Over several nights this week, and I am still not finished I have been watching Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13^th. The documentary covers the entire span of the iconic slasher/horror film franchise and has a running time that is close the seven hours. I am a movie buff and while I have seen a few of the Friday the 13^th  installments I am by far not an engaged fan of the series but I adore learning about films and their production.

Adrienne King who played final girl Alice in the initial film spoke about how many fans reacted badly to her characters quick and unceremonious death in the following sequel and my thoughts instantly flashed to Alien 3  and how the characters of Hicks and Newt were also cruelly dispatched simply to make way for the next batch of Purina Alien Chow.

Sequels are already tricky things to manage. People loved the first story and want more, deviate too wildly from the established tone and elements of that instigating tale and people will feel cheated, that they did not get what was promised on the tine, but hew too closely to the original plot and structure and people will be bored as you simply repeat the original with mere cosmetic changes. What Friday the 13^th Part 2  and Alien 3 exemplify is the dangers of ignores the audiences emotional investment in the previous episodes. A story, prose or cinematic, succeeds when the audience become emotionally invested in the fate of the characters. This is particularly true in films where the conclusion presents few surviving characters of which horror films excel. Alice in Friday the 13^th  is the ‘final girl’ and her survival is the emotional heartbeat of the movie, giving the audience its catharsis and exhilaration with the story climax. People are excited by her survival after attaching their fears to her for the run of the film. Alice matters. But her off-hand death at the start of the next film is an unintentional swipe at the audience. It is calling them suckers for caring about Alice, or Hicks and Newt for that matter, because all of that drama and tension and terror were meaningless. Those cruel and thoughtless character deaths invalidate all of the emotional toil and payoff of the previous franchise installments.

Does this mean you can’t kill surviving characters in the following sequels? No, of course not. What it means is that a sequel needs to be very careful in which characters fall and the manner in which they fall. Off-handedly removing character simply to make room for new ones is disrespectful to the audiences and their deep emotional attachments. If a character that survived an earlier episode must appear and die in a sequel then that death must be important to the plot and development of the story and it must be driven by the character’s choices. It need not be a ‘heroic’ death, though that is a clear option but it must not be a death that could have been filled by a stand in. Remember that sequel have a carry over emotional effect, the audience are in a heightened state filled with the memories of beloved characters in dramatic tension do not disrespect them.