10 Biggest New Cliches Of Modern Horror Movies

Cliched horror is dead. Long live cliched horror.

By Brendan Morrow /

Characters always split up when they shouldn't. The car never starts. Teenagers run upstairs when being chased by the killer. If you have sex, you'll get killed. These are the rules of horror movies that everyone is familiar with, and they're exactly why the genre has gained a reputation for being lazy and repetitive. Yet in actuality, nearly all of these famous cliches have been completely abandoned over the past few years. It's incredibly rare for protagonists to have sex in the middle of the woods these days, and nobody ever splits up anymore. Why? Well, you can thank so-called post-horror movies like Scream, The Cabin In The Woods, and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, all of which hilariously mocked these tropes and helped make them so well known. After all the cliches were turned into a joke, how could any self-respecting filmmaker still include them in their movie? Does that mean horror is now any less lazy and repetitive? Not at all. The genre has just adopted new, equally stupid tropes to replace the old ones. The rules and plot beats of modern horror are quite different than in the past, yet it's all just as predictable as ever...