10 Horror Sequels You Forgot Existed

Forget monsters, slashers, or serial killers. The scariest thing in horror movies is box office failure.

I’m serious. A great horror villain can survive forever — provided his movies keep making money. The minute their grosses started drying up, Jason Voorhees went to hell and Freddy Krueger stalked his final nightmare. In a weird way, ticket sales are what give every movie monster their power. Take them away, and what have they got? Some bloody machetes and some gnarly memories.

Take the ten movies below, for example. These forgotten horror films drained the vitality out of their central antagonists, to the point that they ended their series for years or decades — or, at minimum, sent them out of theaters and into the purgatory known as straight-to-video.

These days, these ten titles (and sometimes their entire franchise) are all but forgotten. And a couple of them aren’t even that old. (The most recent one on the list was released in this decade! Now that’s a forgotten film. The pandemic really did a number on the unlucky titles that came out in 2020, let me tell you.)

You won’t find any Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th movies on this list; those films’ conclusions were temporary anyway, and both were quickly resurrected in reboots, sequels, crossovers, games, and so on. And anyway, those series’ bad movies were so bad they at least left an impression on die-hard fans. The films below have not been so lucky. They were something far worse, and far scarier, than bad. They were forgettable.