10 Pitched Movies Hollywood Wasn't Ready For

8. Alfred Hitchcock's Necrophiliac Serial Killer Horror Film, Kaleidoscope

Alfred Hitchcock had enough unrealised projects to literally fill a Wikipedia page, and perhaps the most interesting and unexpected of them all is Kaleidoscope.

In the mid-1960s, Hitch was attempting to mount a quasi-prequel to his 1943 classic thriller Shadow of a Doubt, which would revolve around a young bodybuilder who moonlighted as a serial killer and necrophiliac in New York City. Yup.

The film would be filmed in black-and-white and, counter to his usual restraint, would feature graphic sex and violence.

Many of his prior collaborators passed on the opportunity to write the script, and even when a screenplay was finally hammered out and Hitchcock agreed to shoot it for just $1 million, he still struggled to muster much interest.

Ultimately, a Universal executive talked him out of making it, suggesting it'd ruin his "classy" brand, and it probably didn't help that upon showing the script to the legendary filmmaker François Truffaut, the Frenchman found the R-rated material too extreme.

Hitch ended up incorporating elements of this screenplay into his 1972 film Frenzy - one of Kaleidoscope's original titles - even if the bulk of this movie, sex, death and all, never made it to the screen.

Hitchcock's timing was probably a few years off here, as given the major shift in moral sensibilities which occurred throughout Hollywood in the 1970s, he might've been able to rustle up more interest by the middle of the decade.

Consider that today we have movies like Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built filling up art-house cinemas, and it was clearly a case of wrong place, wrong time for the master director.