10 Horror Sequels Not Worth Waiting Decades For

The original Blood Feast is a significant milestone in the history of horror cinema entirely because it broke new ground in how explicit screen gore could be.

On its release in 1963 it became the first so-called "splatter film". Director Herschell Gordon Lewis threw guts, severed limbs and buckets of blood at his story of a demented caterer performing cannibalistic sacrifices to an Egyptian goddess. In a market where such gore didn't exist elsewhere, the audience for this was huge, racking up box office numbers of over $4 million on a budget barely above $20,000.

Blood Feast earns its classic status, therefore, because there was nothing else really like it at the time and every ultra-gory slasher story of a knife-wielding maniac that came after owes it a debt. It does not earn that status because it is even slightly competent filmmaking or an at all coherent and engaging story.

So, when Lewis returned to direct a sequel 39 years later in 2002 (in which the grandson of the original cannibal caterer Fuad Ramses takes up the old business), all that you're left with is every bit of the technical ineptitude and none of the shocking novelty.

It's much harder to make a movie for twenty-first century horror lovers that breaks new ground in the way that on-screen gore is depicted in the same way that shocked Blood Feast's original 1960s audience. And, without that, it really has nothing to offer.