10 Awesome Horror Movies With Disappointing Sequels

10. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

When The Blair Witch Project hit screens in 1999, its reputation for raw, authentic frights preceded it. The story of three student filmmakers going missing in the Maryland woods while investigating a local folk legend seemed believable, and Artisan’s marketing team went full-throttle with this, creating a website that documented the supposedly real missing persons case, with the unknown actors sharing their characters' names.

All of this built towards a genuinely scary film that is a certified horror classic, and launched the found-footage subgenre into the mainstream.

This success would be hard to repeat, and audiences would catch on quickly if the same stunt was tried again. That didn’t stop Artisan rushing a sequel out the door the following year, against the wishes of the original’s writer/director team Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was panned for its poor acting, cheap production values, and unoriginality. Adam Wingard’s Blair Witch (2016) was a definite improvement, sticking closer to the original and writing off Book of Shadows as a film within a film, but it then fell into the category of a less scary re-tread of the original movie. It seems you can’t make the Blair Witch lightning strike twice.