tradition. Yet this appreciation for sequels is more fully theorized for classical literature than it is horror films. Nevertheless, many of the same principles apply to both cases. Some sequels merely subsist off of the original, but others are more aggressive and attempt to subsume and replace it.

Sequels will continue to form an important aspect of the horror genre. However many sequels this Halloween (2018) reboot spawns in the coming years (for sequels are a certainty when talking about horror), each will have to grapple with the preexisting and complicated mythology that has been created over the past forty years. We might think that the methods are creative and provocative; we might think they are unoriginal and boring. Either way, filmmakers are using tried and true methods to gun for a spot in the canon; and if Roman epic can teach us anything about sequels, they just might succeed. Who’s to say the new Halloween won’t be the franchise’s Aeneid?

E.D. Adams is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on gender and wordplay. She thinks The Descent Part 2 is a travesty. You can follow her on Twitter @elizdadams.

T.J. Bolt is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and a fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative. He he is currently writing his dissertation on humor, the sublime, and Statius’ Thebaid and is still clamoring for Scream 5. You can follow him on Twitter @teejaybolt.