Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is many things — a sapphic age-gap love story, an interrogation of gender and sex in horror, a Hollywood satire — but on its face, it’s a parody what happens when horror franchises get too long in the fang, wear out their welcome and start heading to space, or worse, Manhattan. 

With a setting borrowed from “Friday the 13th” and Schoenbrun’s desire to reboot “Nightmare on Elm Street,” I couldn’t help but think of other beloved franchises that have begotten more than their share of sequels and reboots. And while all horror franchises have their valleys, three of my favorites arguably peak in the third chapter. 

“Scream” was one of the first horror movies I saw, but the genre tropes it commented on were so embedded in pop culture that even a teenaged horror newbie could appreciate its meta charms. As Stu says, you gotta have a sequel, and “Scream” has delivered several, including a requel trilogy that started strong before torpedoing itself when producers fired pro-Palestitian star Melissa Barrera.

But before all that, there was “Scream 3,” a sequel that surpasses the College Years premise of “Scream 2” by going to Hollywood and/or further up the franchise’s own ass, with delightful results. Spooked by the real-life violence of Columbine, producers wanted more laughing, less stabbing for the third chapter of “Scream.” The result is a movie production-within-a-movie where Roger Corman makes a cameo as a producer who says “Violence in cinema is a big deal right now.” 

“Scream 3” allows frightmaster Wes Craven and company to iterate on “Scream” in tongue-in-cheek ways. Jay and Silent Bob are on the studio tour, Carrie Fisher cameos as a Carrie Fisher-lookalike, Parker Posey chews scenery as an actress playing Courteney Cox’s “journalist” Gale Weathers and the dream of Y2K lives on in transparent iMacs and nu metal-heavy soundtracks.

Aside from a pretty clever plot where actors are being offed in the same order as they are in the script, “Scream 3” also interrogates Hollywood’s problems with sexual assault via the casting couch, within a movie produced by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. The call is coming from within the house, as it were. As Jamie Kennedy’s slain Randy Meeks explains via VHS — physical media lives! — the third part of a trilogy goes back to the beginning and reveals something that wasn’t true: in this case, rewriting the sordid story of Sidney’s mother that kicked off the whole series. Alas, nothing stays dead in horror franchises, because this would’ve made a perfect trilogy.

The “Scream” chronology, even with the requel series, is relatively straight forward. That cannot be said of “Halloween,” the ur-slasher whose successive sequels, remakes and reboots form up a convoluted timeline that only a mother like Pamela Voorhees could love. While Carpenter’s 1978 original remains chillingly effective, it’s the chapter that doesn’t feature the iconic, unkillable Michael Myers that I find myself returning to most often. 

“Halloween III: Season of the Witch” was an attempt to turn the series into an anthology about the spooky season, rather than one dedicated to Mr. Myers (spoiler alert: it didn’t take). Instead, “Season of the Witch” is a creepy thriller in the mode of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and “They Live.” Carpenter collaborator Tommy Lee Wallace gives the film a tactile texture with a surprising amount of filmmaking flare, from focus pulls to depth of field tricks, and Carpenter and Alan Howarth made sure the soundtrack had that familiar chill. 

Instead of an unkillable killer, “Season of the Witch” is focused on a corporate conspiracy involving kids’ Halloween masks and follows a drunken, divorced doctor and his much younger running mate (played by Stacey Nelkin, the real-life inspiration for Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” improbably). The plot is a touch too convoluted, but the scares are solid and the diversion from Myers is a shot of fresh blood in a series that won’t stay dead. And if that’s enough, here’s the hook of Vincent Canby’s review: “Halloween III manages the not easy feat of being anti-children, anti-capitalism, anti-television and anti-Irish all at the same time.” A bad time all around, in the best way.

Bad vibes are horror’s stock in trade, and they’re overwhelming in possibly the best franchise third and one of my favorite horror movies of all time: “The Exorcist III.” Written and directed by “Exorcist” scribe William Peter Blatty, “Exorcist III” is a direct sequel to the first film (The less said about cynical cash-in “Exorcist II,” the better). 

Using the events of the first film as its traumatic backstory, “Exorcist III” follows George C. Scott’s beleaguered police lieutenant as he investigates a series of sickening murders that share a signature with a long-dead serial killer. Washingtonians no doubt get a kick out of 1990 Georgetown and everyone enjoys Scott’s verbose, irreverent cop. “Exorcist III” disarms you with humor (“Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you’re an asshole,” says an equally worldworn priest) and then wallops with unsettling dream sequences, crucifixions, beheadings and the Scariest Jump Scare of All Time.

Brad Dourif is hypnotic as a mysterious patient, the filmmaking — blocking, lighting and beyond — is impeccable, and you can feel the film’s icy touch on everything from “Se7en” to “Hereditary.” As Dourif’s character says of a murder he may or may not have committed: 

“The overall effect is astonishing! And isn’t that really what counts in the end? Yes, of course, good show biz, Lieutenant, the effect! … Now I call that showmanship, Lieutenant!”

This piece is in Recommend If You Like The Spooky Issue Fall 2026. You can find physical copies in bars, cafes and stores in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The newspaper is available for purchase here. 

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