10 Horror Sequels Not Worth Waiting Decades For

This year's big Halloween horror release is the sequel nobody was asking for.

With an ending that manages to be both pretty conclusive and openly ambiguous at the same time, it's hard to imagine anything a follow-up to Stanley Kubrick's classic 1980 version of The Shining could do to build on what has come before without retroactively damaging it.

But Stephen King wrote a sequel novel and, in the wake of the incredible success of the two-part adaptation of IT, King is a Hollywood hot property once again.

So here we are with Doctor Sleep, a movie which not only has the impossible task of giving audiences a 39-years-later addition to a much-cherished original, but also of somehow reconciling the huge differences between King's original novel and Kubrick's original movie to make a new film that is both a satisfying adaptation of the sequel novel and a sequel to the earlier movie.

Who knows? Doctor Sleep could turn out to surprise a lot of people and be a match for its predecessor. Last year's Halloween reboot ignored all the previous sequels to make a successor that managed after forty years to recapture some of its originator's greatness, after all, and director Mike Flanagan is a serious talent whose reinvention of The Haunting Of Hill House shows a knack for getting to the scary core of a story even amidst a very loose adaptation.

Previous examples of decades-too-late sequels to horror classics don't provide much of a positive precedent, though.

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!