A new series tells the sto­ry of the great­est hor­ror movies nev­er made

Giv­en that they’re in the busi­ness of fab­ri­cat­ing fear, you might expect hor­ror film­mak­ers to be whol­ly unflap­pable. There is one place so ghast­ly, how­ev­er, that it sends even the most indomitable direc­tors pack­ing: devel­op­ment hell.

Step for­ward pro­duc­er Dave Alexan­der, who promis­es to share the most fright­en­ing tales of all in his upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary series, Untold Hor­ror, which fea­tures a horde of genre cin­e­ma heroes dis­cussing the projects that nev­er made it to the screen.

The issue, it seems, is a com­mon one. We see John Lan­dis, the man behind An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don, lament­ing his long list of scrapped scripts: ​“I would say for every movie that I’ve actu­al­ly got­ten pro­duced, I’ve worked on 12.” While zom­bie movie mae­stro George A Romero shares a sim­i­lar hor­ror sto­ry – the num­bers are dif­fer­ent, but the sen­ti­ment is the same.

Takashi Miike, Richard Raaphoorst and William Lustig also line up to speak about the var­i­ous obsta­cles thrown in their way, both juicy and bureau­crat­ic, from scan­dal-plagued exec­u­tives to bloat­ed budgets.

Along­side the direc­tors them­selves, the series will com­prise inter­views with indus­try experts, stu­dio deci­sion mak­ers and hor­ror movie super-fans, reveal­ing which projects they wish had been com­plet­ed – and which are in the process of being raised from the dead.

In the case of Romero’s 1994 mock doc­u­men­tary Jacaran­da Joe, snip­pets of which are teased in the trail­er, recov­ered footage is set to be shown for the first time. The film, in which a Big Foot-like char­ac­ter ter­roris­es a fic­tion­al Flori­da town, was pre­vi­ous­ly thought to have been lost for over 25 years.

Among the oth­er infa­mous titles are David Cronenberg’s Franken­stein, Roger Avery’s Phan­tasm and a remake of the clas­sic 1954 hor­ror Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon, which has been con­signed to the scrapheap despite being linked to an string of high-pro­file direc­tors includ­ing John Car­pen­ter, Peter Jack­son, Ivan Reit­man and Guiller­mo del Toro.

Del Toro shows up again in con­nec­tion to a project that most caught our atten­tion: an ill-fat­ed anthol­o­gy of hor­ror movies that was intend­ed to fea­ture con­tri­bu­tions from the direc­tor along­side Lan­dis, Sam Rai­mi and Joe Dante.

Which unfin­ished films would you like to see released? Let us know @LWLies