Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Age of the Sequel: Beyond the Profit Principle
- 1 Before and After the Blockbuster: A Brief History of the Film Sequel
- 2 Screaming, Slashing, Sequelling: What the Sequel Did to the Horror Movie
- 3 ‘It's All Up To You!’: Sequelisation and User-Generated Content
- 4 Adventures in Indiewood: Sequels in the Independent Film Marketplace
- 5 Signifying Hollywood: Sequels in the Global Economy
- 6 Sequelisation and Secondary Memory: Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A. I. (2001)
- References
- Index
2 - Screaming, Slashing, Sequelling: What the Sequel Did to the Horror Movie
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Age of the Sequel: Beyond the Profit Principle
- 1 Before and After the Blockbuster: A Brief History of the Film Sequel
- 2 Screaming, Slashing, Sequelling: What the Sequel Did to the Horror Movie
- 3 ‘It's All Up To You!’: Sequelisation and User-Generated Content
- 4 Adventures in Indiewood: Sequels in the Independent Film Marketplace
- 5 Signifying Hollywood: Sequels in the Global Economy
- 6 Sequelisation and Secondary Memory: Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A. I. (2001)
- References
- Index
Summary
‘Let's face it, baby, these days you gotta have a sequel!’
Stu in Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)‘Is she dead?’
‘I don't know. They always come back.’
Gale and Sidney in Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997)There is much to suggest that the film sequel operates as a genre or, at the very least, as a sub-genre. As the previous chapter has shown, early formative exercises in film ‘kinds’ led to the western, slapstick comedy, film noir, and lately to a host of hybrid generic formulations to alert cinema-going audiences to what they might expect of any film that subscribed to genre codes. A number of theories describe the ways by which audiences are alerted, but central to the operation of genre is the address of expectation. In its repetitious re-organisation of familiar features, genre shares much in common with sequelisation. According to Steve Neale, genre involves ‘repetition and variation’, and according to Barry Keith Grant, ‘genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations’ (my emphasis). Similarly, the sequel is described as ‘repetition-with-variation’ by Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg. How, then, to differentiate between the two?
The immediate connection between sequelisation and genre is found in processes of variation, or, more exactly, in intertextual strategies by which ‘variation’ marks the modulations between textual reproductions. Such ‘variations’ or differences are crucial to the establishment of reading/viewing positions. The forms of interaction between audiences and filmmakers that occur in the genre film perpetuate stabilisation; a comparable process informs the sequel.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Film SequelsTheory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood, pp. 52 - 71Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009