10 Lost Horror Movies: Chilling Films That Never Were Made

Ever found yourself thinking about the amazing horror movies that almost were? The world of filmmaking is full of stories about cool ideas that, sadly, never made it to the big screen. It’s a tough journey from a thought in someone’s head to a finished film. Lots of scary movies get stuck along the way. Some don’t get past the first idea, others get written but don’t find money, and some even get pretty far—like hiring actors and finding places to film—before everything stops. Let’s look at 10 horror movies we wish we could have seen, though a few might still have a tiny chance of being made one day.

Peter Jackson’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: The Dream Lover

Shortly after his first movie, Bad Taste (1987), Peter Jackson, along with co-writer Danny Mulheron, tried to write a script for the sixth Nightmare on Elm Street film. The series had started to focus more on jokes than scares. Jackson wanted to fix this with a meta story called The Dream Lover.

In this version, Freddy Krueger wouldn’t be scary anymore. Teenagers in Springwood would take sleeping pills on purpose to enter the Dream World and make fun of the once-feared killer. Freddy would then manage to kill someone, starting to get his powers back. For reasons we don’t know, New Line Cinema decided not to use this script. Instead, they chose Michael De Luca’s script, which became Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare in 1991.

Darren Bousman’s Wild West Leprechaun Movie

Darren Bousman, famous for his work on the Saw movies, has for years wanted to make a movie for the Leprechaun series. The main character, first played by Warwick Davis in 1993, has caused trouble everywhere from Las Vegas to outer space. Bousman wanted to send him to the Wild West.

He imagined the Leprechaun going back in time to the Colorado gold rush, leading to wild adventures. Bousman stated he would only make it with Warwick Davis and was determined to see it happen. Since 2008, he’s been talking about this idea and even tweeted Lionsgate, the company that owns the series, but hasn’t had success yet. We’ll have to wait and see if this horror-comedy ever gets made.

Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires

At the end of Don Coscarelli’s cult hit Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), a message promised Elvis would return in Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires. Although it started as a joke, it nearly became a real movie. Bruce Campbell, the original Elvis, decided not to do it. However, Paul Giamatti joined to play Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, saying the script was “really, really good.”

Bubba Nosferatu was planned as a prequel. It would explore Elvis’s relationship with Colonel Parker and, as the title hints, feature plenty of vampires. With Campbell out, Ron Perlman was set to play Elvis, but not enough money was raised, and the project stalled. In 2008, Giamatti was still hopeful, saying they would “definitely get Bubba Nosferatu made.”

George A. Romero’s Resident Evil

In 1998, Capcom, the Japanese video game company, hired George A. Romero, known as the father of modern zombie movies, to direct a live-action commercial for their game Biohazard 2 (Resident Evil 2 in other countries). The ad was only 30 seconds long, but it led to Sony Pictures asking Romero to write the movie adaptation.

Romero’s script stayed quite true to the first game’s story, much more so than the movie released in 2002. His version focused on characters Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine and included many creatures created by the T-virus, like zombie dogs, zombie sharks, Plant 42, and the giant snake. Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto later said the “script wasn’t good, so Romero was fired.” Still, many fans wish they could have seen Romero’s take.

Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash

After Freddy vs. Jason came out in 2003, there was talk of a sequel that would bring in Ash from the Evil Dead series. The story would have started with Freddy, as a spirit, tormenting Jason. Freddy would need the Necronomicon from Evil Dead II (1987) to come back to life. The Book of the Dead had even appeared briefly in Jason Goes to Hell (1993). Ash would get involved while working at a local S-Mart and end up defeating both Freddy and Jason.

However, Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash never went further than an initial idea by Jeff Katz. In 2017, Robert Englund (Freddy) said he wanted it to happen, but New Line Cinema was against it because Jason had just beaten Freddy, and they didn’t want Freddy to seem weak. Bruce Campbell (Ash) was less keen, stating he wasn’t very interested in crossovers and mentioned issues with character control and splitting profits.

Even though the movie wasn’t made, it did become a comic book series published in 2007-2008, followed by a sequel comic.

Michael Myers vs. Pinhead

Another crossover idea that never came to be was a fight between Michael Myers from Halloween and Pinhead from Hellraiser. Dave Parker first suggested the idea, called Helloween, to Dimension Films in the mid-1990s, when they produced both series. His story involved a group trying to destroy the Myers house on Halloween while Michael was on his way home. Instead, they’d find the Lament Configuration box and accidentally summon Pinhead.

Dimension initially said no, but after Freddy vs. Jason did well, they thought it might work. They approached Clive Barker (creator of Hellraiser) to write and John Carpenter (director of Halloween) to direct. Doug Bradley, who played Pinhead, explained that Barker wasn’t interested in a simple fight. He wanted to explore where the worlds of Hellraiser and Halloween might intersect. However, Moustapha Akkad, who owned the rights to Halloween, was against the project, and it never moved forward.

Ridley Scott’s The Train

After the success of Alien (1979), director Ridley Scott and artist H. R. Giger planned another sci-fi horror film called The Train. The script, first named “Dead Reckoning,” was by Jim Uhls, who called it “Alien on a train.” The plot was about a modified life form escaping on a fast, runaway underground train. This creature was a humanoid with a genetically changed brain meant to be a “hard drive” for an artificial intelligence project.

Scott wanted to direct and asked Giger in 1988 to start creating concept art. Giger was excited, as he had already designed a ghost train made of biomechanical skeletons and saw this as a chance to use that idea. He worked on art for a couple of years, but Scott left the project due to disagreements with producer Joel Silver. The script was later changed several times, with the creature becoming a super-adaptive killer or an aggressive plant-like being, but the movie was never made. Some of Giger’s ghost train concepts were later used in the movie Species (1995).

House of Re-Animator

In the early 2000s, Brian Yuzna, who produced Re-Animator (1985) and directed its sequels, talked to the original film’s director, Stuart Gordon, and co-writer, Dennis Paoli, about a fourth movie. The main idea was that Herbert West would be taken to the White House to reanimate the recently deceased U.S. president. They hoped Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott would return as West and Dan Cain, and William H. Macy was considered for the president’s role.

Paoli mentioned that they worked on several versions of the story. It was first intended to be a commentary on the Bush Administration’s politics, but they also wrote a more general version that didn’t focus on a specific president. Paoli thinks it wasn’t made because it would have needed a larger budget and because many people are hesitant to support projects with political themes. There was also another idea for a film called The Island of Re-Animator, based on H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, but that also didn’t happen.

Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness

Around 2011, Guillermo del Toro believed his movie adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s story At the Mountains of Madness (1936) was finally going to happen. The story follows a team in Antarctica that discovers ancient ruins and terrifying alien beings. Del Toro said, “We thought we had a very good, safe package. It was $150 [million], Tom Cruise and James Cameron producing, ILM doing the effects.” However, Universal Studios backed out because they wanted a PG-13 rating, while del Toro was set on an R rating for the film’s intense horror.

No studio has been willing to fund del Toro’s big-budget Lovecraftian horror movie since then, but he hasn’t given up hope. In November 2022, he shared a short CGI test video, showing the kind of tentacled creatures he imagined. He also mentioned he’s now thinking about making it as a stop-motion animation film.

John Carpenter’s Creature from the Black Lagoon

After making several hit movies, John Carpenter was offered his choice of Universal Pictures’ projects in 1992. He knew exactly what he wanted: a new version of Creature from the Black Lagoon. A script for a reboot had already been written 10 years earlier by Nigel Kneale, planned as a 3D movie before being dropped. Carpenter brought in screenwriters Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod, known for comedies, to update the script.

Carpenter’s vision for the movie combined the idea of “the Creature being the missing link between man and fish” with a story about “creationist scientists, who are trying to prove that man walked with dinosaurs 10,000 years ago.” He wanted to give it a “Lovecraftian feel,” similar to “The Shadow Over Innsmouth—fish mating with humans.” He also hired Rick Baker, an Oscar-winning makeup effects artist, to design the creature. Models of the Gill-man were made, but Universal never approved the film, possibly because Carpenter’s movie Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) didn’t do well at the box office, making the studio nervous.

The graveyard of unmade movies is vast, and these ten horror projects are just a glimpse of the cinematic ghosts that haunt Hollywood. While some ideas might flicker back to life, most remain tantalizing “what ifs.” They remind us that filmmaking is a complex beast, and even the most monstrously good ideas can falter on their journey to the screen.

Which of these unmade horror movies do you wish you could see? Share your thoughts and any other lost horror gems in the comments below!