Collins’ Crypt: Continuity Debate!
Way back in the day, I wrote an article defending Saw's strong continuity, compared to other horror franchises that routinely ignore previous entries when the story gets too complicated (see: H20), or merely never knew what to make of the previous installment and just followed the original, i.e. what pretty much every single Texas Chainsaw sequel has done. And on that very article, our own Phil Nobile, Jr. left a comment countering that, saying: "the "who gives a fuck what happened in the last one?" vibe from producers was always part of the fun." We discussed it a bit at the time both in comments and in person, but I thought this deserved a full on discussion for all to enjoy! So here goes:
BC: Well Phil, I know that Saw article was like two years ago, so I hope you haven't changed your tune since then or else this will be a very boring and nerdy "debate." I actually meant to do this sooner, but as I often do, I forgot. However the recent, continuity be damned Texas Chainsaw 3D rejuvenated both my interest in debating you and my appreciation for a strong throughline between my horror properties. It's actually kind of ironic, since this newest Chainsaw is from the same producers as Saw (and it even features a cameo from one of its villains), but despite all their advertising about its being a direct sequel to the 1974 original, they can't even get that much right. The timeline of the film makes zero sense - in order to work, the heroine (Alexandra Daddario, aged 24) has to be nearly 40, OR the original film now has to take place in the early '90s. Not to mention how the Sawyer clan somehow multiplied overnight - are all twenty of them cannibals? And since when is Drayton so sympathetic and scared?
But it's a fine example of why I tend to prefer that all the movies in a franchise match up. When my brain wasn't melting from trying to figure out how exactly this movie was supposed to connect to the original, it was actually rather enjoyable in a "dumb fun" way, and thus if they had put a little more effort into the connecting parts so it would all make sense, I might have been able to have more fun watching it. It wasn't until I completely gave up hope that anyone had actually done their homework properly that I was able to get on board, something I never had to worry about on the Saws or the early Halloweens, when the odd mistake (Michael's middle name changed from the first film to the fourth) would be just that - a mistake, as opposed to complete carelessness, as is the case here.
Your turn - what makes what I see as a negative - no respect for the previous installment(s) - a plus for you?
Phil: First off, in a very basic sense, slavish adherence to continuity is frequently the enemy of good storytelling. Ideally, to me, a film needs to exist on its own between the opening and closing credits, and the job it does within that space should be its main priority. More often than not, tying the narrative to other works diminishes the piece out of the gate. I imagine it might be a fun creative challenge, Five Obstructions-style, to paint yourself into a corner a bit and attempt to make it all work. But too often it comes across as creative handicapping, and even more often the attempt to paint inside those lines flat-out fails. Texas Chainsaw 3D was a HUGE example of that; as you describe above, no matter how you slice it the attempts to tie the narrative to the original film just don't work, and it's so sloppy in that regard that a week later it's pretty much all anyone is talking about, even eclipsing Alexandra Daddario's spectacular wardrobe choices.
Every horror franchise that attempts an internal continuity has to fudge parts (e.g., Halloween II has The Shape falling out the opposite side of the house; if you count human physiology as "continuity," Friday the 13th can never even get to Part 2). To hope for airtight continuity is asking to have your heart broken over and over again! Disregarding (or at least de-prioritizing) continuity is freeing, for both the filmmakers and the audience.
BC: I agree that it can certainly open up storytelling possibilities, but the more they ignore/stray from the previous entry, the more I'm being reminded of how cynical it all is to make a sequel in the first place. Much like remakes, there are enough worthy sequels to forever silence the notion that they shouldn't be done (quick, let's name-check Godfather II before someone else does), but still, for the most part - and especially in horror - the creative spark behind a sequel is "eh it made money so let's give them another one." To me, the ones that actually try to thank that paying audience for giving a shit are the ones that turn out better - Cold Prey II and Halloween II are well-regarded mainly for picking up at the exact moment where the originals left off, and in general the least loved Freddy entries are the two that stray (Part 2 and Freddy's Dead), whereas the much more well regarded 1, 3, 4 and (to a lesser extent) 5 have their own little community of characters. And not to keep going back to Saw, but not only did they find ways to keep opening up the story without ret-conning too much (and when they did it was backed up, not "Oh by the way Jason has a sister and some guy named Creighton has been chasing him for years with a magic dagger"), but they did so on a yearly basis.
And those are the most extreme examples. H20 could have wrapped up the dumb cult shit in dialogue and still had the same story about Michael finding Laurie at a prep school - they didn't have to make a whole movie about the ongoing battle between druids and Thorn cultists or whatever the hell was going on in Halloween 6. TCM3D actually had this kind of approach; they wrapped up the events of the first movie and moved on to something that a newcomer would have no problem understanding - in concept that's fine, it was just the execution that was messy. But take out the dumb iPhone scene and throw a digital 1993 on the tombstone, and suddenly the conversation returns to Daddario (and the film's hilariously gonzo climax), and (spoiler) if they didn't kill Drayton off in the shootout the movie could have even fit in with part 2 without actively saying it didn't happen. In other words, there's a difference between a few screwups that only the most obsessed fans will notice (like your balcony in Halloween example), and the total "Fuck you, previous filmmakers" of H20, Freddy's Dead, TCM3D, etc. And if you're going to try at all, try hard - don't just pick and choose what you'd like to keep from the last one while completely going in opposite directions on other elements.
The Friday example you mention is an interesting one - fans have come up with any number of theories as to how it worked. I read one that claimed that since his mother had left town after killing those two counselors, Jason (who never drowned) just retreated to the woods and grew up there, and thus the boy who came out of the lake and grabbed Alice was just - as it is more or less presented in the film itself - a dream. Of course, none of this is in the movie itself, but obviously there's a way to explain it if you want to put some thought into it, and without contradicting or erasing anything that happened in the original. Now take the gap between 8 and 9. Jason's toxic waste bath at the end of Manhattan reduced him to a little boy again (science!), but somehow at the beginning of 9, he's fully grown again (complete with a hockey mask that's seen some damage) and back in Crystal Lake - the only way to explain that one is "part 8 was a dream", with no evidence in the film to support that, which puts us back in "fuck you, previous filmmakers" territory (whether Rob Hedden deserves that is a matter of opinion; for the record I'd rather watch Jason Take Manhattan than Go To Hell). So I think there's a way to skip over the explanations and leave them for the fans to figure out (as they did in 2; whether anyone intended this is another matter), but still refrain from actively saying "The last movie didn't happen".
Phil: Sure, but I don't need to pretend a sequel isn't a business venture. Just seeing a number after a horror title sets off my cynical alarm. We've shown up for over ten Jason Voorhees movies; we know the drill.
And just as only the most obsessed fan will notice certain continuity goofs, only those same fans care that much about having everything neatly in its narrative place. Not gonna lie, that Halloween paragraph made my head hurt. Including that Thorn cult stuff in H20, whatever you thought of H20, wouldn't have made for a better movie, it would have simply placated hardcore fans and muddied up H20 a bit. Because at the end of the day it's an exclusionary move, and on top of that a futile one: the core fanbase would be sated on that one point, but they'd soon turn their ire to the mask or the coveralls being wrong, or some other obsessive detail. I suspect the net gain of trying to please them will always be questionable.
Nicholas Meyer made the best Star Trek film, ironically a direct sequel to an episode of the TV series, and a large reason for its success was that he threw away whatever pre-existing elements didn't work for the particular story he wanted to tell. It didn't negate a whole lot that came before, but it sure as hell ignored a lot. Contrast that with all the Leonard Nimoy/Spock Prime//time travel hoop-jumping crammed into JJ Abrams' Star Trek. It's a fun movie, but it's filled with narrative clutter existing only to serve an overzealous few to whom making sure everything "counts as canon" matters as much as (or more than) having a good standalone piece of entertainment.
And those people shouldn't be encouraged. I want to share two BAD comments about continuity in the James Bond series. Now, it's a FIFTY YEAR OLD franchise, with 23 films. And there are people out there who insist it can (or at least should) all fit one continuity; otherwise it's not as enjoyable. Devin and I both wrote about the inclusion of Bond's parents grave in Skyfall as final proof that "James Bond" is his birth name, not, as a lot of fans want to believe, a code name assigned to a series of agents who looked like all the different Bond actors. In Skyfall, Bond drives to Middle-Of-Nowhere Scotland, where we see the nearly-forgotten headstone of Andrew Bond and Monique Delacroix Bond. Now, here is how two viewers processed that information:
I maintain that if MI6 really wants them to be super covert agents, they could clearly change something like a tombstone to reflect his undercover status.
And:
It is entirely probable (to me) that they recruited an orphan whose last name happened to be Bond to fill in the role of James Bond. To me this would explain why James has access to what is clearly Connery's DB05 if it came with the identity.
Read over those again. This is madness, Brian! When I see that kind of stuff, I find I'm almost at the point where I love a good bit of continuity trolling, just to watch fans lose their minds. Does having the seams show in continuity kill your enjoyment of a film?
BC: Well Bond's continuity is its own very special thing (and yes, that guy with the orphan theory is totally bonkers). I liken it to the "floating timeline" you have in comics, where every eight to ten years in real life is equal to one in their lives, but the world around them manages to keep up. However, rebooting with Craig (but keeping Dench as M) sort of screwed that up, and it's a shame that the final scene of Skyfall wasn't retained for the (completely theoretical) day that the series ended, because it would have been a fine way to close its loop forever and let the obsessives battle for years. As I'm not a die hard fan of the series I wouldn't spot continuity issues as easily as you might (though I've seen enough to know that there are apparently two Joe Don Bakers running around in the Bond-verse - that sort of stuff bugs me), and Quantum more or less proved that direct sequels aren't the best way to go for this series. Then again, perhaps the quality of the film itself was a big part in me not caring much - if Casino Royale sucked, maybe I'd be complaining more about the "glitches" it caused by rebooting within continuity as it did. Unlike, say, Jason Goes To Hell, which tossed out any number of entries in order to tell its terrible, largely Jason-less story, or the generic cheap thrills of TCM3D wiping out the wonderfully insane TCM2 in the process. Disregarding x number of movies says to me that the filmmakers of that entry think that they're "fixing" something, and thus I'm insulted if I don't think it was all that broken to begin with, or if they're actually making it worse. They were trying a lot of new things in Friday the 13th 7 The New Blood, but they at least took the time to bring Jason back from the spot he died in the last one. The Jason design changed, but that's when you get into "obsessive details" territory, and while I notice those things, I never hold them against the film (indeed, Jason's design is the best thing about that lousy entry). You're right, the die-hards will always find some little detail to complain about, but the big picture stuff (i.e. the previous film's EXISTENCE) I think can always be kept in line without its hurting the new creative team's ability to tell a story about a guy killing people.
I definitely agree that Abrams' Star Trek's confused attempts to keep it in line with the other movies (and TV show?) weakened it some; I think it worked best with little throwaway nods (Sulu's bit about fencing), not so much when the movie stops cold to explain how it all fits. Because yes, there are bound to be mistakes (I've seen two Trek films and maybe ten episodes of the original series, so don't ask me what they are), and in that particular case I do think it's handicapping the narrative. But they also had what, a seven-year gap between movies, no new shows... the series was basically done, and the new film came with a very clear indication that this was a reboot, only to spring "Nope, same continuity, sort of..." halfway through (when Spock Prime appeared) and muck it up a bit. Halloween 6, on the other hand, ended on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved, and then H20 came along less than three years later, utilizing two characters from the other films (played by the same actors). And they even spent part of the movie clunkily trying to make sure we knew that parts 4-6 never happened (and possibly even Halloween II, since Michael is said to have merely disappeared that night, rather than get blown up). So they were still handicapped, just in a different way, trying to attempt a reboot and direct sequel all at once. Thus it seems they could have used that time letting someone brush off the Thorn nonsense in the same manner ("A couple years ago he wiped out a bunch of doctors at his old institution, even Dr. Loomis, and no one's seen him since" - done), rather than reduce the series' most enduring character (Loomis) to a sad old man sitting in a house looking at files until he died (and don't get me started on shitting on Donald Pleasence's final film!). Yeah, H6 mostly sucked, but any long running series is prone to a couple of weak entries, that doesn't mean we should just ignore them. I mean, if I pick up Spider-Man #587 and everyone thinks it's terrible, I don't think #588 should start off "OK, the last issue was #550, that cool?" and then tell another lame story.
Basically I think that it goes on a property by property basis, and should be dictated by the number of characters it's about. Surely a Bond film is just about Bond, and while he has M and Q backing him up, I don't think anyone should ever care too much where the film's surviving Bond girl went when the next one starts. But in something like Halloween, where you have Myers, Loomis, Laurie (and then Jamie Lloyd)... plus a few films establishing their importance, I think it's important to at least put the effort into keeping that story more or less in check. As nuts as I am for that franchise, I don't really care about who Jamie's father is, but I do care that her character exists, something H20 went out of its way to say that she didn't. There's a theory that Halloween III might have been accepted if it didn't have part II to cement the Halloween series as being about Michael Myers (and Loomis, and Laurie, and even Brackett), and I agree. Once something is established with a part 2, it should be carried through to part 3 and beyond. And if there's no viable story to tell with these characters, then you write them off (a la killing Laurie off at the beginning of Halloween 8) and do your best to move on. And if that doesn't work, call Rob Zombie. 
On that note, I should stress that I am fully AGAINST the idea of sticking to the established rules and story of its predecessors when it comes to remakes. Nothing drives me more insane than people whining that Zombie has no idea what makes Michael Myers interesting - he might know perfectly well what makes John Carpenter's incarnation work, but that doesn't matter as he was trying his own thing. And his ideas might have worked if he had tossed out EVERYTHING about the original film besides the Michael Myers character, rather than try to combine his ideas with Carpenter's. His 2009 sequel actually mostly works in my opinion, and a big part of that is because he wasn't recycling story elements from any previous Halloween film and just doing his own thing. Same with Jason in the Platinum Dunes remake - "Jason doesn't make traps and tunnels!" idiot fanboys cry, somehow missing the fact that this was not the same Jason. Going to the remake well is a fine way of wiping the slate and changing whatever you like - a sequel is not.
Final thoughts? I have to go rant about Seed Of Chucky's "Made in Taiwan" joke when it was established in part 2 that Good Guy Dolls were manufactured in Chicago.
Phil: Hang on - it bugs you when an actor turns up in two roles in a franchise? What'd you think of James Remar playing two different parts in Django Unchained?
I think a lot of it it comes down to personal peccadilloes - a fan is more bound to be irked by a disregard for continuity of a series in which they're more emotionally invested. For some people it's Halloween, for some it's Bond, for some it's Star Trek - we shrug at one and pull our hair out over another. (Somewhere someone is putting away a half-written angry letter to the CW upon learning that The Carrie Diaries is "correctly" set in 1984.) But when I think of that tangled rat's nest of Halloween continuity, I'm reminded of that old Turkish proverb - "No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn around." And while any part 4 or part 8 or part 23 has to fight uphill to NOT seem like a cynical business venture, sometimes the only way a filmmaker can possibly create a sequel that's not just commercial product is to forget about all those Roman numerals that came before.
BC: When it comes to Tarantino, rules do not apply!
But yes, the more you're into a series the more likely you are to notice/care about the continuity. However, I also think that the reason I'm NOT into say, the Bond series as much, is because there's no reason to make sure I see every entry. With a blank slate every time, more or less (Blofeld, Bond's wife, and whatever Quantum carried over from Casino Royale are pretty much the only attempts at serialized storytelling beyond a few sight gags, right?), and a lack of an ongoing story established right off the bat (From Russia With Love doesn't mention much about Dr. No), I don't feel like missing a few adventures will leave me at a disadvantage as much as say, skipping Saw III would if you planned to watch Saw IV. Of course, the Bond films make more than the Saws, so I guess not being so exclusionary has its rewards
It's your turn, readers! Pros/cons of continuity? And please keep it to original series continuity - don't muck about pointing out the "mistakes" in Platinum Dunes' remakes or Rob Zombie's Halloween or whatever. Whole other ballgame.
