Nerd Initiative Presents: Continuity Be Damned – A Leprechaun Franchise Retrospective

In 1993, a horror franchise was born. Its premise was simple: a leprechaun goes on a murderous rampage against a group of people he thinks have stolen his gold. Using tropes from more popular horror franchises of the past, the initial entry was panned by critics despite its use of the familiar, something that would follow in subsequent movies. While its cult following would result in several sequels and leave an indelible mark on horror and pop culture, the Leprechaun franchise gets treated like the red-headed stepchild of the genre.

While horror has had its take on mythical beasts and holiday-themed slashers, the Leprechaun Franchise mashes these two things together. Despite only the first two movies taking place on St. Patrick’s Day, it seems that any time of the year is a good time to let out a centuries-old being to torment people. Even then, the Leprechaun’s motives vary from film to film: sometimes he wants gold, sometimes he wants blood, and sometimes he wants a bride.

Except for two movies (Leprechaun Origins and Leprechaun Returns), the Leprechaun is played by Warwick Davis (Return of the Jedi, Willow). Excluding Leprechaun Returns, each film puts the Leprechaun in a new environment. Are we to believe this is the same Leprechaun in each film, or are these alternative universes? Each of these movies puts the little scamp in a different setting, with a different motive, and sometimes with different powers, while continuity, tone, and logic take a back seat. So, come along as we explore the unforgettable chaos that is the Leprechaun franchise.

Leprechaun

While on vacation in Ireland, Dan O’Grady catches a 600-year-old Leprechaun and procures its gold. After he buries it on his property in North Dakota, he is attacked by the titular creature. Using a four-leaf clover, O’Grady traps the leprechaun in a crate. However, before he can burn the crate, O’Grady has a stroke. Ten years later, the house is being rented out by JD Redding and his daughter, Tori. One of the workers hears the cries of the Leprechaun and goes to investigate, leading to its escape. The leprechaun decides to get revenge on the family who he thinks stole his pot of gold.

Written and directed by Mark Jones and featuring a cast of people you remember seeing in things, Leprechaun marks the film debut of future Friends star Jennifer Aniston. This first movie could only have been made with the influence of horror films from the previous decade and a half by amalgamating the bad one-liners of Freddy Krueger, a well of inventive deaths in attempts to stay fresh, and the unlikely kryptonite of shoe shining.

Initially panned on its release for not being scary or funny, Leprechaun found a cult following that inadvertently kicked off a franchise that doesn’t seem to have a through-line. The Leprechaun bites, claws, and uses magical powers to torture the Redding family and the workers fixing up the house in the first entry, but these powers almost change from movie to movie. This establishes a series where anything goes. While it takes a movie or two to establish tropes in any franchise, it’s best not to think of the moving parts in the series’ mythos.

Leprechaun 2

Leprechaun 2 also starts in the past, this time on St. Patrick’s Day in the year 994. While celebrating his 1,000th birthday, the leprechaun decides he’s going to marry his slave, William O’Day’s daughter. William O’Day saves his daughter from her horrible fate, but is immediately killed. The leprechaun snaps his neck and vows to marry one of William’s descendants in 1,000 years.

In 1994, Los Angeles, we meet this descendant, Bridget. Her boyfriend, Cody, has to work on their go-kart date night. Soon, a vagrant unintentionally releases the Leprechaun from a suspicious-looking tree, and the Leprechaun begins his search for his assumed bride. Through ways only described as horror convenience, Cody ends up with a piece of gold when Bridget is kidnapped by the Leprechaun.

The leprechaun’s weakness for four-leaf clovers is replaced by wrought iron bars that burn him upon touch. His obsessive shoe-shining isn’t even mentioned. At one point, Cody is sure to meet his certain doom as the leprechaun runs him down with his conveniently themed Irish go-kart, but drives right through him. The wishy-washy trope of the leprechaun using limericks is established here, but going forward, the franchise either overcommits or doesn’t commit enough to them.

While you should always strike while the iron is hot, the second installment of the Leprechaun franchise was released less than a year after the first one. According to Warwick Davis, it was reportedly even more low-budget than the first. Some of the mythos set in the first one has been completely thrown out in this sequel.

Leprechaun 3

This installment of the franchise takes place in the “City of Lights.” No, not Paris, but beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. Given that the rules change from movie to movie, the filmmakers make the strange decision to put a lot of exposition at the beginning of the movie.  This time, the leprechaun comes to life in a pawn shop. Of course, the leprechaun drops a piece of gold as he leaves to cause havoc

Later, a college-bound student, Scott, helps a magician’s assistant with a ride to a casino when her car breaks down. Scott loses all of his tuition money in the casino and decides to pawn his watch. Upon arrival, he finds the piece of gold the leprechaun dropped and attracts attention from a lot of shady people, including the leprechaun. After he is bitten by the leprechaun, Scott must find a way to stop from turning into one himself.

With the failure of both Leprechaun and Leprechaun 2, this third installment was the first to be released directly to video. Filmed at the mostly abandoned Ambassador Hotel in Las Vegas, Leprechaun 3 is as coherent as the previous films in the franchise and just as bonkers. It feels like these films are belligerently satirical in a way that they might accidentally step into a metaphor.

Leprechaun 3 is the first film in the franchise to feature the medallion as a MacGuffin, something that will actually be called back to and consistent in some, but not all, future installments. The “were-leprechaun” subplot is weird, as the leprechaun gets pretty bitey in the first two movies, but the people bitten go through no physical change. Logic would suggest that this would have been addressed before, but again, logic is not this franchise’s strong suit.

Leprechaun 4 in Space

When the leprechaun finally gets a woman to agree to marry him, a group of Space Marines comes in and saves this space princess. The leprechaun is only killed when he jumps on a grenade, saving his future, showing there is some nobility in him in the right situation. When the Space Marine who kills the leprechaun marks his kill by peeing on the leprechaun’s corpse, the leprechaun can transfer his soul into the Marine.

Later, the Leprechaun comes out of the Space Marine’s crotch when trying to celebrate with a female Space Marine. If that wasn’t enough, at one point, the Leprechaun cuts someone up with a lightsaber for trying to take his treasure. The movie takes off as the rest of the Space Marines go on a mission to find the leprechaun at the behest of a cyborg nazi scientist. 

For a franchise that borrows liberally from other established IP, Leprechaun 4: In Space actually predates Jason Voorhees’ space follies by about five years. After taking the Leprechaun to glittering Las Vegas, returning director Brian Trenchard-Smith takes the little scamp to space. Hovering somewhere between homage and ripoff of the Alien franchise, the film liberally borrows plot points but uses the Leprechaun instead of Xenomorphs. I wonder what the Prometheus of this universe would look like.

Leprechaun 4: In Space actually subverts tropes from the first three films by having a woman reciprocate the Leprechaun’s feelings and somewhat be his partner in crime later on. This film attempts to use more special effects as it leans into sci-fi somewhat. The results are less than spectacular. Is this movie an homage or a ripoff of the Alien franchise? If you manage to make it through the whole thing, you can answer that for yourself.

Leprechaun in the Hood/ Leprechaun Back 2 tha Hood

Taking a cue from Rusty Cundief’s Tales From the Hood, the Leprechaun series jumped on the bandwagon of sending the titular terror into urban areas. Ditching the number system for the fifth and sixth installments, Leprechaun in the Hood and Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha Hood pick up where the other ones did, by making absolutely no sense at all. I don’t know if the “2” in Back 2 Tha Hood is trying to be hip or if it’s a reboot situation. It carries a lot of weight but isn’t hip and didn’t lead to more Leprechaun movies in the hood, even though more were made overall.

Leprechaun in the Hood starts with Ice-T as Mack Daddy O’Nasses and his protege, Slug when they find a room full of gold and a statue of the Leprechaun we’ve come to know and love. When Slug takes the amulet off the statue, it awakens the Leprechaun and leads to his death, but allows Mack Daddy to capture the Leprechaun and leave with its flute. Twenty years later, after a record deal gone bad with Mack Daddy O’Nasses, three would-be rappers break in and take the flute and amulet.

This again wakes the Leprechaun, who hunts down the three rappers that have taken his magical flute, along with his Zombie Fly Girls, whom he has taken as slaves. While the leprechaun’s powers are always fluctuating in this series, the way they are disabled in this one sticks out as he is tricked into smoking a joint laced with four-leaf clovers. Leprechaun in the Hood has another distinction: The Leprechaun actually wins, becoming a music mogul and taking over the world.

Leprechaun Back 2 Tha Hood has no connection at all to the previous movie(s) set in the same hood. After a pastor hides the leprechaun’s gold, he fights the leprechaun to the death, using four-leaf clover-laced holy water. One year later, four youths find the gold at the now-abandoned youth center, and they use the gold to fulfill their wildest dreams.

Neither of these films is great, but they do keep in line with the horror comedy tone, but it’s around here where things start to crack. After this installment, star Warwick Davis declined to reprise his role as the Leprechaun due to the physical demands of the role and for the sake of his family. Due to this, there was a lull in the franchise that seemed to have some sort of release every other year or so.

Leprechaun: Origins 

Following a gap of over ten years in movies, WWE Studios chose to reboot the franchise with Dylan Postl, also known as Hornswoggle, a Cruiserweight champion. With a reboot comes a chance to reinvent the franchise. Leprechaun: Origins is closer to traditional horror with its gritty take on the source material, a gamble that doesn’t pay off here.

Four friends are vacationing in the Irish countryside when they are taken to an Irish cottage to hike the cavern in a small, dwindling village where gold was processed. They are attacked by a figure that jumps in through the fireplace and causes a ruckus by taking a gold earring and biting one of them, leading them to leave the cottage and hide.

We learn that the gold the villagers have belongs to the Leprechaun and their population has been gutted due to sacrificing two humans a year to appease the leprechaun. The villagers use tourists instead of their own ilk if they can. Gruesome deaths are afoot, but the humor and charm of the original are gone.

Leprechaun: Origins does have at least one thing in common with a few of the first six movies. Most notably, it scored a zero on Rotten Tomatoes, like the majority of the franchise. While you’d think anything would fit right in with the rest of the films, you’d be wrong. This movie tries hard to legitimize the concept, but the anarchic series had already established a trope of being completely disjointed and batshit crazy. There’s no gold at the end of this rainbow.

Leprechaun Returns

Out of all these sequels, Leprechaun Returns is the only true sequel despite not having Warwick Davis in it. Taking place twenty-five years after the original, Tori Reding’s daughter, Lila, goes to the house from the original Leprechaun with some sorority sisters in hopes of making an environmentally friendly sorority house. When Ozzie Jones from the first movie accidentally lets the Leprechaun free, havoc reigns again at the North Dakota house.

Taking cues from Halloween (2018), Leprechaun Returns disregards all sequels and is mostly canonized with the first movie, with a retcon or two. This movie should almost be called “callbacks” due to how much it references the first. Even the way Ozzie dies is tied to his swallowing of a gold coin in the first installment.

Leprechaun Returns doesn’t just return to the location, but also to form. The attempt to make this a full-on horror franchise with Leprechaun: Origins was a misfire. This movie gives everything you need from a Leprechaun movie, with some sort of semblance of continuity. While Jennifer Aniston does not return, her character does in the form of a voice impression by comedienne Heather Macdonald. Overall, without the star power of either Aniston or Davis, the nostalgia that makes these things pop is missing.

In Juxtaposition 

The Leprechaun franchise does not seem to make much sense in general. I mean, the character of the leprechaun himself is pretty consistent throughout the films, especially the ones with Warwick Davis, but his powers and abilities seem to change depending on the sequel, where the story takes place, and the Leprechaun’s goal. Despite there being a crossover with powers between the movies, nothing is consistent. Five years ago, this wouldn’t have bothered me, but recently I feel like this is exactly what the Predator movies have been doing.

The films go from setting to setting or time period with a certain set of powers to mostly hunt humans. While this Predator hunts for sport, Leprechaun hunts to get what’s his. Motivations may be different, but the Predator films mask their inconsistencies with sci-fi clothing, while the Leprechaun lets it all hang out. Does this cheapen either franchise? I guess it would depend on your attachment to either.

While the Predator franchise has had a resurgence in the last few years, Leprechaun has not. Leprechaun Returns premiered on the Sci-Fi channel on St. Patrick’s Day in 2019. This was the last Leprechaun movie made in the franchise, with no plans to make another. A movie called Leprechaun: The Beginning was released in 2025. While it’s not canon to the character Mark Jones created over thirty years ago, I’m sure they can shoehorn it in somewhere.

Still, there’s no denying that the Leprechaun franchise has its place in horror’s vernacular. Any horror series with that many movies would sneak its way into our consciousness and pop culture. I don’t know if we will ever see a series of films quite like the Leprechaun movies again, but I also am not sure it could ever match how bonkers these were.

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