By this point, we all know that Hollywood’s obsession with reboots, nostalgia and franchises is a bad thing. To lament the lack of originality in mainstream cinema is about the most hackneyed opinion it’s possible to express, which isn’t to say that it’s incorrect. But in recent years, Hollywood has hit upon a new formula through which to plunder its past glories and be bad in new and original ways. We are living, for our sins, in the era of the ‘requel’.

As the name suggests, a requel is essentially a cross between a remake and a sequel. They typically bring back original cast members and revisit familiar tropes, while introducing a new primary set of characters. While they can be any genre – Star Wars: The Force Awakens arguably invented the template – recent years have seen a notable spate of horror requels, which is probably due to the wild commercial success of David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018). Its sequel, Halloween Kills (2021), was met with mostly bad reviews, but also did pretty well at the box office, as did Scream (2022). A requel trilogy based on The Exorcist (1973) is already in the works. None of these films have been very good. They aren’t just bad because they’re bad films, and they aren’t just bad because they’re unoriginal: the requel format, and the creative limitations it imposes, is itself partly to blame.

Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, released last week, is about a group of influencers attempting to turn an abandoned Texas town into a pop-up food market with an art gallery and a comic book shop. This hair-brained scheme is interrupted when Leatherface, a chainsaw-wielding serial killer, shows up and begins to murder them. It is probably one of the worst films I have ever seen, which seems to be a typical response. In fact, a number of critics have called it out for its ‘cringey wokeness.’ I don’t think this is entirely true: it feels as though the audience is invited to actively root for Leatherface as he massacres these annoying, liberal, racially diverse hipsters. Plus, one of the few sympathetic characters is a gruff Chris Hemsworth-look alike who at one point bellows, “I’m a Texan. I don’t like people telling me what to do, especially smug, self-righteous, rich city folk!” It’s not that it’s too woke, but more that it’s plagued by confused and pointless efforts to engage with contemporary politics: there’s a bunch of stuff about school shootings, gentrification and racism floating around in the background to little effect, and the characters say stuff like “behold the joys of late-stage capitalism” – along with a reference to the ‘30-50 feral hogs’ meme, which is reason enough to ban all screenwriters from using Twitter. 

What really makes this a ‘requel’ is the return of Sally (Marilyn Burns), the sole survivor of the original massacre. But while Burn is excellent in the 1974 version, Sally is not a particularly well-drawn character. She’s beautiful and screams a lot, which is fine – it’s a brilliant, intense performance for what it needs to be, but she doesn’t withstand the kind of mythologising brought to bear here. It doesn’t help that the script’s efforts to turn her into a bad-ass avenging angel are so corny: “Remember me now? I’m the one who got away and I’m here to make sure you don’t – motherfucker!” The characterisation of Leatherface is also misjudged. In the original, he’s not really evil per se: he’s more just a weird guy the characters stumble across, who dispatches them in a dispassionate, matter-of-fact way. He’s also a functionary of a larger family, of which he is a kind of housewife figure who minces around in a pinafore. Apart from one brief scene in which he applies some rouge, the Netflix version dispenses with all of that and turns him into a generic, lone wolf slasher villain; a lumbering brute in the vein of Jason Voorhees. In doing so, it dispenses with a lot of what made the original character so memorable. You could even, if you wanted, accuse the film of erasing Leatherface’s queerness, which would be a very serious charge indeed.

Unlike the original, which has the scuzzy, grimy feel of a snuff film you found in an attic and really shouldn’t be watching, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) is cursed with the same bland, glossy color-grading as every Netflix production. As with the new Halloween films, it’s baroquely gory in a way the original wasn’t (the violence in the original is brutal but mostly implied.) The film’s big set-piece involves Leatherface coming onto a party bus, where one of the revellers attempts to warn him, “try anything and you’re cancelled, bro!” The resulting massacre subverts two ideas about slasher films: that characters almost always get picked off one-by-one so there is safety in crowds, and that technology can keep you alive. Unlike a lot of post-mobile phone horror films, there’s no effort to ensure that there’s no reception: the characters wield their phones in an effort to save themselves and only end up live-streaming their own deaths. This is at least something kind of original and it’s the best scene of the film, but the violence is more cartoonish or disgusting than terrifying, its potency diminished by soy banter and inane cultural references. 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been an almost unanimous critical failure, but other horror requels have fared better. Scream (2022), which sees Courtney Cox, David Arquette and Neve Campbell from the original series return to face a new iteration of Ghostface, was fairly well-received: it holds a 60 rating on Metacritic which, for a horror film, is respectable. But while it was a lot more competent than Texas, it still isn’t a very good film: it’s dreary and joyless, lacking the sharp wit and bite of the originals. It’s a laborious and not very interesting take on the ‘requel’ format itself – the rules of which a character expounds upon in great detail. This echoes a scene in the original film where Randy (Jamie Kennedy) lists a set of rules to follow in order to survive a horror film: don’t drink or have sex, never say ‘I’ll be right back’ etc. This is fun because it deals in tropes and cliches that we already know, and, if we’re horror fans, probably feel a degree of affection towards. Listening to a character explain the IP-plundering mechanics of contemporary Hollywood, on the other hand, is more akin to reading a boring Reddit thread or an article in a trade magazine. In attempting to satirise its own cynicism and redundancy, Scream just hammers it home even further. Watching it made me feel genuinely depressed; aware of the passing of time and my own mortality, and not in a good way. What Hollywood fails to realise is that nostalgia is often a fraught and unpleasant emotion.

But for many critics, it was last year’s Halloween Kills (2020) that represented the nadir of the requel format. In a scathing Letterboxd review, film critic Sean McTiernan wrote, “This isn’t a film, it’s limited edition merch. It’s licensed ephemera that the accountants, landlords, product managers and any other well-adjusted member of the spend-money-now official horror fandom, who all dress vaguely rockabilly for some reason, can safely enjoy with their terrible children.” The original Halloween (1979) is one of my favourite films of all time, and I agree that Halloween Kills is a travesty. It treats its source material with cloying reverence, regurgitating the original for references, call-backs, trivia, Easter Eggs and cameo appearances. Its obsessive nostalgia wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it captured the atmosphere or formal qualities of the original, which was a masterpiece of slow-build suspense. But Halloween Kills and its 2018 predecessor careen from one gory death scene to another, never pausing long enough to allow for a sense of foreboding. It opens with a truly absurd scene in which Michael Myers slaughters a bunch of firefighters in hand-to-hand combat. But it’s far scarier in the original when Michael is lurking around in the background, his white mask appearing in the edge of a frame. To have him engage in a John Wick-style fight scene is, frankly, undignified.

What all of these horror requels share in common is an obsession with the minutiae of their source materials coupled with an all-encompassing failure to understand what made them so good in the first place. The prequel format also brings its own structural problems. Slasher films are at their best when they’re tightly paced, concise and well-structured. The hoops that these requels have to jump through in order to reunite characters from the original with a new set of cast members entails a degree of narrative bagginess and contrivance; it prevents them from cutting to the chase. In Scream (2022) and Halloween Kills particularly, the focus on the more famous and interesting original cast members means that the film fails to develop the new characters, who are largely indistinct. This is a problem, because for a slasher film to be effective you need to care at least a little bit when people get picked off. The requel seems like an expression of a culture that is completely exhausted with itself, entirely dependent on the icons of the past and unwilling to create new ones. Watching Scream (2022) I had that strong feeling that I would rather be watching something as epoch-defining to the 2020s as the original was to the 1990s. By definition, this couldn’t be a Scream film – it would have to be something entirely new.