Horror movies tend to be the most profitable genre. Why do people love flocking to theaters to get their pants scared off them? Perhaps it’s because of the adrenaline rush and pure visceral reaction caused by these kinds of movies. Perhaps it’s because of how horror monsters appeal to what people try to bury in their subconscious. Perhaps it’s because they’re a safe venue to explore the nature of evil. Whatever the case, these are some of the most entertaining movies audiences can find.
However, horror is also one of the movie genres that most commonly provides truly terrible fare. More often than not, the root of these bad films’ lack of quality comes from screenplays that are, to say the least, poorly written. From modern disasters like The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) to classically bad movies like Troll 2, the worst-written horror movies can be as obnoxious as they can be unintentionally hilarious.
15
‘Halloween Ends’ (2022)
In 2018, David Gordon Green made a sequel to 1978’s Halloween with the same title, ignoring the events of every other film in the franchise. He followed that up with the much-worse Halloween Kills, but the trilogy really came to the peak of its badness in Halloween Ends, one of the most disappointing sequels from any major film franchise.
The script of Halloween Ends is such a departure from its two predecessors and such an insult to the characters and story that it’s almost offensive. Instead of serving as the epic, momentous Laurie Strode vs. Michael Myers final showdown that fans had been hoping for for years, Ends decides to introduce a boring new character, throw in some incoherent themes, and sideline the plotline that fans actually wanted to see.
14
‘Alone in the Dark’ (2005)
No list of the worst anything in movies of any kind would ever be complete without at least a mention of Uwe Boll. Based on the survival horror video game series of the same name, the atrocious Alone in the Dark is silly, inept, and way too dark. Physically too dark, that is—not tonally. In that sense, it’s an absolute laughingstock of a film.
The plot is completely disjointed, the character writing is incoherent at best, and the exposition-heavy dialogue seems like it was written by an alien. Alone in the Dark‘s script is a masterclass in what not to do when writing a horror movie, and that’s why the movie has aged so poorly that it hasn’t even been picked up as a so-bad-it’s-good cult classic. Sometimes, a film is just plain awful.
13
‘Terrifier’ (2016)
Damien Leone created Art the Clown for the short film The 9th Circle, and he knew he had something really special on his hands. So, he brought the villain back for the anthology film All Hallows’ Eve. It wasn’t until Terrifier, though, that he was finally able to make a feature wholly centered on Art the Clown as its antagonist. The only issue? The movie sucks.
Art is, indeed, an entirely unique and awfully terrifying horror villain, but at least in the original Terrifier, that comes entirely from Leone’s direction and David Howard Thornton’s performance. The movie itself is easily the worst of the three in the Terrifier franchise, with a script that’s overflowing with stupidity, misogyny, and no clear sense of creative direction. Terrifier‘s script is mean and bloody just for the sake of it, and that hardly results in an interesting experience.
12
‘The Happening’ (2008)
Evil trees. That’s what the whole premise of M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happeningessentially boils down to. If that sounds dumb, that’s because it is—and it makes for an equally dumb movie. The Happening has become one of the most iconic so-bad-they’re-good horror cult classics of the 2000s, and for good reason. It’s proof of just how low the quality of Shyamalan’s filmography can go.
The movie is supported by some terrible direction and one of the most iconic bad performances of all time (in Mark Wahlberg‘s portrayal of Elliot Moore), but the script is the real star of the show. The characters don’t behave or talk like actual humans, the rules of the premise don’t make sense, and the tone of the story jumps around between parody, satire, tragedy, and straight horror. At no point does it give you the impression that it was competently written.
11
‘Slender Man’ (2018)
In 2009, the fictional creepypasta character Slender Man shook the Internet. Sony was more than a bit late to the party when, almost a decade later, they released a movie based on the story. Slender Man is set in small-town Massachusetts, where a group of friends fascinated by the Slender Man lore attempt to prove that he doesn’t actually exist, until one of them mysteriously goes missing.
Shamefully generic and lacking any mystery or suspense to make the story truly compelling, Slender Man is a laughably lackluster attempt at capitalizing on an old Internet sensation. One of the worst mystery movies ever, it has characters so dull and forgettable that it’s easy not to even notice when the villain makes them disappear. The whole thing feels like just a collection of cheap scares very loosely joined together by a dumb narrative thread.
10
‘The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)’ (2011)
Tom Six‘s Human Centipedetrilogy is one of the most obnoxiously pretentious in the history of horror, but its middle installment is arguably the most egregious of the bunch. The Human Centipede 2, one of the 2010s’ worst movies, follows a disturbed loner who, inspired by the first Human Centipede movie, dreams of creating a 12-person centipede and sets out to realize his fantasy.
Showing that meta layers don’t an intelligent script make, Human Centipede 2 serves to somehow both mock those who enjoyed the first film and insult anyone else who dares to watch it. The film is all about reveling in nastiness and violence without rhyme or reason, with absolutely nothing to say, no character development to speak of, and no interesting story to make it even slightly tolerable.
9
‘Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2’ (2000)
The original Blair Witch Project, largely thanks to its brilliant marketing campaign but also because of how good a horror movie it was in its own right, was one of the 1990s’ biggest and most influential horror films, revolutionizing the found footage subgenre forever. Its sequel, Book of Shadows, does away with the found footage framing device completely, and instead tells the story of a group of tourists who arrive in Burkittsville, Maryland, after seeing The Blair Witch Project. In exploring its mythology, they come face to face with their own neuroses and possibly the witch herself.
Yet another horror sequel that proves that being meta isn’t a sign of intelligence, Book of Shadows has none of the creativity and mystery that made its predecessor a classic. Instead, it’s a chaotic mess with some of the most one-dimensional characters and cringeworthy dialogue that the genre saw throughout the 2000s. Generic to the point of having nothing to make it stand out in the endless ocean of 21st-century horror films, it’s a sequel better left forgotten.
8
‘Hellraiser: Revelations’ (2011)
The British-American Hellraiserfranchise is one of the most unique out there, with some of the genre’s most (and certainly least) enjoyable outings. The franchise’s absolute worst, though, is universally agreed to be Hellraiser: Revelations. The first installment, without Doug Bradley as the iconic Pinhead (he declined the role because of the rushed production and proposed minimal salary), is about two college friends who accidentally unleash Pinhead and his minions.
The makeup effects are okay, as they tend to be in this particular franchise, but everything else is a failure. Revelations is one of the worst horror movies of all time, due to its lifeless direction, atrocious performances, and — of course — lamentable screenplay. It’s mostly just a rethread of every plot point in the first film, just… bad. Stupid and nonsensical, but not enough to be entertainingly bad, it’s just a plain, terrible script with very little value to offer.
7
‘Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday’ (1993)
The original Friday the 13thfrom 1980 isn’t generally regarded as a particularly great horror film, but its introduction of Jason Voorhees, one of the genre’s biggest icons, was more than enough to ensure its place in the canon of cult horror films from the era. Some of its sequels, too—despite being pretty abysmal in comparison—have earned cult followings. Not the ninth outing in the franchise, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (which wasn’t actually the final Friday, and doesn’t actually see Jason go to Hell), which is generally regarded as the absolute worst of the bunch.
Jason Goes to Hell tried to reinvent the wheel by introducing brand-new concepts into the series, like Jason’s spirit moving between different bodies and explaining his evil origins, but this is simply not what fans of past installments had signed up for. In trying to be so ambitious, the movie’s script ends up feeling ludicrous and entirely unaware of its target audience. It provides for very few fun moments, very few creative kills, and pretty much none of the campy charm that had made past Friday films, bad though they may have been, at least somewhat enjoyable.
6
‘A Serbian Film’ (2010)
As far as the most disturbing movies go, it doesn’t get much more traumatizing than A Serbian Film, which was precisely its intention — but that intention is the only thing it has to offer. Its story is about an aging porn star who’s invited to participate in an art film to make a clean break from the business, only to discover that he’s been drafted into making a pedophilia and necrophilia-themed snuff film.
Absolutely everything that could make this premise scandalous is shown in full detail without any shame or sensitivity, which led to the movie being banned in many countries across the world. Meant to be a critique of censorship, Serbian politicians, and political correctness, A Serbian Film instead comes across as nothing more than a mean-spirited, purely evil movie that, in doing so much, says absolutely nothing.
