16 horror films that prove a simple premise is often better

John Carpenter’s original “Halloween” is a perfect example of how simple can be better. Every ensuing “Halloween” movie and every remake and reboot overcomplicates things. In the first film, Michael Myers kills his sister as a kid. Then, many years later, he breaks out of a mental hospital, heads back home, and kills or tries to kill a few teenagers. It’s just a guy in a mask committing murders. No need for lore or any of that stuff. It’s just tension and well-crafted filmmaking.

Now, when Jason Vorhees is getting supernatural and going to and from Christian Hell, things get a little too silly. At one point, the dude goes to space. “Friday the 13th” has none of that. It doesn’t even really have Jason. As complicated as it gets is, “Who’s killing these camp counselors?” Then you find out it is Jason’s mom because of when he drowned as a kid, and the one “mystery” is solved.

You could argue that “massacre” is a smidge hyperbolic, but when a guy in a skin mask is killing people with a chainsaw, that’s close enough. The original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” – and that’s still a top-10 all-time movie title – was to a degree a commentary on salacious news stories, kind of presaging both the true crime boom and the backlash to the true crime boom. Thus, it had to stay straightforward. It didn’t have to look like a snuff film, but that helped.

Alien monsters abound in horror. With “Alien,” the Face Hugger, Chest Burster element and the android element adds a couple complications. “The Thing” is weird and mostly about gross visuals. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” has a lot of business to it. “The Blob” is pretty simple, though. A blob lands on Earth and subsumes living things and grows. This film is notable in part because “The Blob” was an early film for Steve McQueen.

Spiders! A whole bunch of spiders! Yes, there are all sorts of spiders, but it’s all pretty easy to understand. “Arachnophobia” is also, notably, a horror-comedy, though it’s not terribly comedic. John Goodman, as an aggro exterminator, brings most of the laughs.

You may not think of “Jaws” as a horror movie, but many people throw it under that header. That makes sense, as it is, in many ways, a monster movie. We see a lot of blood, some body parts, and also a young woman getting pretty brutally killed by a shark. Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough film does also benefit from a simple premise. There’s a shark. The end.

There is a little bit of backstory and “lore” at play, but in true execution, “Paranormal Activity” is exceedingly simple. That’s how it was able to be made, to a degree. It revamped the found footage genre. “Paranormal Activity” is essentially just a camera in a bedroom watching supernatural stuff happen. It was originally made for $15,000 before Paramount scooped it up and shelled out a whole $200,000 to make it suitable for large-scale release. You have to keep it simple to succeed on that kind of budget.

Of the old Universal monsters, Dracula is a bit complicated. The story is burnt into the zeitgeist now, but you have some stuff to learn without that. The same goes for Frankenstein(‘s monster). However, “The Mummy” is straightforward. A mummy is reanimated and looks for his lost love. You know, “Creature of the Black Lagoon” might be even simpler. There’s a creature in a lagoon!

A lot of Stephen King plots are complicated, and frequently too complicated. Even “Carrie” has some added religious stuff to it. “Cujo,” though, keeps it simple, and is effective for that. A big ol’ St. Bernard gets rabies and ends up trapping a woman and her son in their car. It’s tense and small scale, which beats whatever the hell is happening in “Dreamcatcher.”

The zombie logistics can be complicated. There’s also explaining why the zombies, you know, exist. George Romero helped codify the zombie genre, but notably he kept it simple. He didn’t even use the word “zombie.” You could say “They don’t explain why the dead have risen” and call that a complicating factor. We consider it a simplifying factor. All that matters is the dead have arrived and they are relentlessly trying to kill people and eat them.

“Scream” is meta, but “Scream” is also fairly simple. Really, it’s all summed up in the tagline, “Somebody has taken their love of scary movies one step too far.” That’s it. “Scream” is really just about a killer in a mask, but instead of a maniacally driven Michael Myers type, it’s a chatty, horror-loving murderer who is committing the crimes.

We wanted to go with “Evil Dead 2,” which is a better movie than “The Evil Dead” and also fairly straightforward. However, while “Evil Dead 2” is in many ways a remake of “The Evil Dead” that is less nasty and gnarly, it does work to connect itself to the first film, and so if you were jumping into that one this might throw you for a second. By dint of being made on an ultra-low budget, “The Evil Dead” did also have to pare things down a bit. Sam Raimi still did plenty to make the movie work, though. Now, “Army of Darkness?” That one is not so simple (but it is a lot of fun).

There’s a smidge of “What’s going on here?” at the beginning of “The Omen,” but things all become clear quite quickly. Basically, Gregory Peck’s son Damien is the Antichrist. No, literally. If you understand that, you understand “The Omen,” and you can get on board for the horror ride.

Many enjoyable “B” horror movies don’t actually keep it all that simple. This, in part, is why they end up being more dumb fun than actually of real quality. “Chopping Mall” is a bit self-aware and goes for some silliness. You don’t cast Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov in small roles otherwise. Fortunately, the action is simple.” Some party-hardy youngsters think it would be fun to hide in the mall and then hang out after it closes, drinking and carousing. Little do they know the mall has security robots that aren’t afraid to use lethal force.

The idea of a haunted house is fairly simple. You can add complications to that, sure, but at its core, it’s about ghosts haunting a house. The only issue is most haunted house movies aren’t any good. However, “The Haunting” is. It’s very atmospheric and certainly not gory, but the tension is key.

“Child’s Play” puts the soul of a murderer into a child’s doll, and while that is not exactly “The Parallax View” in terms of a complicated plot, “M3GAN” makes things even more simple. An A.I. doll gains self-awareness and becomes protective of her human companion. Like, dangerously protective. Maybe that’s not as fun and silly as “Child’s Play,” or the Chucky-fueled sequels, but “M3GAN” became a quickly-accepted cult classic in its own right.