Over the past couple of years, horror movie reboots have become somewhat of a necessity for any popular horror franchise. Reboots take a story back to its roots and make a direct sequel to the original movie. As there are some horror movie sequels many of us would like to forget, I think this is a welcomed development.

The art of the horror movie reboot has become a set formula. It usually goes that the killer comes back to kill a new group of people, and someone that’s connected to the original case helps them. The three movies I want to touch on are Scream 5 (2022), Texas Chainsaw (2022) and Halloween (2018)

Halloween (2018) was the movie that popularized this recent trend, and I think it’s one of the better examples. This movie has by far the best returning character in Laurie Strode played by the legendary Jamie Lee Curtis. This movie does an amazing job of recapturing what made the first few Halloween movies so good. It also set up for the next movie Halloween Kills (2021) in an effective way.

While Scream 5 is technically not a reboot, it follows the same formula as the others by focusing on the original movies. This film is a very interesting take on the formula, in that it acknowledges the idea of legacy characters in the movie itself. The returning characters, while interesting, aren’t as strong as those in Halloween. Overall this movie achieved what it set out to do. The movie is a lot of fun to watch, especially for avid horror fans 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if anything, was what I expected from a new TCM. It’s a bloody gorefest that has a mediocre story and bland characters. The returning character for this movie is by far the weakest and overall it felt like she was introduced through necessity rather than to improve the movie. While this movie is in my opinion, a failure in many ways, it’s still a fun watch for the over the top gore and the return of leather face   

Horror movie reboots, for me, are a welcome revelation. It’s fun to see these characters that we’ve seen grow over the course of multiple movies return in an effective way. With this trend seemingly not let up, I’m excited to see what the next reboot is.