Ed Wood
Movies don’t save lives, but they do relitigate memory and imagination. The beloved suddenly reappears in frame, reanimated through some alchemical bargain of light and motion. Isn’t he dead? Yes, in 1978, at the age of 54, Edward D. Wood Jr. died—where else?—in Hollywood. But then, there he is, up on the screen in Ed Wood (1994).
No Michael Myers Necessary
The way horror film series typically work is that the first entry is notable, for whatever reason—it’s a great movie, it’s popular, it infiltrates the news cycle/culture—and then subsequent entries get worse and worse and worse, until there are no more.