It’s time to put some chills in this cheer-ocracy. Syfy is turning the Bring It On movies into a horror show — literally — with a new sequel that brings the longtime sports comedy franchise into the slasher genre.

Syfy announced Bring It On: Halloween as part of its 2021/2022 slate, with plans to debut the horror-themed cheerleader movie sequel next year. Bloody Disgusting reports that the seventh installment of the Bring It On franchise, and its first non-comedy entry, will be an original movie premiering in 2022. No cast or specific release date has yet been set, but considering the title, we can assume it’ll be around Halloween.

In Bring It On: Halloween, “Held down by restrictive rules, an embattled cheerleading squad seeks the freedom of a creepy, closed school gym to practice for regionals, but when members of the squad start to disappear, the cheerleaders must unmask their assailant to save themselves.”

Dana Schwartz (of Twitter and podcasting fame) and Rebekah McKendry wrote the script for Bring It On: Halloween, which is produced by Universal 1440 Entertainment.

The news of Bring It On being turned into a horror movie may surprise you, as may the fact that this is the seventh installment of the franchise. The 2000 original Bring It On starring Kirsten Dunst, Gabrielle Union and Eliza Dushku was a sleeper hit that ascended to cult status, with Roger Ebert famously calling it the “Citizen Kane of cheerleader movies.” And while its legacy includes launching the careers of stars Dunst and Union, as well as inspiring a successful stage musical, it also spawned a middling direct-to-video franchise that will apparently never die. The Bring It On sequels, which include 2004’s Bring It On Again, 2006’s Bring It On: All or Nothing, 2007’s Bring It On: In It to Win It, 2009’s Bring It On: Fight to the Finish, and 2017’s Bring It On: Worldwide Cheersmack are varying degrees of white-noise entertainment, fine to put on in the background in your hotel room when nothing else is on. But let’s not pretend they’re anywhere close to Dunst and Union grappling with social and racial inequality in the original film.

So maybe a horror movie is exactly what the Bring It On franchise needs to inject it with some new energy, and change up the boring cheerleading tournament formula. But I don’t believe Bring It On: Halloween will completely abandon the comedy genre. After all, there’s something inherently funny about a slasher villain suddenly going after a group of cheerleaders who were just in it to win it.

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