10 Horror Movie Mistakes You Can Never Un-see
The mechanical monsters, disappearing corpses, and mysterious timezones of classic horrors...
There are some movies that can get away with pretty egregious mistakes. Those mistakes may be anything messing up basic facts that were easily researched, accidentally leaving some of the filmmaking process exposed in the finished film, or even keeping in a blooper reel take.
But for comedies and less serious movies, these aren’t make-or-break moments and few film fans even notice. When it comes to horror, however, mistakes are a different story.
There’s nothing which punctures the terrifying atmosphere of a monster movie than a corny creature whose zipper is visible, and nothing makes a gruesome death more laughable than seeing a cameraman in the mirror behind the victim.
As a result, horror directors tend to be as careful as possible about avoiding any slip ups during the making of their masterpieces. That said, there are still enough obvious missteps to fill a list like this.
With that in mind, these are ten of the most unmissable mistakes that made it past the editor’s snipping scissors in the history of the horror genre.
10. Darkness Falls
Released in 2003, Darkness Falls is a horror which sees its cast plagued by a light-sensitive ghoul referred to as… The tooth fairy.
That should give you a good enough idea of this silly but fun horror film’s tone. But even goofy horror efforts need some semblance of believability.
There’s a scene early in proceedings wherein our hero is introduced as an adult, and lest the audience forget that he say his dear mum offed by the tooth fairy herself prior to the opening credits, he’s popping pills from a bottle labelled as “anti-psychotic”.
So, probably worth noting that most psychoactive drugs don’t actually have the patient’s condition printed on their side, so that… Well, so that no one is forced to take pills from a bottle labelled “anti-psychotic”.
Then again, this film seems to have trouble with a lot of basic facts. The lightstick which our heroes smash via dropping it late in the film? Those boys are often used by divers, cave explorers, and EMTs precisely because they don’t, you know, explode upon falling a few feet. Turns out those colourful chemicals need to stay in there for a reason.