10 Great Horror Movies With Terrible Concepts

Sometimes despite all the odds, a great film can come from a terrible premise.

Whether it’s an unexpectedly funny comedy coming from a dud idea (a James Bond parody? In the nineties?) or a sci-fi hit which lands harder than anticipated (a remake of that corny fifties film The Thing From Another World?), there’s no nicer feeling for film fans than when a flick exceeds the low expectations set up by its potentially terrible premise.

Horror in particular is a genre where he who dares wins, as scary movies are already asking their audiences to believe in ghosts, demons, or in some cases just teenagers who can’t outrun or outsmart a lumbering mute who moves at five miles an hour.

With that in mind, cast your mind back to before you saw the following flicks and knew they were classics. Without the knowledge that these movies turned out superb, ask yourself: Does a film about a bunch of smart ass horror fan teens being hunted by a slasher actually sound good, or insufferably smug?

That’s the question posed by the ten flicks listed here, each a great horror with a terrible conceit.

A teen horror where a slacker’s hand becomes possessed and goes on a killing spree after he manages to remove it from his body? Sounds like an underwritten attempt to spin one great Evil Dead II scene into an entire feature film, stretching the joke less than paper thin in the process.

Released in the late nineties during the post-Scream teen horror boom, Idle Hands is a one-joke film whose one joke had already been explored a decade earlier by a classic of the genre. The flick’s description reads like a half-baked attempt at remaking 1978’s already laughable The Hand as an intentional comedy…

So what better approach than go fully baked (as it were), fill the script with silly weed jokes and double entendres, and abandon any attempts at seriousness by hiring the likes of Seth Green, Jessica Alba, and the Offspring to ensure this Rodman Flender project becomes a goofy and surprisingly agreeable horror comedy.

Epitomising the offbeat zaniness of nineties comedy, this flick turns its potentially thin premise into a launching board for progressively sillier horror sequences and ends up a classic stoner comedy as a result.