Every year around Halloween, horror movie lovers look for films to satisfy their seasonal craving for scares. It’s fun to revisit a favorite like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Psycho, but a horror movie is almost always scarier the first time you watch it, when it can sneak up on you and surprise you with unexpected twists and gore.
But if you look for new horror films to watch by Googling something like “best horror films” or “most famous horror films,” and then you cross-reference those results against a site like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll find that many of the best-known and most-watched horror movies in history got pretty bad reviews from film critics. We’re not just talking about schlock like your Troll 2s of the world. These are movies that launched massive multimedia franchises; titles that continue to spawn sequels and spinoffs and TV shows to this day.
Below, you’ll find 15 such examples; horror films that have stood the test of time to become home video and streaming classics that did not receive much in the way of critical admiration on their initial release to theaters. (There are titles dating back almost 50 years, so I’m not joking around about the stood the test of time part.) I’ve provided the Rotten Tomatoes score for each film, along with a sample review so you can get a sense of what critics had to say about them.
It just goes to show that horror, like every other kind of movie, is subjective. What one person finds shocking, another might find tacky or tasteless or banal. So don’t rule any of these films out of your Halloween rotation just because of their reviews.
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