10 Genuinely Terrifying Scenes Trapped In Terrible Horror Movies
Trust me, the scary part IS coming!
In the same way that the true value of a comedy is in how much it makes you laugh, the sign of a quality horror film is in how much it can make you reach for a change of undergarments. A truly good horror film will have you cowering behind a sofa pillow and praying for the sun to come up, whereas a bad horror film will see you reaching for the remote to see what else is on.
It may not even be that the film isn't especially scary, it could simply be poorly made, badly written, or at the very worst, genuinely boring. Although every so often, an inept horror film will have a secret ace up its sleeve. That one genuinely terrifying scene that almost makes it worth sitting through, and ensures that horror fans will be constantly recommending it to their friends for years to come.
This then brings us to this list, in which we're diving into ten genuinely terrifying scenes that are trapped in otherwise terrible horror films. If you're feeling adventurous you could seek out each of these films in turn and watch them in the lead-up to their one great scene, but honestly, we'd just suggest you skip to the scary part.
10. Bob Goes Into The Basement - The House By The Cemetery
Depending on your tolerance for gory Italian horror, you may or may not feel that The House by the Cemetery is a particularly terrible film, but when judged on a filmmaking level, it certainly is lacking the usual kind of spark that one would associate with the grandmaster of gore Lucio Fulci.
The plot is fairly non-sensical and the characters woefully underdeveloped, but it does have some potent atmosphere and genuinely hair-raising moments. Case in point, the scene in which the perpetually irritating Bob ventures into the titular house's basement after hearing the sounds of his babysitter Ann being brutally butchered.
Once that initial shock of seeing Ann get her throat hacked open wears off, the scene manages to maintain a great deal of its suspense. Fulci makes great use of the basement set, with only small pockets of light illuminating the dusty and cob-webbed covered furniture. Things only go from bad to worse though when Ann's head is flung down the stairs towards Bob, prompting him to flee, only to get caught in the door.
Things reach a fever pitch as the unseen killer makes their way up the stairs, and with this being an Italian horror film, anything is possible...