10 Overhyped Horror Movies You Wish You'd Not Watched
Drawing on the immortal word of Twenty One Pilots: Don't believe the hype.
Nobody can talk up a movie like the horror fandom - just think of how many people have told you people really went missing during filming for The Blair Witch Project, or that The Exorcist is the scariest film of all time.
But just because other people love a film so much they're willing to bend your ear about it ad nauseam, that doesn't mean it's good! And in this day and age, when internet hype drives most trends, and every publication has an angle to sell, it can be hard to separate your Gremlins from your Critters.
Plenty of times we've bought the ticket, the Blu-ray, the Shudder subscription, only to find that that one big horror flick everyone's been bigging up is better off in the bin. Indeed, contrary to popular opinion, The Woman in Black didn't give us nightmares, Hush hasn't revolutionised the genre and Army of the Dead really is just another zombie flick.
Enter at your own risk and beware, because nothing is sacred, no film too beloved to be able to hide from our sheer regret at ever having seen it. Here are 10 overhyped horrors we've watched so you don't have to.
10. High Tension (2003)
Considered part of the New French Extremity - the movement of transgressive, absurd and frequently grotesque horror and horror-adjacent movies that came out of France in the late-'90s and noughties - High Tension puts the slasher and the psychological horror in a blender, with uneven results.
Rebranded in English-speaking territories, from Switchblade Romance to High Tension (bringing it in line with its original French title, Haute Tension), but still known by both names, the film sees student Alex (Maïwenn Le Besco) and her friend Marie (Cécile de France) travel to visit family in the country, where a psychotic truck driver (Philippe Nahon) shatter their peace for good.
While the film isn't short on some nail-biting moments and gory action, it is also not deserving of the hype that the splatter buffs afford it.
The film chugs along conventionally for the most part, until an unfortunate, late-in-the-day twist. Spoiler alert: Marie is the truck driver, unaware of her split personality and the sudden and severe effects it can have. Aside from being one of the dumbest cliché reveals available in fiction, the whole split personality thing tears the film apart at the seams, making a whole variety of the preceding scenes logically and logistically impossible, and leaving us wishing we'd never tuned in.