Behind the Couch

1981 Dir. Rick Rosenthal Laurie Strode is rushed to the hospital after surviving her bloody ordeal at the hands of demented killer Michael Myers. Meanwhile, Dr Loomis discovers that Myers isn’t really dead and sets out to track him down with Sheriff Brackett. Discovering Laurie’s whereabouts at the hospital, Myers makes his less than suspenseful way there, leaving a bloody trail of bodies in his wake… After the runaway success of John Carpenter’s Halloween , and the slew of stalk and slash films it inspired, it came as a surprise to few that a sequel charting the increasingly gory antics of Michael Myers would be released. Halloween producers Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad approached John Carpenter and Debra Hill to pen the script for Halloween II and they initially planned to set the sequel a few years after the events depicted in the first film, with Myers tracking Laurie to her new life and home in a high-rise apartment building. The decision was then made to set the fi...

2008 Dir. Mats Stenberg Having survived the massacre that claimed the lives of her friends in an abandoned hotel at the hands of a psychotic, feral killer, Jannicke (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) finds that her nightmare is far from over. Taken to a rural hospital to be treated for shock, she realises that the body of the monstrous brute she thought she’d killed has been recovered along with those of her friends’ and brought to the hospital where she’s staying. On closer inspection, the doctors discover the killer is not dead at all, and before the night is over Jannicke finds herself fighting to stay alive in the midst of another bloodbath… Cold Prey II is one of those rare specimens – a genuinely great slasher sequel. It maintains the momentum of the first instalment , picking up directly where it left off (the first of many nods to Halloween II ), adds to the story and doesn’t just recycle itself in the manner of so many slasher sequels. Viewers will reap a much more rewarding exper...