Welcome to Script to Pieces, a recurring feature at Wicked Horror where we look at the best, most interesting and at times most unbelievable horror movies that never happened. Sometimes these will be productions that never came together at all, other times, they will be original incarnations that were completely different from what we wound up with. Each should be fascinating in its own way, because the stories of movies that never see the light of day can sometimes be even more interesting than the stories of those that do.
2009 was pretty much the height of the remake craze. We saw new versions of everything from Night of the Demons to The Last House on the Left. And the major franchises returned in a big, bad way. We had Friday the 13th and Halloween II in the same year, with A Nightmare on Elm Street in development at the same time. Not only that, but Friday the 13th and My Bloody Valentine came out less than a month apart.
The remake craze might not have been everyone’s favorite time for recent horror, but it inadvertently gave us a slasher resurgence that I was incredibly grateful for. It was expected at the time for all of these things to launch franchises, but that never really happened. Halloween II was the end of Zombie’s tenure on that series. Friday the 13th still hasn’t gotten a follow-up and it’s sure at this point that it won’t be a sequel to the reboot if it even happens at all. The same is true but even less likely for A Nightmare on Elm Street.
But My Bloody Valentine was a bigger success than anyone expected. It made money and people had a great time with it. Usually, that’s all it takes for a studio to want to churn out a sequel. On top of that, Todd Farmer and Patrick Lussier planned for sequels. They came out of that release knowing exactly where the story would be headed.
According to Farmer, the sequel would pick up immediately where the first one left off, in the tradition of Halloween II or even Hatchet II. It would tie back into the massacre alluded to at the beginning of the remake, but is never actually shown. Axel and Sarah would be rushed to the hospital, Sarah would look around a corner, seeing muddy footprints and then seeing Tom sewing himself up.
From there, Farmer said “The massacre you didn’t see at the beginning of our Bloody Valentine, perhaps you see in the sequel.”
While Farmer is usually one to freely share the plans for things he attempted to make but fell through for whatever reason, the exact plots of the My Bloody Valentine sequels are still unclear.
Almost immediately after My Bloody Valentine 3D, though, Farmer and Lussier became attached to Halloween 3D. This was announced as the continuation of the Halloween franchise after Rob Zombie finished telling the story he began in his 2007 remake. The duo wound up spending years attached to the project before it fell through and simply moved onto attempting to reboot Hellraiser after it lost its director, Pascal Laugier.
But it was not their availability that stopped My Bloody Valentine 2 & 3 from happening. They were completely ready and willing to dive into the follow-up after the reboot’s successful release. Lionsgate, however, had other plans. Despite My Bloody Valentine’s box office success, they were insistent that it was entirely due to the 3D gimmick and that a sequel would not be wise, as there would be no point and it would not make as much money. This was not a property that, apparently, they ever planned to turn into a franchise.
The truth, Farmer and Lussier both suspected, was that Lionsgate was attempting to move away from horror in general. They’d been branded as a horror studio long ago with the release of the first Saw and their reputation as such had only grown since then. While this reason is not confirmed, it’s a pretty good guess. With the Hunger Games franchise, Lionsgate started to rebrand itself as a broader, bigger company.
At this point, I think it’s highly unlikely that we’ll actually see Farmer or Lussier return for any kind of sequel, though I still hold out hope that some day we might see a random DTV My Bloody Valentine follow-up somewhere down the line.
