So on Saturday evening I watched Cat People, and followed it up on Halloween with its sequel Curse of the Cat People. I’d seen them before, wanted to share them with my boyfriend who’s been getting more interested in classic horror. Obviously we enjoyed both. There be spoilers below for some movies from the 40’s…
If you haven’t seen them, Cat People is a creepy psychological horror story about an all-American young man who meets and marries a sweet Serbian immigrant artist. She loves him but refuses to consummate the marriage, as she is afraid that she’ll turn into a cat-monster and rip his face off in the throes of passion. She enters psychoanalysis to no avail. Some scary shit goes down. She ends up dead, along with the shrink, and husband Ollie ends up with his work wife Alice. It’s debatable whether she actually does turn into a cat or was using a leopard stolen from the zoo to bring her tormented inner demon to life.
Curse of the Cat People picks up perhaps 8 years later. The survivors of the first movie are living in the suburbs and have a little girl. The girl is a dreamer and has trouble distinguishing fact from fantasy. Not out of the ordinary for a 6 year old. She ends up with an “imaginary friend” that is the ghost of the Serbian cat woman from her parents past. Again, it’s debatable whether she’s actually seeing a ghost or if she created “Irena” based on her parents’ pictures. Contrary to what one might expect from the first movie, scary shit fails to go down. Ollie (the dad) has a really hard time dealing with his daughter’s imagination, as he identifies it with his first wife’s troubles. It’s a really interesting story about a family dealing with a child’s development through the lens of a previous trauma.
So this got us to thinking: What other movies are there out there that are true sequels, with the same characters and some acknowledgement of the events of the earlier movie, but are a completely different type of movie? Prequels etc count, as long as they are actually overtly related in these ways. I think there’s a lot of potential out there for similar stories that are about what happens to people who live through a horror-movie scenario and then have to just go on living, but other genre shifts could be interesting too.
Boyfriend suggested the Evil Dead movies, as the sequels have the same main characters but change in tone pretty significantly. I’m not entirely convinced but it’s a start. Any ideas?
Chucky and Leprechaun both started off attempting to be real slasher horror movies, but they realized how stupidly ridiculous they were after a few sequels and changed into horror comedies.
The Indiana Jones suggestions are interesting. I never really thought about them that way, since I saw the original three out of order and so many times throughout my childhood that the plots kind of run together. I do think that they are still within the same swashbuckling adventure genre though they have differing structures.
I thought of Cat People as soon as I saw the thread title. The first film is horror, the second a straight psychological drama with little scary happening (except for a subplot that seems tacked on). There aren’t even any Cat People.
Though it never happened, there was a plan to do one of the Jaws sequels at Jaws 3, People 0 and turn it into an Airplane-like spoof. The studio decided against it.
Technically, Return to Oz was a sequel to The Wizard of Oz and is far different in tone than the 1939 movie – darker and more scary.
The Black Bird, a comedy, is a sequel to The Maltese Falcon, going so far as to have a couple of actors in the original reprise their roles (decades later).
The first Evil Dead movie was a serious attempt at a Lovecraft-based horror film. But it was done so poorly that it became a semi-cult so-bad-it’s-good movie. So they went for more laughs in Evil Dead II, and really turned it up in the third, Army of Darkness. I also think each one increased the previous budget by an order of magnitude.
Pitch Black was a monster/horror movie set in space and it’s sequel The Chronicles of Riddick was an action sci-fi film.
Pretty much exactly like Alien and Aliens.
Gremlins II was more overtly comedic than Gremlins.
Each Mad Max sequel looked like it was in a much farther-gone dystopic future than its immediate predecessor. Mad Max didn’t seem particularly futuristic. The Road Warrior kind of did, and Beyond Thunderdome looked like Firefly’s Reavers had taken root.
The American Pie movies are pretty consistent in tone, but the justifications for Eugene Levy’s character’s inclusion have gotten increasingly tenuous. Really, I think the guy’s a brilliant performer, but not since Michael Caine in the Jaws sequels has there been such a gap between actor and movie.
If you’re looking for books as well as movies, Huckleberry Finn might count, as a sequel to Tom Sawyer (not to mention the later, lesser Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective).
Stephen King & Peter Straub’s Black House was marketed as a sequel to The Talisman, but where The Talisman was a quest fantasy, Black House is a straight horror novel.