Originally published on Set The Tape
Horror films have always been popular, and with the improvement of television as a storytelling medium, more and more horror film franchises are making the leap to the small screen, such as Psycho, Evil Dead and The Exorcist, which this week returns for its second season in the UK, developing the mythology of William Friedkin’s original classic.
We have horror on the brain this week, consequently, especially given we’re in the run up to Halloween, so we pondered five other great horror movies and franchise that would make a strong leap from the big to small screen…
Alien
With the latest films in the Alien franchise dividing fans, perhaps now would be a good time for the franchise to make the leap to television. The Alien universe encompasses hundreds of years, and as such means that there’s ample room to be creative as to what era to set a series in, though using Aliens as a foundation seems to be a sensible choice.
You could easily create a series around the Colonial Marines, following a squad of soldiers as they find themselves fighting against the xenomorphs. This could be done in a similar way to the old Colonial Marines comics, where they’re sent to a number of worlds to fight alien threats.
Child’s Play
The Child’s Play series is one that started a with a serious tone, but over time embraced the more humorous side of itself. In this it shares a lot of similarities to the Evil Dead franchise, and much like Evil Dead it lends itself quite well to the idea of a television series.
Like Ash vs. Evil Dead, it could be a continuation of the films, focusing on what the possessed Chucky doll does between films, following him on his adventures. Hell, if Starz were to produce the series they could even do a Child’s Play/Evil Dead crossover episode or two.
The Thing
The Thing is one of the all time great horror films, not least because of the genuine horror of not knowing who you can trust in a scenario where your life is in danger. When your most trusted friend could turn out to be a monster who wants to take you over, how could you ever know who was real? This would make a great basis for a horror series.
I’d propose a show that would be more of a sequel to The Thing, rather than an adaptation. Create a show where the titular monster has made it off the Arctic. Set it in a world where the monster has managed to spread and take over most life.
Not only would this allow you to make a post-apocalyptic show, which are always popular, but a show that would be full of tension and horror as the survivors would never be able to let their guard down, even with each other.
It Follows
It Follows was a haunting film about some kind of entity that stalked people until it caught them and killed them. The entity could take on the form of any person and could only be seen by those it was following at that time.
Because the entity could be passed on to another through sex, the film was seen by some as a parable about the dangers of sex and sexually transmitted infections. By adapting this into a series it would allow more time to explore the story and delve deeper into the mythology.
It could even go on to finally explore what the entity is, whether it is actually real, if it can be stopped in any permanent way, or even where it came from.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
In much the same way that The Thing would work as a series, so would Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Expand the narrative to give us a more complex story of infiltration and replacement. A series could take the time to show what happens on a more global scale, or even what the pod people’s end game would be.
The story could begin as the small town horror story that the original film was before expanding outwards in later seasons, showing what would happen as the invasion expanded across a country, before the whole world.
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