10 Horror Sequels Not Worth Waiting Decades For

10. Psycho II

At least everyone waited until after Hitchcock was dead before they started desecrating his most iconic movie.

The Master of Suspense's body was barely cold, though, before both the novel's original author Robert Bloch and the studio Universal rushed into making Psycho sequels.

Universal hated Bloch's Psycho II, the kind of post-modern slasher story which satirised Hollywood slashers in a manner that would not become popular until after the release of Scream almost fifteen years later, and ordered a completely different screen sequel.

Written instead by Tom Holland (the Child's Play director, not Spider-Man) and directed by former Hitch protege Richard Franklin, the movie version of Psycho II was both made and set 22 years after the original. It brought back Anthony Perkins and Vera Miles for a story in which a now-sane Norman Bates is released and returns home to renovate the family motel, but not before suspicion falls on him for another series of murders.

Compared to both the sequel novel and some of the later sequels, remakes, and spin-offs which swiftly followed, even though there had been a two decade gap up to this point, Psycho II is actually not too bad.

It's a horror sequel in the vein of Jaws 2: a solidly decent movie on its own terms (and far better in retrospect once you've seen how bad it gets by Part 4), but never with any hope of matching how thrilling and expertly made the original was. At least Jaws fans didn't have to wait over twenty years, though!