Movie studios don’t usually let franchise potential go unfulfilled, but some of the scariest horror movie monsters only ever appeared in one film and never got a sequel. Usually, when a movie monster is popular, Hollywood keeps bringing it back for sequel after sequel until it loses all its impact. After the success of Jaws, Universal brought in a bunch of other bloodthirsty sharks for a string of sequels. There have been dozens of Godzilla films and they’re not slowing down any time soon. Even the Judas breed from Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic came back for some cheap direct-to-video sequels.
Some of the most terrifying movie monsters ever created have only shown up in one film. Jordan Peele thought up a mind-blowing new take on extraterrestrial life for the organic flying saucer in Nope. Jennifer Kent brought the abstract universal concept of trauma to life with the eponymous entity in her modern horror classic The Babadook. David Robert Mitchell created the perfect metaphor for sexually transmitted diseases with the paranormal pursuer in It Follows. There are a ton of frightening horror movie monsters that deserve to show up in more than one film.
The flying saucer was one of the earliest visual interpretations of what first contact with aliens might look like, but Jordan Peele cooked up a brand-new take on the flying saucer concept for his spectacle-skewering sci-fi blockbuster Nope. In Nope, the flying saucer isn’t the ship that the aliens arrived in; it’s the alien itself. The Haywoods set out to capture the alien on film and find that it’s much more beautiful than it initially seemed.
In the final act of Nope, the flying saucer opens up to reveal its true angelic form. These visuals were inspired by the mind-blowing imagery of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Peele did a terrific job of realizing those images in live-action. It feels like Nope just scratched the surface of Jean Jacket’s disturbing beauty; it needs another movie to see where it came from.
The main villain in Hereditary is grief, as it sees the Graham family dealing with unimaginable loss, but that grief is manifested as King Paimon, the evil god worshipped by the twisted pagan cult targeting the Grahams. Paimon never shows his true face in the movie; instead, he reveals himself through a sadistic glint in the eyes of the poor, unsuspecting souls he chooses to possess. Actors like Alex Wolff pulled off that possessed look perfectly, with a haunting stare right through the screen to the audience on the other side.
The ending of Hereditary felt like the beginning of a new story. Paimon finally made it to the surface world in a human vessel, surrounded by his cult followers, ready to launch his sinister reign. Another Paimon movie could explore the impact of his earthly arrival.
Attack the Block brings the typical alien invasion tropes to a council estate in South London. A nurse reluctantly teams up with the street gang that mugged her to fight off alien invaders who have infiltrated the UK under the guise of fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night. The aliens themselves have a totally unique design: they have thick black fur, no eyes, and razor-sharp neon-blue teeth. They’re described in the movie as “big alien gorilla-wolf motherf***ers,” which is pretty apt.
At the end of Attack the Block, Moses and his friends manage to vanquish all the aliens from London, but those “big alien gorilla-wolf motherf***ers” are still out there. They’ll surely launch a second attempted invasion at some point. This would give Cornish an opportunity to explore different alien tropes in different parts of the UK.
Rather than making up a new monster to frighten audiences, Antlers director Scott Cooper dug into real-life folklore. The wendigo seen in Antlers is a legendary Algonquin demon that supposedly passes from person to person and appears as a hungry, flesh-eating deer-like creature. It can only be killed when it’s at its absolute weakest, so it takes quite some doing to defeat the wendigo. Surely the fight isn’t over after just one movie.
While it has great performances, stunning cinematography, and genuinely terrifying scares, Antlers was let down by its weak screenplay. The beautifully designed wendigo from this movie is deserving of a much better script. Perhaps the wendigo could make a comeback in an Antlers sequel whose storytelling matches the terror and intensity of its monster (although that’s unlikely, given the first film’s box office disappointment).
From the titular demonic vigilante in Hellboy to the Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water to the Judas breed in Mimic, Guillermo del Toro is responsible for creating some of the most iconic movie monsters of all time. Arguably the creepiest of them all is “The Pale Man” from his twisted fairytale Pan’s Labyrinth. Pan’s Labyrinth is all about coming to terms with the dark side of human nature and the moral ambiguity of the war-torn world that Ofelia lives in, and the Pale Man embodies all of that spectacularly.
With his long, spindly build and eyeballs embedded in the palms of his hands, the Pale Man looks nothing like any other monster ever seen on the big screen. Since he appears in an imaginary fantasyland, there’s a wide range of stories the Pale Man could show up in. If Hellboy can get a sequel, surely the Pale Man can get one, too.
There are plenty of terrifying mutations in “The Shimmer,” a mysterious zone of alien interference on Earth in Alex Garland’s chilling sci-fi thriller Annihilation, but easily the most terrifying of them all is the mutated bear. The mutant bear first appears when it attacks the base and kills Cassie. By the time it reappears, the mutant bear has managed to assimilate Cassie’s remaining tissue, and when it roars, the sound that emanates is Cassie’s dying screams.
This whole scene is a masterclass in sound design. The bear is just lurking around, trying to sniff out more people to eat, but Cassie’s screams of terror substituted for the bear’s voice make the whole thing so much more unsettling. It’s the most memorable scene in the film by far, and its tenure on the silver screen shouldn’t have been confined to that one standalone sequence.
Zach Cregger’s Barbarian doesn’t initially seem to be a monster movie. It starts off with an Airbnb booking snafu as two strangers arrive at the same rental house and realize it’s been double-booked. The first half of the movie plays on the idea that these two strangers don’t know if they can trust each other, but the second half turns it into a totally different story as they discover hidden passageways underneath the house.
Down in these tunnels, they encounter “The Mother,” a horribly mutated humanoid that’s been granted super-strength by several generations of inbreeding. The Mother is a truly terrifying movie monster, introduced by repeatedly slamming a protagonist’s skull against a wall until he dies, but she’s also oddly sympathetic. At the end of the day, mutilations aside, the Mother just wants to have a baby to look after.
The xenomorphs can be seen in every Alien movie, not just the first one. H.R. Giger’s truly otherworldly vision of a vicious, malevolent extraterrestrial entity is the defining image of inhumanity. It’s one of the only on-screen aliens that actually looks alien; it’s something that primitive human beings can’t comprehend. The xenomorph will never stop being terrifying, so it’ll probably continue to be featured in sequels, prequels, and reboots for years to come. But the xenomorphs’ queen only ever appeared in James Cameron’s perfect first sequel, Aliens.
The Queen’s role as the big bad of Aliens ties in beautifully with the theme of motherhood, and specifically the maternal instinct of protectiveness. Just like Ripley, the Queen wants to keep her kids safe. The Queen is the biggest, baddest, most terrifying xenomorph of them all, but she was only ever featured in one movie.
The supernatural entity in It Follows is a potent metaphor for the paranoia around sexually transmitted diseases. David Robert Mitchell’s haunting horror gem opens with a young woman going on a date with a guy who seems antsy and trepidatious about staying in one place for too long. At the end of the date, they have sex, and the guy reveals that by doing so, he passed on the entity to her. He’s been getting followed by a shapeshifting monster, and now, it’ll follow her until she passes it on to someone else.
This is a perfect horror premise. There’s an unbearable feeling of dread when the monster is far away, gradually approaching, and there are a couple of big jump scares when the monster unexpectedly appears in a doorway or crashes through a wall. The image of a monster constantly following the hero, walking slowly but surely in a straight line toward their target, is too powerful to only use in one movie.