10 Hit Horror Movies That DIDN'T Get Sequels
Stand alone scary movies that didn't spawn an entire franchise of sequels, prequels, and crossovers.
Traditionally, horror movies spawn more sequels than any other genre. Almost every classic has not just a sequel, but a franchise.
What often makes a horror film into a franchise is having an iconic baddie that makes the film brandable. Without Michael Myers there wouldn’t be eleven films in the Halloween franchise. Freddy Krueger led to six A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, just as Jason Voorhies led to nine Friday the 13th sequels. That was before Freddy vs Jason and the subsequent reboots of both originals.
In the 70s and 80s, we got franchises borne out of The Exorcist, Alien, Jaws, The Omen, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead. The 90s gave us Ghostface and the Scream franchise. The noughties gave us Jigsaw and the ongoing Saw franchise. Even, somehow, The Human Centipede managed second and third installments.
With that one in mind, it's astonishing that some of the most successful horrors ever didn't get a single second go, let alone a whole series of them...
10. The Cabin In The Woods (2012)
We begin with a film that did for cabin-in-the-woods style horrors what Scream did for slashers, and then some. Grossing $66.5 million from a $30 million budget and receiving huge critical acclaim, this irreverent parody of a horror sub-genre has enough scares and gags for mainstream moviegoers, whilst keeping the horror buffs satiated with its metafictive allusions to other horror movies and, further still, what horror movies are in our society.
After arriving in a cabin in the woods a group of teens are attacked by Evil Dead-esque ghouls, before it is revealed that beneath the cabin is an underground facility that houses an entire zoo of movie monsters. These monsters are used in other recognisable horror movie locales to sacrifice teenagers and appease the evil Gods “The Ancient Ones”, a.k.a. us the viewers.
It’s a clever and incredibly fun premise and it opens up a huge world of monsters and Gods and in terms of franchising, you could parody so many subgenres in a similar way - The Haunted Mansion, The Murderous Inbred Family, The Torture Porn Dungeon. But whether you could say anything more about the function of horror movies that isn’t already said by Joss Whedon in this original is doubtful. Even worse would be unleashing a slew of Epic Movie style sequels.
Whedon must have known this himself. To make sure there would be no sequel or franchising of the film, it ends with a gigantic monstrous hand destroying the entire world. Fair enough, Joss.