10 Foreign Horror Films That Claimed to Be Sequels to American Hits
John Squires
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It was pretty common back in the day for foreign horror films to be illegitimately attached to popular American franchises as a way of luring in audiences under false pretenses. Allow me to elaborate.
Let’s say Joe Italiano makes an Italian horror film about killer spiders in the early 90s. It’s called Attaco Dei Ragni, and nobody bothers to see it. So the company in charge of releasing the film here in the States decides to put out the same movie under the title Arachnophobia 2, and suddenly the audiences come out in droves (…hopefully).
See how that works? Whatever it takes to get asses in the seats, as they say.
Here are ten foreign films (mostly Italian) that were released under the false pretense that they were sequels to popular horror films – when that actually couldn’t have been further from the truth!
The most well known case of this happening is of course Lucio Fulci’s 1979 splatter classic Zombie, which was released in Italy under the title Zombi 2. When did Zombi come out, and why have you never seen it? That’d be because Zombi was actually George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, retitled for the Italian release. So when Fulci made his own zombie movie, the distributor decided to call it Zombi 2, tricking audiences into thinking it was actually the sequel to Romero’s “Zombi.”
Aside from the fact that zombies are in both films, the two in reality had absolutely nothing to do with one another.
Though made in 1975, Dario Argento’s Deep Red didn’t see release in Japan until 1978, one year after Argento put out his follow-up film, Suspiria. Since Suspiria was already familiar to Japanese audiences at the time, Deep Red was released under the title Suspiria 2 to lure in fans of that film. Posters for this so-called Suspiria 2 were even whipped up that used the imagery of the bloody ballerina from Suspiria’s promotional materials. Pretty funny, considering this supposed sequel was made BEFORE the film it was apparently a sequel to!
1990’s Troll 2 would appear, on paper at least, to be a sequel to the 1986 horror film Troll – but again, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with that film. In fact, the ironic thing here is that Troll 2 is about goblins, rather than trolls, which is just one of the little charms that makes the film so gosh darn loveable. In fairness, the movie was actually shot under the title Goblins but was changed in an attempt to bring more attention to it.
MORE FAKE SEQUELS ON NEXT PAGE!
