20 Horror Sequels That Took FOREVER To Get Made

No genre loves a sequel quite like horror, and studios are all-too keen to give audiences more of what they liked the first time. And yet, getting even the most slam-dunk, can't-fail project made can still be one hell of a Herculean feat.

And so, sometimes a sequel might spend years, even decades festering in development hell due to various factors. 

Perhaps the actors need some convincing to come back, the creatives struggle to crack the script, or the studio just doesn't have enough faith in the project's commercial prospects to give it the greenlight.

Whatever the reason, these 20 horror films all took an absolute age to get made after being announced.

In some cases it's simply a victory that the film finally got made and released at all, regardless of its eventual quality, while others managed to somehow live up to such an outrageous amount of long-gestating hype.

These 20 horror films surely shouldn't have taken so damn long to come out, but as ever, it takes a village and enormous creative willpower to get any film over the finish line...

There's one key reason that a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's all-timer horror classic The Shining took almost a full 40 years to get made - Stephen King didn't write it for over 30.

Indeed, the Doctor Sleep novel wasn't released until 2013, and though Warner Bros. began developing it the very next year, it was another five years before the Mike Flanagan-directed end product finally hit screens.

Despite the obvious risks posed by such a belated follow-up, the fact that King himself penned the sequel and it was left in the hands of a filmmaker as talented as Mike Flanagan sure didn't hurt - not to ignore a terrific cast led by Ewan McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson.

The nearly four-decade wait likely contributed to the film's failure to light a spark at the box office, though, because as beloved as The Shining is, do younger generations really think much about it at all?