10 Horror Movies Test Audiences Loved (And Everyone Else Hated)

2. It Lives Again

It Lives Again is Larry Cohen's 1978 sequel to his own cult classic horror It's Alive, which attempted to one-up the original by having not one but three mutant babies running riot.

The sequel was test-screened and received such a vociferously strong, positive response that Warner Bros. executives initially believed that the audience had been filled with "ringers" - that is, audience members paid to cheer the movie in order to give the studio a false impression they had a hit on their hands, for whatever reason.

Well, that might've actually been entirely on the money, given that It Lives Again went on to gross just a fraction of its predecessor, with audiences largely dismissing it as a dull retread of the original, enough that you couldn't really be blamed for failing to be aware of its existence at all.

Whether ringers were involved or not, the thunderous positivity of those previews weren't at all reflected in the subsequent general release.