The roots of the slasher sub-genre can be traced back even further, but one thing isn’t up for debate: the hugely successful Halloween, itself inspired by Black Christmas, is the film that kick-started the American slasher movement that dominated the genre in the ’80s. Subsequently, Friday the 13th, released two years after John Carpenter’s indie hit, took the sub-genre to a whole new level, adding extreme gore and creative kill sequences to the formula and paving the way for countless blood-soaked slashers that came in its wake.

One of the best of those films, My Bloody Valentine, came along in 1981.

The success of Friday the 13th led Paramount to pick up the Canadian-made, George Mihalka-directed slasher film about a gas mask-wearing miner with a (pick)axe to grind, and though it’s widely regarded as one of the top slasher movies of the ’80s, the film didn’t perform all that well at the box office. Made for a couple million dollars, My Bloody Valentine made back its small budget and then some by netting around $6 million at the box office in February of 1981; but it wasn’t the kind of money Paramount was hoping for. And so, sadly, we never got a sequel.

Of course, My Bloody Valentine was given a modern day makeover in 2009 with the incredibly entertaining My Bloody Valentine 3D, but even that film has to date not spawned a follow-up. And it’s a damn shame, because the so-called miner is a bona fide horror icon who seemed tailor made for a long-running franchise; if not in the 1980s, then at least in the present day.

Was a sequel to the original franchise ever planned? Yes, actually. Oddly enough, Mihalka and producer John Dunning were trying to get it off the ground around the time of the remake.

Our main source of information about the unmade sequel, then-tentatively titled The Return of the Miner, is the website Terror Trap, which ran extensive interviews with both men several years ago. According to Dunning, Paramount had once upon a time purchased a script he wrote, but it was ultimately shelved in favor of Lionsgate’s remake.

Dunning explained:

When there were talks to revisit My Bloody Valentine, I had written a sequel, which they bought…only to shelve it. Some guy at Lionsgate decided the remake should be a “date movie.” Now, we didn’t even understand what a date movie is. So they canned my script. They bought me out. We had thought they were gonna make it, but to our surprise, they shelved it. The damn thing that bothered me about the remake is that everyone is running around being killed with an axe. The same axe. It gets boring. Absolutely boring. My sequel…and I’m not going to boast here…but the sequel that I co-wrote was ten times better than the remake. And that’s because it has the spirit of the original, with the survivors from the original back in play.

He dug further into the canned sequel’s plot:

In the sequel, the girl that survived (Lori Hallier) married the boy survivor (Paul Kelman) and she became the town’s Chief of Police. And he became a drunk. They would have been the two main characters that maintained the action. There were young actors in my script too, because this couple had sons. And the sons were the same age as the kids in the first one. They were typical young guys, hooking up with girls of their own age and going into the mines for sex, etc.

Dunning also explained to the site that he wanted all the original actors to return, and that the miner would resurface in the wake of Valentine Bluffs “turning the old mine into a carnival attraction complete with a Mine of Terror thrill ride.” The site relayed, “surrounding the ride are theme concessions selling masks, miner helmets, toy pick axes, t-shirts, etc. Needless to say, with their experience from the past, an older and wiser Sarah and T.J. are not enthused!”

Sigh. A kickass franchise that never came to be.