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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

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On the rainy night of October 30, 1978, 21-year-old Michael Myers escaped from Smith's Grove Warren County Sanitarium, where he had spent the previous 15 years of his life after murdering his 17-year-old sister, Judith, at the age of six, and made his way back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois in the stolen car of his psychiatrist, Sam Loomis. The next day, on Halloween, he managed to track down his now-17-year-old sister, Laurie Strode, who was only a baby when he murdered their older sister and she was subsequently adopted by the Strode family. After killing her two best friends, Annie Brackett and Lynda Van Der Klok, along with Lynda's boyfriend, Bob Simms, Michael pursued Laurie and subjected her to a night of trauma that would forever alter the course of her life, but thanks to the miraculously timed intervention of Dr. Loomis, who intuitively knew that his former patient was the personification of pure, unadulterated evil, Laurie was able to survive the night. Ment...
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Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

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The introductory intertitles for Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 , the meta sequel to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's groundbreaking 1999 supernatural horror phenomenon, The Blair Witch Project , read, "The following is a fictionalized reenactment of events that occurred after the release of The Blair Witch Project. It is based on public records, local Maryland TV broadcasts and hundreds of hours of taped interviews. To protect the privacy of certain individuals, some names have been changed." Right off the bat, co-writers Joe Berlinger (who pulls double duty as director) and Dick Beebe's attempt to replicate the verisimilitude of Myrick and Sanchez's low-budget masterpiece and deceive viewers into believing that what they're about to see is based on factual events is eye-rolling in its transparent phoniness. This isn't the only instance in which the filmmakers borrow liberally from their predecessor, which they must have loved so intensely seeing as th...
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Jacob's Ladder (1990)

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One Sunday morning, I experienced the most terrifying and devastating nightmare my mind had ever conjured in my 27 years of existence. From what I can remember, I got into a car accident—which plays into my insecurity of driving—and died. At first, I hadn't yet realized that I was dead. I suddenly found myself in my house, listening to my father reminisce wistfully for the umpteenth time to my mother about a childhood photo in which he and I, as a baby, laid beside one another in bed, me staring into his eyes with a smile.  At some point, it dawned on me that he wasn't just rehashing a memory for the nostalgia of it; he was reminiscing about me as a baby because those memories are now all that he and my mom had left. All at once—like Malcolm Crowe in the ending of The Sixth Sense — a wave of devastating realization washed over me: I died in that crash, so now, I'll never even have the opportunity to get married or gift my parents a grandchild. Worse than that, I'm now t...
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