Negotiating Franchise Identity in Trailers for Neo-slasher Remakes and Reboots

Nick Redfern

Many films released as part of the neo-slasher cycle of horror films between 2000 and 2013 were remakes of ‘first wave’ slasher films from the 1970s and early-1980s, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Black Christmas (2006), Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), Halloween (2007), Toolbox Murders (2004), When a Stranger Calls (2006), Friday the Thirteenth (2009), Prom Night (2008), Halloween 2 (2009), My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009), Sorority Row (2009), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), and Curse of Chucky (2013). James Francis observed that, during the neo-slasher cycle, the horror film industry was “in the process of becoming a giant remake of its genre film past. … the overall presentation of contemporary horror films is now déjà vu. Classic film creations and modern-day B-movie exploits are being remade and cranked out quicker than an axe murderer beheads stalked prey” (2).

Joanna Murphy argues that remakes of slasher films incorporate content from the original film along with the sequels and intertexts of those franchises. The result is that these remakes become “cumulative hypertexts,” retaining much of the content of the original film in their “adherence to the original film’s narrative structure, retaining elements of syntax, the same cause and effect sequences, and the original film’s story,” by the “retaining of repeated and frequently referenced tropes from each franchise, as opposed to simply using that which appeared in the first film,” and in their fidelity to the rules of the slasher film (61). Slasher film remakes, according to Murphy, are not simply a re-telling of a well-known story but adapt and add to the original film making their “own original contribution to the franchise in the form of back story and an extended final act, commenting on and adding to the hypertexts and original film that preceded it” (114).

In this article I am interested in how slasher film franchises operate as cumulative hypertexts, focusing on the trailers for neo-slasher movies to examine how the strategies of negotiating franchise identity operate as part of the creation and circulation of a film’s narrative image prior to its release. Trailers are one of the most effective forms of marketing for motion pictures and have a significant impact on audiences’ decision about which films they choose to watch (Karray and Debernitz). All trailers must advertise to a potential audience the pleasures that will be fulfilled by the promoted film and communicate key marketing information (e.g., release dates, social media information, etc.) to the viewer. For franchise films, trailers must also negotiate the relationship between the film being promoted and other films in the franchise, establishing connections between the body of knowledge held by the audience and the new film that will, in the course of its own narrative, add to that knowledge.

Disavowal and re-mystification

A common approach to rebooting slasher franchises is to disavow elements of franchise canon that are no longer considered useful and create the monster anew. Elizabeth Dixon refers to this process of stripping away past narrative information to present a known monster as an unknown threat as re-mystification (201). This process begins before the viewer ever gets a chance to see the film, and organizing the viewer’s knowledge of franchise lore is a key function of trailers. Nowhere is this process more evident than in the trailer for Rob Zombie’s reboot of the Halloween franchise with Halloween (2007).

Although the film tells the same basic story as John Carpenter’s original movie Halloween (1978), Laura Mee argues that the 2007 version of Halloween was presented as Rob Zombie’s personal vision of a well-known story by significantly expanding the backstory of Michael Myers and devoting the first 50 minutes of the film to focus on the killer’s childhood and time in the Smith’s Grove Sanatorium (134-145). The trailer also seeks to establish the film as the work of Zombie as auteur – the voice-over describes the film as the director’s “unique vision of a legendary tale” – and does so by diminishing the roles of Laurie and Dr. Loomis to focus on Michael. Figure 1 shows the amount of time each character is on screen in the trailer for the original film and for Zombie’s reboot. Michael is on screen for just over half the trailer’s running time, as a boy, as a patient at Smith’s Grove, and as a killer on the loose, while Laurie appears in only a handful of shots and Loomis is on screen for only a fraction of a second.

Another key difference between the trailer for this film and that of the original is that Michael is clearly visible whenever he is on-screen and his face (or, rather, his masked face) is shown on screen numerous times, whereas previously he was restricted to the shadows and his face was shown only briefly. This makes Michael a physical presence, and the selection of shots included in the 2007 trailer emphasises his size and strength, being almost exclusively framed from a low camera height in contrast to the eye-level framing trailer of the original film (Figure 2). The trailer for Zombie’s film also introduces the plotline that Laurie is Michael’s younger sister, which was not introduced until Halloween II (1981) in the original franchise, so that his return to Haddonfield is motivated by his search for his sister. This Michael is a tangible monster, physical, psychologically driven and, therefore, more real.

However, the reboot’s trailer is structurally very similar to that of the original. Both trailers begin with Michael as a young killer, followed by Michael’s escape from the hospital with narrative context supplied by Dr. Loomis, and devote a similar proportion of their running time to this material: 40% for the original’s trailer and 43% for the remake’s. We then move to Haddonfield, with a sense of foreboding created by the girls sensing they are being followed (the original trailer) or being explicitly warned of the dangers of Halloween night (the remake), before the stalk-and-slash section of the trailer begins. This allows the trailer for the remake to draw on the audiences’ existing knowledge of the franchise – both the films and their marketing materials – to reduce the risks of introducing novelty into a well-known franchise. The narrative image of Zombie’s version of Halloween is very different from that of the original, shifting the focus away from Laurie, the “Final Girl,” and onto Michael as the main character of the film, thereby enabling the film to be presented as something different from the original while telling the very same story. This is now Michael’s story, but it is still a recognisable story.

Remake the trailer

Just as a film provides a template for its remake, trailers for a film perform the same role for trailers of a remake. Remakes of neo-slasher films must follow the same structure, hit the same beats, and apply the same principles to trailer production, with shot selection, shot ordering, and graphics use strongly determined by earlier marketing strategies. Murphy argues that the retention of content in neo-slasher films is characterised by (1) adherence to a formal structure; (2) the referencing of a franchise’s tropes; and, (3) adherence to the generic rules of the slasher film (61). I have already identified in the example of Halloween above that retention of the structure of a trailer is a means to contain the re-mystification of the monster. In this section, I focus on how the trailer for the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th references trailers for the first four films in the franchise (Friday the 13th (1980), Friday the 13th Part II (1981), Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)) to amplify the key images of the franchise.

The trailer for the first Friday the 13th film presented the viewer with a sequence of violent moments followed by a blood-red number counting up to the thirteen of the film’s title (Figure 3.10). This became a key motif of the promotional materials for the franchise when it was continued in the trailers for parts two and three. The trailer for the 2009 reboot devoted the first half of its running time to establishing its narrative, but once it moves on to frightening the audience, it adopted this same strategy of displaying numbers on screen to count up to thirteen (Figure 3.7). Other choices by the trailer’s producers match images from trailers for the first four films in the original franchise, both in terms of their selection, function, and placement in the trailer for the reboot. The narrative structure of the 2009 trailer is taken from the trailer for the third film in the franchise, with the arrival of a group of teens at Camp Crystal Lake in a van (Figure 3.1-3.2 and 3.16-3.17), followed by a swimmer in the lake (Figure 3.3 and 3.15) who is the first to encounter Jason. The transition from narrative to horror is initiated by a shot of the moon (Figure 3.4 and 3.13), and includes pulling back shower curtains (Figure 3.5 and 3.11), Jason’s shadow on a tent (Figure 3.6 and 3.18), and Jason breaking through a window (Figure 3.8 and 3.14).

The trailer for the 2009 release is constructed as a compressed and compendious version of the franchise and demonstrates that the principles Murphy identifies as governing the production of neo-slasher remakes are equally applicable to trailers themselves. Trailers are paratexts with reference to the film they promote, but viewed within the context of a franchise they exist as short films in their own right, and the relationships between trailers mirror the relationships between films. This process is evident in the trailer for the remake of Friday the 13th not simply because the shots are selected from a remake of the original films, but because the trailer follows the template of the original trailers.

Identity

Another strategy employed by trailer producers is to avoid disclosing changes made to a neo-slasher film. This approach was adopted for the 2010 release of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that made substantial changes to the plot, none of which are mentioned in the trailer. In this case, the trailer goes beyond creating an association through amplification of a franchise’s key images and tropes; it seeks to create an identity between those films to exploit the audiences’ prior knowledge of a franchise and to overcome the competing demands of satisfying the demands of the audience for novelty while operating within a familiar framework.

For the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, the filmmakers wanted to re-mystify Freddy Kruger as a monster, returning to his nightmarish persona from the original 1984 film and dropping the humour of later movies in the franchise that made Freddy a cartoonish villain. In the words of producer Brad Fuller,  “He’s not funny, he’s a f**ked up guy” (Rotten 2009), and so Freddy’s backstory was altered to make him a child molester who had abused the main cast of teenagers, thereby re-contextualising their dreams as the post-traumatic experiences of survivors, and presenting Freddy as a truly horrifying being who had escaped justice, legitimising his death at the hands of the parents. The film even implies for a large part of the second act that the children had invented the abuse story, and though it ultimately backs away from this possibility to confirm Freddy’s guilt, this means that Freddy is not only a monster but someone the audience can sympathise with as the apparent victim of injustice.

The impression we get from the trailer, however, is that the 2010 version tells the very same story as the original film. Key elements from the franchise are re-presented in the trailer: Freddy’s fedora, striped jumper, and glove, his death in the fire, the nursery rhyme warning you about the monster, the exhortations that you must remain awake, along with iconic images from the franchise. But the trailer does not include any of Freddy’s new back story or the possibility he is the victim of injustice. Although we see the parents chase him and burn him alive, Freddy is never identified as a child abuser. In fact, the trailer neglects to establish that the children were abused by Freddy even though this fact defines the relationships between the characters and the relationship of the audience to those characters. Lacking this context, the presentation of Freddy on-screen throughout the trailer is in keeping with his supernatural incarnation – exactly the opposite of what the producers intended to do with Freddy by defining his character against the abuse backstory. It is, however, consistent with the audience’s prior knowledge of the franchise, disavowing the history of the franchise and re-mystifying Freddy as a monster, but, unlike the Halloween trailer, doing so in a way that ultimately misleads the viewer about the film. The trailer rewards the audience for its knowledge of the franchise, providing moments of recognition and nostalgia as though the trailer for the remake was, in fact, a trailer for the original film. But with the changes to the characters and backstory, the knowledge motivated by the trailer in creating the narrative image for the film is no longer useful when watching the movie.

Playlist

The trailers discussed above can be accessed via a YouTube playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbMicDSWb8QbdzahR084ptR3qEbftB52c.

Works Cited

Dixon, Elizabeth E. Done to Death? Re-evaluating Narrative Construction in Slasher Sequels. Sheffield Hallam University, PhD thesis, 2017.

Francis, James. Remaking Horror: Hollywood’s New Reliance on Scares of Old. McFarland, 2013.

Karray, Salma, and Lidia Debernitz. ‘The Effectiveness of Movie Trailer Advertising’. International Journal of Advertising, vol. 36, no. 2, 2017, pp. 368–92.

Murphy, Joanna Mary. Re-Presenting Fear: The Slasher Remake as Cumulative Hypertext. University of Otago, MA thesis, 2012.

Rotten, Ryan. ‘Set Visit Preview: A Nightmare on Elm Street’. shocktillyoudrop.com, 21 July 2009.