Even the best horror movies of all time can be dragged through the dirt by a poor sequel. We all love the original Halloween movie, but by the time it got to the Cult of Thorn, the franchise had obviously lost its way. Freddy Krueger was a menacing killer in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but he eventually evolved into a bad stand-up comedian delivering jokes about using a Nintendo Power Glove while taunting teenagers.
Bad sequels are one of the biggest tropes of the horror genre. It's simple to understand why. After all, horror movies are usually pretty cheap to make. If one is a big office hit, studios want to pump out as many as possible, as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the installments that follow have a hard time living up to the original--even if the original wasn't very good.
We took a trip through horror history to find the 11 absolute worst horror movie sequels of all time. Narrowing it down to 11 was hard, but there is practically nothing to love about these movies. Yet, still, chances are you've seen most of them. Who among us hasn't watched Jason Takes Manhattan or Jaws 3D, if only to laugh at how comically bad it is?
Take a look at the 19 worst horror movie sequels below, then sound off in the comments with the ones you love to hate.
1. Hellraiser: Hellworld
Hellraiser: Hellworld is the most 2005 horror movie to come out of 2005. It contains a futuristic video game, raves, and CG that has aged like four-month-old milk. And yes, it was straight-to-video.
In the movie, there's a MMORPG called Hellworld, which a man becomes obsessed with, leading to his suicide. Years later, his friends head to a mansion hosting a Hellworld party, which is totally a '00s-style rave. Of course, the friends in the group get separated in the house, and one by one, they are killed off by Cenobites--including Pinhead himself. But then it's revealed that this is all a hallucination, but the Lament Configuration is actually in the house and summons the real Cenobites. Not only is the movie exceptionally dated, but the "it was all a dream" twist makes most of the movie a moot point. While the first couple of Hellraiser movies are brilliant, this is the lowest point for the series.
2. Jaws 3D
You've made your first horror movie, and it was a smashing success. You made a sequel, which was pretty much the first movie with more deaths. Where do you go from there? Obviously, you head to the land of 3D.
Jaws 3D was quite the experience for audiences, and not just because it took them to the third dimension. The third installment takes place at a SeaWorld. The sons of police chief Brody work at the amusement park, and the park captures a baby shark who accidentally entered. Of course, the baby shark's mom is mad and wreaks havoc on the park, which puts guests in danger, as they're stuck in underwater tunnels. While the plot is silly, the movie somehow becomes boring. Why do sharks keep coming after the Brody family? Why do these two brothers work at the same place? Why do the effects look so infamously terrible, even by 1983 standards?
3. Silent Night, Deadly Night 2
It's garbage day! And no, it's not that just because you're reading this list. Yes, these movies are certainly garbage, but Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 is known for its line "Garbage Day," as well as just being a straight-up bad movie. The sequel follows murderer Ricky Chapman as he escapes from a mental hospital and goes on a murdering spree, which includes killing a dude just trying to take out the trash.
The craziest thing about this movie is that the runtime is 88 minutes long and 40 minutes of that is repurposed footage from the first movie. That's right, almost half of Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 is stuff from the first movie.
4. Leprechaun Origins
The Leprechaun series was very tongue-in-cheek, following the mildly comedic adventures of a Leprechaun (Warwick Davis) murdering people for his precious pieces of gold. The films took the magical Irish being to various locations: Las Vegas, Space, The Hood, and "Back 2 tha Hood." In 2014, the series tried something very different: become a serious horror movie.
For the first time in the series, Davis did not play the titular Leprechaun. Instead, it was played by Dylan Postl, who many know as Hornswoggle from WWE--yes, this movie was produced by WWE Studios. Regardless of what you think of Swoggle, it doesn't matter because he's barely in the movie as the Leprechaun. It's a reboot and tries to tonally change the series entirely. However, the filmmakers seemed to have forgotten that what makes the Leprechaun movies watchable is that they are silly and fun. Leprechaun: Origins is not.
5. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
It's hard to top the first A Nightmare on Elm Street movie, though the third movie, Dream Warrior, came close. From there, though, the franchise went downhill, culminating in Freddy's Dead. Freddy went from one of the scariest boogeymen ever, haunting the children of those who killed him in their dreams. However, as the franchise went on, Freddy grew less scary and more silly as he became a pop culture icon. That's on full display in Freddy's Dead, a movie in which he fights his own daughter to the death. That's right, dream demon Freddy Krueger also has a long-lost daughter for some reason.
There's so much about this film that makes no sense, from the bizarre and off-putting cameos by Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold, to the fact that Freddy's daughter wears magical 3D glasses in the last 10 minutes of the movie to let audiences know it's time to put on their own 3D glasses.
At least this movie was followed by the extremely meta Wes Craven's New Nightmare, which clearly inspired Craven's next major franchise, Scream.
6. Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan
Let's get this out of the way upfront. This movie should be called Jason Takes a Boat. Yes, he gets to Manhattan at the very end of the film, but most of this Friday the 13th sees Jason Voorhees stalking and killing people on a cruise ship that goes from somewhere on Crystal Lake to New York City--a feat that makes practically no sense.
Letting Jason Voorhees loose on the streets of New York City is such an interesting idea for this franchise and it simply dropped the ball. So much potential was wasted and the series never recovered.
7. Halloween: Resurrection
The Halloween franchise is all over the map, in terms of quality.The first film is an all-time classic, while the latest (2018's Halloween) is a return to form. Outside of that, the films range from pretty good to truly bad--and that's before we talk about the rebooted movies from director Rob Zombie. However, it's hard to think of a worse installment than 2002's Resurrection, which pitted Michael Myers against none other than rapper Busta Rhymes.
The plot of the movie throws out Michael's decades-long feud with Laurie Strode by killing the character off in the opening minutes. Now, Michael is hunting a group of teenagers who agreed to stay overnight in the house he committed his first kills in while being streamed live online. Resurrection's kills are boring, its "everything is streaming online" gimmick is silly, and not nearly enough bodies hit the floor by movie's end. Adding to that, at one point the title of the movie was going to be Halloween: MichaelMyers.com. What a horrible title, appropriate for such a bad movie.
8. Exorcist II: The Heretic
Some movies are so perfect and game-changing that any attempt to make a sequel is doomed to fail. This was the problem when the sequel to William Friedkin's horror masterpiece The Exorcist arrived in 1977--how do you make a movie that even vaguely measures up to the original? To be fair to The Exorcist II: The Heretic, director John Boorman takes the movie in a very different direction. But the result was a jaw-droppingly terrible effort which is as much metaphysical fantasy movie as it is a horror film, with incomprehensible plotting, terrible dialogue, a bored performance from Richard Burton, and a bizarre subplot about locust breeding in Africa. Freidkin later described the movie as "the worst piece of crap I've ever seen." He's not wrong.
9. Texas Chainsaw 3D
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series is one of the least consistent franchises in horror--there have been sequels, reboots, sequels to reboots, prequels, and more. One of the worst of the lot is 2013's Texas Chainsaw 3D. As the title suggests it was made during the brief 3D boom of the early 2010s, and focuses on a woman who finds out her cousin is chainsaw-wielding maniac Leatherface when she takes a road trip to Texas to claim an inheritance. It's a terrible, boring, cheap-looking film that offers horror cliché after horror cliché without a fraction of the skill and scares of the original.
10. Return to Sleepaway Camp
The first Sleepaway Camp movie is a highly-regarded slasher with a twist ending that definitely surprised audiences. Sleepaway Camp 2, which recast the main role, is arguably the best of the franchise as it strikes a balance between slasher horror and comedy that is hard to duplicate. From there, the franchise crashed and burned. The third film, 1989's Teenage Wasteland, was a pale imitator of Sleepaway Camp 2. Nearly two decades later, 2008's Return to Sleepaway Camp ignored the events of the previous two sequels and instead was a sloppy, unimaginative, and poorly written and acted follow-up to the original film. Return to Sleepaway Camp is a bore with nothing that made the first two films so memorable.
11. Children of the Corn: Revelation
The final film in the long-running franchise, before it was rebooted in 2009 and again in 2011, is a real letdown. That's not to say any of the Children of the Corn sequels are works of art, but Revelation is the bottom of the barrel. It's cheaply made, it doesn't follow up on the return of original film character Isaac in the previous installment, and is entirely forgettable.
12. Amityville 3-D
Amityville 3-D
If Friday the 13th can do 3D, why not The Amityville Horror? The issue is, a slasher like the Friday the 13th series can easily lean into the silliness of a 3D movie. In Amityville 3-D, the gimmick just isn't as entertaining. Pair that with weak characters and a little too much retreading of the original story and you have a recipe for trash.
13. The Birds II: Land's End
The Birds is an iconic horror film by the master of the genre Alfred Hitchcock. The sequel, The Birds II: Land's End, is a pretty awful made-for-TV directed by Rick Rosenthal--the man responsible for one of the best Halloween movies (Halloween II), as well as the franchise's absolute worst (Halloween: Resurrection). However, even he is ashamed of the film and instead the credited director is the fictional Alan Smithee. The only holdover from the original film is Tippi Hedren, though she plays a different character than she did in The Birds.
14. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
Remember how The Blair Witch Project essentially kickstarted the found footage craze in the mainstream, had many people convinced it was actually real and became a pop cultural phenomenon? Well, the sequel didn't do any of that. In fact, Book of Shadows instead is a bad and basic horror movie that attempts (and fails) to cram more lore into the series. The problem is, the original Blair Witch created the definition of what the franchise was and Book of Shadows threw it all out the window. At least 2016's Blair Witch felt like a true sequel to the original.
15. Exorcist II: The Heretic
Did you know there are five Exorcist movies, including sequels and prequels? None of them are any good, but we are specifically looking at Exorcist II: The Heretic. It's the only one that Linda Blair returned as Regan MacNeil in, but that certainly couldn't save the film. There's no glaring thing that stands out, it's just a truly bad movie all around. In fact, it's so bad that William Friedkin, director of the original film, never shied away from sharing his true feelings. In the book The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows, by Bob McCabe, Friedkin reflected on seeing a half hour of the film. "I looked at half an hour of it and I thought it was as bad as seeing a traffic accident in the street," he said. "It was horrible."
16. Jason X
Jason X is amazing, but we have to be honest in how truly garbage it is. After all, think about the beginnings of the Friday the 13th franchise. This boy drowned at Camp Crystal Lake and his mother set out to exact revenge. From there, the boy himself, now grown and somehow supernatural it seems, continues to kill people at summer camps (and on boats and even in Manhattan, but we've already talked about that) with no remorse. Why on earth did they think the next logical place for him to do his killing was in space? It made no sense then and it makes none now. But it gave us a Drowning Pool song to remember, the most late-90s possible redesign of Jason's mask and, well, an actually awful movie that we still enjoy watching for how bad it is.
17. King Kong Lives
Did you know King Kong survived being shot off of the Empire State Building? In 1986's King Kong Lives, which honestly sucks, Kong is in a coma for a decade, before he receives an artificial heart that replaced his own. Then a female Kong, known as Lady Kong, makes herself known. She and Kong make a baby together, battles are fought, Kong dies, and the movie ends with Lady Kong and the son of Kong living in the jungle somewhere. It's...so bizarre.
18. Rings
The Ring was fantastic. The Ring 2 was pretty good. 12 years later, Rings came along and made the whole thing silly. With Rings, the filmmakers wanted to not only explain the origins of the monster, Samara but find a way to rejuvenate the franchise and hopefully start anew by "passing" Samara's being onto a new person. Unfortunately, it spends too much time digging into a rather unexciting origin story and the "rebirth" at the climax of the film just isn't that interesting. Why try to overcomplicate a pretty simple premise?
19. The Rage: Carrie 2
What if Carrie, from Carrie, had a younger sister who also possessed telekinetic powers? That's the basic plot of The Rage: Carrie 2. And while it may be a bad movie, that's a pretty cool name. The movie largely treads the same ground as the original film without adding anything interesting to the mix. It's not so much that it's terrible as it's very unnecessary.
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