20 Recent Horror Movies That Made ONE Big Mistake

20. Giving The Strangers A Backstory - The Strangers: Chapters 2 & 3

The new trilogy of The Strangers movies are, admittedly, terrible for many reasons, but the one thing that rankled fans above all else? The boneheaded decision to give the masked killers backstories in the second and third entries.

Numerous flashbacks reveal how Pin-Up Girl and Scarecrow became the murderous psychopaths we know them as, going all the way back to their early childhoods.

But of course, the entire appeal of the original Strangers movie was that the killers were total unknowns who broke into people's homes and killed them simply because.

Lending context to the killers' lives and pathologising their actions only makes them less interesting, as is so often the case with slasher sequels which over-explain the nature of their villains.

It's as though the producers realised they didn't quite have enough material to fill three movies and so decided to tack on a ton of flashbacks to meet a contractually obligated runtime.