10 Horror Sequels Not Worth Waiting Decades For

Mother Of Tears is the closest thing that the horror genre has to a Godfather Part III. After two absolute genre classics released in quick succession, a wait of some decades succeeded before the once-talented, now kind of losing it, director returned to cap the trilogy off in the most disappointing fashion for anyone who had spent the intervening years loving those earlier episodes. Mother Of Tears director Dario Argento even thoughtfully aped Coppola's misjudged casting of his own daughter in a leading role for the trilogy closer.

With the twin witchfests of 1977's Suspiria and 1980's Inferno, Argento established himself as the master of lurid, plotless nightmare fuel. Their stories ran on dream logic, but their disturbing imagery stayed with you years after the fact.

A third part was mooted during the 80s and a script was written by Suspiria writer and Inferno star Daria Nicolodi, then Argento's partner and the mother of his daughter Asia. But the couple broke up in 1985, a period that coincided with the beginning of Argento's creative decline. Nicolodi appeared in the final version of Mother Of Tears but had no hand in its screenplay.

That Mother Of Tears is kind of camp and tasteless isn't really a problem, even Argento's best work falls into those categories. No, the trouble is that it is visually flat and uncreative, lacking in any of the mad baroque grandeur of the director's previous nightmare visions. It feels like the work of a much lesser filmmaker struggling to understand what worked about the first two parts.

Doctor Sleep is perhaps unlikely to sink this much lower than its predecessor, but it will do well to even convince that it ever needed to exist at all.