10 Biggest Missed Opportunities In Horror Movie History
The all-time "what if?" horror movies we never got to see.
The horror genre has historically offered up fertile ground for little-known filmmakers to make a name for themselves, presenting opportunities for early success that come much tougher in other genres.
Studios love horror because it's easy to keep the budgets low and horror fans are positively fanatical about the genre, critics be-damned.
Yet for as permissive as horror has been throughout the decades, it's also fair to say that there are some huge missed creative opportunities which fans are still lamenting to this very day.
On paper, these whispered-about projects clearly had a ton of potential, and yet for whatever reason, they sadly never came to pass.
Perhaps a legendary filmmaker got spooked at the prospect of dabbling in an established franchise, the studio bean-counters got nervous about a deeply ambitious project, or boring business nonsense just got in the way.
We'll unfortunately never get to see how these proposed horror movies would've turned out, but the possibility of brilliance speaks for itself.
Yet fate had other plans, ensuring that these possible genre classics never made it before cameras, and are instead confined to frustrating "what if?" question marks in the annals of horror legend...
10. Quentin Tarantino's Friday the 13th
Let's kick things off with a wild one.
In 2005, as New Line Cinema was in the early stages of putting together a new Friday the 13th movie, word began doing the rounds online that Quentin Tarantino was in talks to potentially direct the next installment in the franchise.
IGN even claimed that Tarantino was in "final talks" for the gig, though a week later, Tarantino himself refuted the news, adding that while he did talk to New Line about a new Friday the 13th, he in no way signed up to do it.
All the same, the mere fact that Tarantino entertained the idea enough to discuss it with New Line sent fans into a frenzy, and to this very day, they can't help but fantasise about what a Tarantino-directed Friday the 13th would even look like.
Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Tarantino's next film following this not-news was his only horror film to date, 2007's Death Proof.
While Tarantino has also flirted with directing a Star Trek film in recent years, it goes without saying that his R-rated style was infinitely better suited to the world of Friday the 13th.
But with Tarantino firmly moved on from the discussion and his next film reportedly set to be his last, this is destined to forever remain an agonising "what if?"