I think most horror fans enjoy terrible horror movies.
The worst sin is when they're just boring, though.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Boring is probably the worst thing any movie can be.
Yeah, like I find horror movies to be mostly just unintentionally funny, but that doesnβt make them bad to me. I enjoy them like that!
Iβm not really a fan of the ultra-realistic gore stuff like Hostel though. I much prefer classics like The Exorcist, the Wicker Man, Hellraiser, Evil Dead, and literally anything with Vincent Price!
The terrible movies are fun too!
If you watched hundreds of hours of movies and you didn't like any of them, you might not be a fan of the genre.
You know what horror movie you should see? Creep, by Patrick Brice, 2014. Do not look any trailer, do not see anything about it. Just go and watch it. It will take only one hour of your time.
I liked it because it was unique. I think Horror benefits from just being a different way to present the story. Barbarian recently did that for me, and anytime a horror movie gets me to say, "Hey, I'd dint expect that," that's a good thing.
Seconded. Don't think the second one captured what the first one did.
Creep is the movie I show people when they say they like terrifying horror movies that are grounded in their premise. I love this movie, and it still unsettles me every time
Honestly, I wanted my hour back at the end of it.
rewind the movie
They nailed with X (2022), but I think they screw it with their sequels. I know a lot of people that claim that every movie is superior, one by another (Pearl and MaXXXine), the same thing happened with Terrifier, the first movie is awesome, but the sequels.... uggghh.
Edit: M3GAN was funny, but happened the same thing whit the sequel.
Edit 2: My favorite horror movie sequel is Hellraiser II
Just watched the trilogy over the weekend and I've got to disagree almost entirely with you. X is awful, awful, Maxine is okay but barely horror, and Pearl is actually a really great movie
E: same thing with Terrifier. 1 is forgettable, 3 is masturbatory, but 2 is phenomenal
X was awesome, Pearl was alright, but I couldn't even finish Maxxxine.
I personally would flip that. X is meh, pearl is fantastic, but Maxxxine isn't great.
Honestly, X is better after watching Pearl, but I still prefer the prequel.
Hellraiser II is a fantastic movie!
As a horror fan, I guess I don't really understand the desire to wade through low-tier films when we live in the age of reviews and online-word of mouth. Every horror film I watch is almost always a great film or better. I sat through maybe 4 or so low quality films a few years back, and realized I should just cut my losses and trust what people say, unless I find some super obscure found-footage Japanese horror flick from the 80's that doesn't even have a translated subtitle track, then I'll take the risk.
Those are rookie numbers. I was subbed to Amazon prime for years. You have no idea how bad a bad movie can be and just how many there are.
But honestly, it makes you appreciate the bad movies that put the effort in. You feel like a Klondike gold prospector when you finally find not even a good movie, but a good part in a bad movie. And sure, I'll watch the good movies too but there's barely enough of them for even one streaming service.
These are fair points, that I have no real argument with, but I do have a different perspective.
- Tastes vary widely, especially when you try to start trying to throw a little humor into the horror mix. I genuinely enjoy watching some things others really hate and conversely can't stand to watch some franchises that I know are actually pretty good.
- I freely admit that I enjoy cheaply made horror and movies that makes big swings and take wild chances. Sometimes that works out. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes even the failures open the door to something else. The Alien franchise might have taken a really different direction if James Cameron didn't work on Galaxy of Terror (a low budget mess of a movie that I don't recommend to anyone that isn't seriously into bad movies the way I am). Even though I don't like Galaxy of Terror enough to repeatedly watch it, I'm grateful for the insight.
- I think the trick really is to find a reviewer(s) whose taste align with yours. For example, I enjoy watch Brandon Tenold's takes on cult movies on YouTube. I don't always bother to find and watch the movies he reviews, but after watching his take I can usually get a good feel for if I'll enjoy it enough to spend the time and effort to find and watch it.
- My time for movies, shows, and books is not precious and limited. If I start watching or reading something that I'm not into, I'm okay with not finishing it. There's no reason to torture myself over it, I just move on. I don't consider this a waste of time.
There's been a recent resurgence in good horror
Barbarian was fantastic
So was Together, just watched it for date night last weekend.
I was going to check out Good Boy next, it looked interesting
I liked Weapons (2025), also by Zach Cregger.
Hereditary and Midsommar are excellent films as well
A friend recommended this one to me. I need to check it out.
Just since 2020
Evil Dead Rise
Nope
Barbarian
Longlegs
The Substance
The Heretic
When Evil Lurks
Smile
Smile 2
Sinners
Talk to Me
Prey
Godzilla Minus One
The Invisible Man
Nosferatu
The Menu
Color Out of Space
Just finished Bring Her Back. Pretty top notch, imo. Same directors did Talk To Me which was great. Weapons was enjoyable, but not in my top 10 of last 15 years, give or take.
I feel like weβve been in a horror movie golden age for a bit. It will likely sputter out soo . A lot of them seem to be hitting the same vibe/style, so getting overdone feeling.
The true horror.
Horror movie hit or miss ratio is perfectly fine in my experience? Is this an issue people face? Y'all need a better way of deciding upon a movie then lol
Yeah i wouldn't say its any worse than any other genre nowadays
Lotsa slop out there
Horror movies as a genre includes a large portion of direct to video/direct to streaming lower budget films. If we look at action movies and include all the Stephen Segal movies, or romance movies and include all the shlocky Hallmark stuff, or sci fi movies and include all the low budget crap like the Asylum puts out the ratios for those genres are pretty awful too.
Horror just happens to be one of the few that include non-theater releases in what people tend to think of when discussung the genre because of being excluded from theaters for so long. Comic and superhero movies had a similar begatuve popular opinion because of how bad most of them were before the 2000s.
90% of anything tends to be crap and always has been.
It's much easier to throw together a slasher or other horror movie on a small budget and get at least a small paying audience.
If you're ok watching movies that are funded by, written, directed, and starring the same person.... Those have a really low ratio of hit and miss. But the highs far outweigh the lows.
Just watched Sinners.
It was awful.
1.5+ hours of largely unnecessary back story leadup for maybe 25 minutes of actual vampire survival content. Horror movies aren't supposed to be 2.5 hours long.
Sinners wasn't a horror movie though. It was a movie that happened to include some horror elements.
I mean it's a movie about people surviving the night against a vampire attack.
It's like From Dusk Till Dawn. Sure there's some action and some humor, but it's a horror movie. Sinners is a horror movie, despite having some action and drama.
It is a movie about two brothers opening a black owned business in the racist south and a vampire happens to show up.
What you call unnecessary backstreet is the main movie.
I dunno, I hadn't heard of it, looked it up on Google, and it specifically and only says horror. Not a horror comedy or anything. But I haven't seen it so I dunno.
Movies are trending toward being longer now though, genre be damned. I remember I used to think, damn, movies are too short. And now I find myself more often saying, damn, movies are too long.
I'm sure that is the official category, because of blood and gore and vampires. But that is only the later part of the movie and the main story is the characters and build up to get there.
It was billed and advertised as a horror movie. I think some people were disappointed because they were expecting a horror movie but got something else.
Aliens is 2h37 (director's cut) and you don't see the first xenomorph until 1h30 in (not counting facehugger)
Ok it's horror scifi but still
I saw The Monkey recently, and I feel it fits the bill here a bit. It's weird, it's cheesy at times, it's got a very eclectic choice of scares and whatnot. It's not serious, at all. But it's also not at all a bad movie, it's got a very respectable 77 on the tomatometer, a source I used to trust implicitly, despite having gone to shit probably five or more years ago at this point.
I think that horror lets itself benefit from some cheese in a way that no other genre can benefit from, and in there we get the whole "bad movie" vibe sometimes. I'm not remotely a massive horror fan, because I've known some and my fandom doesn't hold a candle to theirs, but I enjoy the genre, and it's a very dense genre, with so many ways to tell what is ostensibly the same story: something to "scare" the viewer.
I let other people watch the terrible stuff so I donβt have to
Me, who hates "good" horror movies and loves monsters, kaiju, slashers, and otherwise B movies: Thumb.
My filter is usually age. There has been a massive glut of shitty horror in the past 20 years as it's become cheaper and easier to make and distribute independent film.
I tend to look at the 70s and 80s for things have stood the test of time in terms of favorability. Letterboxd is a great resource for that, especially obscure stuff. I'm sure there is plenty of great contemporary horror but I'll stick to things that are recommended to me.