The clearest creative vision can be thwarted if a writer’s own characters get other ideas. Sometimes a secondary character can emerge from the background and steal the limelight from the rest of the cast.
These breakout characters often start out benign, but studio and network interference are notorious creative carcinogens.
Here are a three supporting characters that took the wheel and drove their franchises off a cliff.
He was never meant to be the boogieman that launched the 80s slasher craze.
John Carpenter and Debra Hill had no interest in making a sequel as they believed the original Halloween (1978) was a standalone movie. When the studio offered him to write the script and pay them more money (Carpenter states that to this day he saw very little earnings from the success of the original movie) he took the job so he could earn back what he believes was his owed pay.
Carpenter was so sick of Myers that when Halloween III rolled around, it didn’t feature the Shape at all (except for a brief TV ad for the original Halloween). In fact, Carpenter tried to re-imagine the franchise as a horror anthology series.
In his capacity as producer, Carpenter would bring in a novice director to tell a new Halloween-themed story each year. The series would stay fresh, and several young film makers would get a potentially career-making shot at the director’s chair.
Sadly, Halloween III tanked. The money men blamed its failure on the lack of Michael Myers and demanded his return in the fourth film. Carpenter washed his hands of the franchise, leaving it in the hands of producer Moustapha Akkad. Thus began a downward slide culminating in the convoluted trainwreck that is Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers.
Pinhead’s rise from a part described only as “Lead Cenobite” to series front man can be credited to actor Doug Bradley, who portrayed the character with panache and absolute control.
There’s a world of difference between silent masked slashers like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Leatherface, who were played by stuntmen; and the Cenobites, who were portrayed by trained actors at Clive Barker’s insistence.
Barker’s quality control may have been Hellraiser’s Achilles’ heel, because Pinhead ended up stealing the show from Barker’s original choice for the series’ main villain.
This element was meant to underline the story of Frank (Oliver Smith) and Julia (Clare Higgins) and their corruption by lust, with the latter intended to become the ultimate villain of the series. Pinhead, however, proved much more popular with audiences, and thus became the center point in further sequels.
The decline set in with the very next film, wherein Pinhead was warped from a depraved yet rule-bound manipulator to a slasher-style chaos demon.
Hellraiser: Bloodline completed the series’ downfall with the dreaded In Space episode that is the perennial kiss of death for every horror franchise that manages to limp that far.
The Simpsons justly takes flack as the archetypal zombie show that staggers on despite having lost the spark of life decades ago. An early warning sign of the show’s impending decline was the elevation of Homer Simpson to main protagonist.
Not that the show’s downfall was immediate. You had a couple seasons of Homer as an average Joe thrown in over his head. But his character quickly devolved into the oafish lower middle-class white dude who’s now the laughingstock of all media.
