7 Horror Movie Prequels That Need To Happen

The idea of a horror prequel can often seem counter-productive. The horror genre works best when dealing in ambiguity, with the exploration of the unknown being what scares us the most. Therefore, delving into a backstory to unearth answers posed by the original can often have the opposite effect of terror.

Hannibal Rising and Texas Chainsaw: The Beginning are just a couple of examples of how an on-the-nose origin story can make a monster less scary, even conjuring up empathy for the once feared villains. After all, isn't it the lack of motive or the manic randomness of the likes of Leatherface that makes them a hell of a lot more frightening?

However, despite this, there are some horror movies where the prospect of exploring what went before is so enticing that even against better judgement, we long for a prequel. Films where the past events hinted at can seem even more interesting than those in the initial story presented to us.

This is a list of those such movies, where there is a genuine strong case for a prequel idea that has legs to be more than just a rehash of the original, but instead could explore and even evolve the story further. And in some cases could be even more interesting than the original itself.

The events of Midsommar are certainly weird, but to those who belong to the mysterious Swedish cult The Hårga, they are anything but. That is because those living in the commune have been partaking in these bizarre ceremonies and rituals for centuries.

Therefore the students meeting their grisly fate in Midsommar wouldn’t have been the first to have fallen victim to the Hårga’s macabre ways, leaving plenty of room for more ritualistic madness to be explored in a prequel.

Though a Midsommar prequel could be in danger of merely following a similar series of events, only with a different group of victims, if handled carefully, and with restraint, it could be equally horrifying whilst developing the mythology further.

There are plenty of directions the prequel could take in order to differentiate it from the original. It could focus on someone born into the cult, and their upbringing. Or it could even go back to the origin of the cult, almost in a period-piece style, to when the rituals were even crazier. In doing so it could explore the evolution of the ceremony to what it is today when it all unravels in Midsommar. Either way, The Hårga still has so much more to offer.