10 Horror Movies That Sound Terrible (But Are Actually Great)

More than with any other genre, it's usually pretty easy to tell if a horror film is going to be good. One only has to look at the trailer, which will be full of jump scares and shots of some advanced screening audience reacting, to realize there likely isn't much there. Sometimes, even just the premise is enough to make a determination - A movie produced by Hasbro that's an adaptation of the Ouija board? How could that not be bad?

However, that isn't always the case, and there are some movies that you shouldn't be so quick to judge. These are the films that have a bad trailer, a lame poster, or maybe even a dumb premise, yet something about the execution wildly surpasses expectations. 

Just look at a movie like The Exorcist III. It sounds like a cheap cash grab capitalizing on a film that never needed a sequel, and at the time reviews weren't overly positive. Years later though, fans who gave it a chance found it to be surprisingly effective and far more pant-wettingly terrifying than its poor reputation would ever have suggested.

You've probably assumed these 10 films are total crap as well, but if you go in with a completely open mind, they might just surprise you.

The first Saw movie is actually a really well constructed thriller, but by Saw III, the series undoubtedly began to spiral out of control. It makes sense that everyone dismissed the later movies then, yet Saw VI was an excellent return to form that deserves a chance. 

After a bunch of sequels about not much at all, Saw VI brings an interesting theme to the series: it's all about the health insurance system.  While a horror movie about health care might sound awful, it actually works. The main character is an insurance executive who frequently denies people care, and so he basically decides if someone lives or dies. Now, he must do that in a much more practical sense, choosing which of two people will survive and being forced to watch the bloody consequences.

In the original Saw, the point was that Jigsaw kidnapped people who didn't value their own life and put them in a difficult situation. However, in the later sequels, that increasingly turned into people being put into positions where they couldn't possibly survive. The traps in Saw VI are more interesting than they've been in a few movies, feeling much closer to games than simple torture machines. 

If you gave up on the series after the abysmal Saw V, Saw VI is worth sticking around for. Just stay the hell away from Saw 3D.