Why does everybody have to have a back story?

Was watching the Halloween reboot movie the other day, and while it is interesting to show Michael Myers with a horrible white-trash hillbilly family as the reason for his snapping and turning to a serial killer, I remembered when I was a kid and I saw the original Halloween (It was on TV and the whole "see anything you like" scene was edited out. Kind of a bummer for a preteen boy with crazy puberty hormones). That movie was great because there is no reason for Michael Myers losing his sanity as a kid and killing his sister. He just snapped, his humanity just turned off like one of the vampires on Vampire Diaries (yeah, I watch the show. It's a guilty pleasure, and I have the excuse that my wife likes the show, so I can blame it on her), and he goes homicidal. It was the kind of show that makes you think, what if that just happened to anybody? He was a normal kid, and all of the sudden, he turned killer out of nowhere. Fans of the original didn't need a back story.

He wasn't like Jason Voorhees, where they explain his reason for killing in the first movie he appears in (its part II, for those who don't know). They have this chat at a bar talking about how Jason's mother sheltered him so closely and he was unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. No, Michael Myers was the ultimate killing machine. No remorse, no reason, he wasn't freaking human. He was a normal kid, then all of the sudden a button was randomly turned off like he was the freaking Terminator, and he became a killer. But it seems they are doing this more often with movie stories. They feel that the movie has to have an explanation. They have to give away all of the secrets, explain everything down to the nitty gritty. Look at Star Wars. The original trilogy – excellent. Then they did the shitty prequels. They had to explain how Vader turned evil, and they did it with three movies, excessive CGI, and Jar Jar Binks.

Misa gonna shit on your childhood memories

 But that's an old example. How about something more recent. There are, off the top of my head, three current TV series based on old movies that are there to explain the stories behind the stories. I'll start with the worst.

From Dusk 'til freaking Dawn. If you haven't seen it, watch it (the movie), but not the sequels because as anybody knows, sequels suck.

Except for you guys

In the movie, it started off as a crime/action flick. Two bank robbers, one of them losing his mind because he is a perverted sociopath, take a minister and his family hostage so they can escape to Mexico and avoid arrest. That is what the whole first half (or longer, I think) that the movie is about. They go to a strip club to meet some guy who is supposed to help them, and the next part of the movie is strippers all over the place. So far, nothing to suggest this as a horror film. Then, all of the sudden after Salma Hayek does a sexy stripper dance for Quentin Tarantino (who, by the way, wrote this film, and Robert Rodriguez directed), she suddenly turns into a vampire (well, a cobra-vampire, which is kind of weird). Either way, the rest of the movie is about fighting vampires and surviving the blood-sucking strippers.

Now the show, it tries to explain the reason the crazy bank-robbing brother is crazy. No, he can't just be a rapist sociopath, he has to be having visions coming from the crazy vampire/stripper bitches telling him to be a violent rapist sociopath. This stupid twist, which starts from the beginning of the series, ruins the purpose of the movie, which was to make you think Robert Rodriguez was making another movie like Desperado which was awesome and came out the year before, and then surprise you with the damn vampires. Seriously. Look at the movie poster that came out with the movie, and tell me this is a vampire flick.

Vampires... with guns.

Then we have Hannibal. 

Thomas Harris hates writing, and then he somehow wrote one of the most iconic horror villains known to man, and due to demand wrote three more novels, although he hated every second of it. While Hannibal is an excellent novel (my favorite right behind Salem's Lot), it was the one that started giving Hannibal a back story, and then Harris basically rewrote parts of Hannibal to give the story that anybody who actually read the book already knew.

"And did they really ever explain why Hannibal Lecter liked to eat people? Don't think so. You see, it's scarier when there's no motive, Sid." - good point, you psychos.

Finally, we have Bates Motel. 

Norman Bates was obsessed with his mother. She got married, and in jealousy (Oedipus complex, anyone?) he killed her and her husband, then lost his shit and his personality split so that he went batshit crazy and became both himself and his mother, who was now a homicidal maniac. But now we have this prequel series, to explain why Norman Bates went crazy, or basically say he was crazy the whole time. In the movies we are given the impression that his mother was so overbearing and insane that she drove her son to insanity. Now the series that seems to be trying to take the mother's side. Yeah, she is overbearing in the series, but Norman is already schitzo from the get-go. His obsession and insanity had nothing to do with his mother, and once again, this kind of ruins the original story.

As a final point, they are making a series of Scream instead of sticking to the original plan of making a new trilogy. And it may even have a supernatural twist .

Why, Wes Craven? Why?