We’ve all seen the films.
Skeet Ulrich’s Billy Loomis, in the original Scream (1996), suddenly sits up, gasping – despite having been lying there full of bullet holes – imbued with a final burst of life after a murderous rampage as Ghostface. “Careful!” warns horror movie nerd Randy Meeks. “This is the moment when the supposedly dead killer comes back to life for one last scare.”
Scream does, of course, do this self-referentially, but it’s a trope as old as horror itself. It’s Michael Myers, disappearing after falling from the balcony in Halloween (1978); it’s a hideous, deformed baby Jason Voorhees pulling Adrienne King’s Alice into the previously tranquil depths of Camp Crystal Lake as she leisurely rowed across it; it’s Carrie White – albeit in a dream sequence – reaching up from the foul depths of the grave.
What do all these films have in common, bar the obvious? After becoming wildly successful – critically, yes, but most of all commercially – they all spawned multiple sequels. The original Friday the 13th (1980), for instance, begot an astonishing nine direct sequels – the last of which, Jason X, was released in 2002 – and was remade in 2009. (Mr Voorhees also got some airtime in Freddy vs Jason, a crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street’s franchise face, Freddy Krueger, in 2003; but the less said about that, the better.)
But neither Jason or Freddy – who himself was the star of seven films and one remake, in addition to that much-maligned outing with his hockey mask-wearing counterpart – are alone. The success of Halloween saw it blossom (perhaps ‘mutate’ is a better word) into an eight-film series, which has since been remade twice: in two Rob Zombie films from 2007 and 2009, and into a David Gordon Green that wrapped in 2022 with Halloween Ends (2022). (Spoiler – it really didn’t end.) Scream will welcome its sixth sequel, Scream VII, in 2006. And even poor old Carrie White – a film Brian de Palma adapted from Stephen King’s first published book, and certainly one of his most slender – saw Carrie's story spun out into a sequel (the ill-advised The Rage: Carrie 2), and two remakes (one in 2002, another in 2013).
What’s my point, you ask? Well, I’m talking about intellectual property (IP) – the legal term for creations of the mind, including inventions, designs, and artistic works. In film, it’s become shorthand for franchises – for any movie that’s part of an established series or franchise. Why’s it on my mind, you ask? Because, while the horror calendar always has a few IP-based tentpole films to hang its hat on, 2025 is a year absolutely brimming with them.
In 2025 alone – and this is by no means an exhaustive list, given we’re only five days into the year at the time of writing, and there will still be plenty of movies with a 2025 release date to be announced – just look at what we’re getting. In the horror genre alone for 2025, I count six films derived from books, 15 entries into existing franchises, five remakes of classic movies, and two adapted from video games.
Not to mention seven films belonging to a third, slightly zanier category: beloved old cartoon and book characters where the IP expired, entered the public domain, and proceeded to be pounced on by lazy filmmakers looking for a quick buck. (As an example, 2025 will see not the first, nor the second, but the third film in the Blood and Honey franchise; the IP only expired three years ago, for goodness’ sake!)
Blood and Honey is, FYI, a film in which the venerable Pooh is re-imagined as an axe-wielding killer. Proving, perhaps, that "you're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem...and more maniacal than you think".
I have a complicated relationship with IP films – and I imagine many genre enthusiasts do. The more negative take is a simple one to sketch out: that, at best, these films can be bland and unoriginal; at worst, exploitative. 2025’s Screamboat – a ‘reimagining’ of Disney’s 1928 short film, Steamboat Willie, through a horror lens – feels this way, as 2024’s Mouse Trap did before it. Plus, Mickey Mouse only entered the public domain on 1 January 2024 – just over a year ago – which only serves to add to that sense of taking advantage; of vultures first circling, then picking the commercial carcass clean in mere minutes. It certainly feels this way with poor Winnie the Pooh and friends, who – while most of us will remember him frolicking with pals Tigger, Eeyore, and Christopher Robin in the pages of A.A. Milne’s beloved children’s books – is now reduced to an axe-wielding maniac in films like Blood and Honey (2023), Blood and Honey 2 (2024), and (shudders) Blood and Honey 3 (2025).
If you can believe it, 2025 is even bringing us a film with the unlikely title of Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble, a kind of mad, misguided Avengers-esque attempt at a shared world dubbed "The Twisted Childhood Universe". "Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl, Piglet, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, the Mad Hatter, Peter Pan and Tinkerbell join forces to wreak bloody havoc", the synopsis reads, with future instalments – involving similarly bastardised versions of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, respectively – planned for 2026 and beyond.
Worse still, 2025 will see characters like Popeye (Popeye the Slayer Man) and Pinocchio (Pinocchio: Unstrung) and Peter Pan (Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare) become the latest classic characters to have their illustrious images tarnished with shameless re-appropriations of their IP for quick financial gain. Not even Bambi(!) is safe after Felix Salten’s novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods entered the public domain just over three years ago; and, pondering the fact that it’s 2025 and we’re getting a picture called Bambi: The Reckoning, I genuinely don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Yet of course, the case of Pooh, Bambi, and Mickey are relatively isolated for now – and the other, more positive, side of the IP debate is, well…that it means even more of the horror films we know, love (and, perhaps most importantly, recognise) wind up coming to our screens each year. (And, let’s face it – Disney doesn't need any more money. Unless you're in the market for a few more bad Star Wars TV shows.)
Some of the sequels we’ll be getting this year, for example, include the first sequels in the nascent M3GAN and The Black Phone franchises, as well as the eleventh film in the Saw continuity. Add in the fourth films in the Fear Street and The Conjuring series (the ninth, if you’re counting the Annabelle and The Nun films as well), and you’ve got a packed bill.
Yet we’re not done! Final Destination: Bloodlines and Thread: An Insidious Tale look to be less direct sequels than more related (but not necessarily sequential) additions to their respective franchises’ canons, while an as-yet-untitled I Know What You Did Last Summer film pulls the stars of its first two films out of retirement to return to the universe – 27 years after the first film hit theatres. Not to be topped, the two-film 28 _ Later series is set to return, in June, as the third film in that series, albeit with a title that’s a little bit of a case of false advertising...given we’re only getting it 17 years after the most recent film was released (and only 22 years after the first hit screens).
On top of all this, add in 2025's V/H/S 8, Thanksgiving 2, Predator: Badlands, A Quiet Place Part III, the fifth – and last – instalment in the Hell House franchise, Hell House LLC: Lineage, and the second film in Renny Harlin's three-part re-hash of Bryan Bertino's The Strangers (2008). The Strangers: Chapter 2 (2025) will pick up where the abominable The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) left off, with Madelaine Petsch returning as the lead. If it's even fractionally as bad as the original, it's one you might as well strike off your watchlist now.
Not to be forgotten in 2025 are the remake (or reboot) category: and here, Universal Pictures have been getting busy, with remakes of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Wolf Man (1941) coming this year; 90 and 84 years, respectively, since the excellent originals hit the astonished eyeballs of audiences. Netflix is jumping on the Frankenstein bandwagon with an adaptation, too – helmed by Guillermo del Toro, no less – while Dracula is getting another outing courtesy of Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale. Looking internationally, Korean Christian chiller Dark Nuns isn't a remake, but a spin-off of 2015 flick The Priests.
Reboot-wise, we've also got The Anaconda (2025), starring Jack Black and Paul Rudd, as well as remakes of 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night and 1985's Return of the Living Dead.
Those aren’t the only characters who originated in books who’ll be getting a run out in 2025’s pantheon of genre offerings, either: Oz Perkins’s The Monkey is based on a short story in Stephen King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, Eli Craig will front an adaptation of Adam Cesare’s 2020 novel Clown in a Cornfield, and Travis Knight will direct Wildwood, a stopmotion dark fantasy yarn based on Colin Meloy's 2011 book of the same name. It would also be rude, of course, to forget horror films based on video games: Until Dawn is one coming to screens in 2025; Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is another.
Fortunately, recent years have seen plenty of original horror fare come to our screens, too. A24, in particular, has been doing plenty to pull its weight in this regard – Talk to Me (2022), MaXXXine (2024), and I Saw the TV Glow (2024) are just a few – and it’s been exciting to see the studio’s excellent work gain more mainstream appeal. Yet…
Yet.
There’s something about indefinable about returning to a familiar franchise. Something that’s like sliding into a warm bubble bath; like reaching for your favourite bottle of Pinot Noir off the shelf, or like smelling the perfume of a former lover on the breeze.
Films, like scents, are like time capsules in many ways – you remember what stage of life you were in when they first came out, or when you watched them for the first time. 28 Weeks Later (2007), for instance, came out when I was a fresh-faced 14-year-old, only beginning to dip my toe in the murky, magnificent waters of horror. I first remember it hitting cinemas (even though I was too young to watch it!), then making its way initially into the “New Releases” section of the local video store (too expensive), then the “Horror” section (where you better believe I pored over the case of the DVD, desperate for details and to look at the pictures), before finally ending up in the bargain bin, where I could convince my folks to spend the $9.99 to buy it for me. (I was still too young to purchase it myself!)
Now, the latest edition of the seemingly long-buried franchise greets me as a (recent) 32-year-old. The intervening years have seen me grow up, finish college, lose my virginity, get into uni, graduate from uni, travel the world, find my career, build that career, get engaged, and move from Wellington to London to Melbourne – with a few stops in between – but there’s something about 28 Years Later coming out (and how I know I’ll feel when I lay eyes on it for the first time) that transports me all the way back to that video store more than 2,500 km from where I sit writing this. (Actually, it’s regrettably closed down.)
There’s something about the franchises you love that act as a through-line, anchoring not only the movies they tie together, but demarcating key life stages, too; like a thread running parallel to your own life, but that suddenly (and in the case of the 28 _ Later franchise, unexpectedly) bends – bringing you closer to a previous era in your life you wouldn’t otherwise have had a reason to revisit.
Films based on IP may be bad. They may be over-egged and underfunded (or, more commonly, overfunded and under-thought), and they may feel like quick cash grabs.
But at the end of the day, does that matter – as long as they’re entertaining? As long as they still retain that power, that magic ability to transport us through time and get us smiling – or screaming – like quixotic young moviegoers again? On that note of those young moviegoers – those kids flicking furtively through the “Horror” section of their favourite streaming platform (since video stores don’t exist anymore) – it’s worth thinking about them, too. Sure, the rest of us don’t need another Saw movie, and I don’t believe that even the most hardcore I Know What You Did Last Summer fans were twiddling their thumbs waiting for the next entry into the franchise (especially not 18 years after the most recent entry, 2006’s I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, flopped).
But. But, if these are the films that are going to hook young filmgoers and get them interested – better yet, get them curious to explore the wider genre in more detail – then yes, perhaps we do need more entries into the tired old horror franchises.
Similarly, the sixth Final Destination film may elicit more eye-rolls than eyes-lighting-up in older (and, dare I say it, more cynical!) horror enthusiasts. But if it’s one of the first entry points into the genre for a teenager dabbling with an interest in horror – and if seeing the sixth Final Destination film leads them to watch the first Final Destination film, and if watching the first Final Destination film encourages them to look at other horror of that era and ilk – then yes, perhaps we do need these films.
Franchises may, as I pointed out earlier, be like the slasher movie killer that refuses to die; when defenestration, decapitation, drowning (or even all three) still isn’t enough to see them off. But knowing, deep down, that our killer – and, by proxy, our favourite films – will be back for (at least) one more outing is a safe, deeply satisfying feeling akin to snuggling up in a warm bed and dozing gently off to our dreams…
…even if we’ll be sleeping with the light on.
I've talked a lot here about the horror films coming out this year...but how do you know which ones are any good? Explore Talking Terror's guide to the best horror movies of 2025 (including plenty of originals, don't worry!) to find out.
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