Released in 1997, An American Werewolf in Paris was something of a loose sequel to An American Werewolf in London, though it of course had no actual involvement from John Landis. But did you know that Lands himself actually wrote a sequel to his own 1981 werewolf classic back in the 1990s?!

As reported by Digital Spy, Landis fully details the never-made sequel in the book Beware the Moon: The Story of An American Werewolf in London, which now has a brand new limited paperback edition (only 500 copies) up for pre-order – it’ll begin shipping November 27.

“I was asked to do a sequel by PolyGram in 1991,” Landis explains. “The company, under Jon Peters and Peter Guber, made something like 10 or 12 movies, and the only one that made money was American Werewolf. I entertained the idea for a little bit and then came up with something that I liked and wrote a first draft of the script.”

Landis continued…

“The movie was about the girl that the boys talk about at the beginning of [An American Werewolf in London], Debbie Klein. She gets a job in London as a literary agent and while she’s there, starts privately investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Jack and David. The conceit was that during the time in the first film where Jenny goes to work and David is pacing around the apartment, he actually wrote Debbie Klein a letter. It was all to do with this big secret that David had never told Jack that he had a thing with her.”

“She tracks down Dr Hirsch, who tells her that Alex now lives in Paris because she was so traumatized by what happened. She went back to the Slaughtered Lamb and everyone is still there! I think the only changes were a portrait of Charles and Diana where the five-pointed star used to be and darts arcade game instead of a board. It’s then when she speaks to Sgt McManus, the cop from the first movie who didn’t die, that she finds out that Jenny is still in London. She calls her and leaves an answer phone message, which we then reveal is being listened to by the skeletal corpses of Jack and David, watching TV in Alex’s apartment!“

“The big surprise at the end was that Alex was the werewolf. It was pretty wild. The script had everybody in it from the first movie – including all the dead people!”

So what happened? Polygram’s Michael Kuhn hated Landis’ script; “[he] was actually pretty insulting about it,” Landis recalls. And that was the end of that.

“Clearly he would have hated the script for the first movie, because like that, it was funny and scary – and if anything, a little wackier,” Landis notes.