10 Horror Movies Critics Were WAY Too Harsh On

Fans of The Conjuring and the Insidious series may not realise the debt director James Wan owes to this wonderfully silly 70s illegitimate child of The Exorcist and Black Christmas. Starring Margot Kidder and James Brolin, father of Josh, the film is based on the completely fabricated but enjoyably hokey book of the same name.

Complete with alarmingly localised thunder and lightening, a procession of priests and nuns to terrorise and the inevitable axe-wielding maniac dad (when will mum get a turn at cleaving the brats?), there is so much to enjoy here.

Roger Ebert took no prisoners in a wincingly bad star-and-a-half trashing on the film's 1979 release: "... A dreary and terminally depressing series of glum things that happen to the residents of the Ocean Boulevard house. Nobody who has had to live under a roof and amidst four walls and pay the rent could possibly find such things amusing."

This film is a delight and so of its time that it'll make you want to purchase a gingham table cloth and rock out the double denim. It's really a compilation of scares, Omen style, each one gleefully over the top and framed splendidly by Kidder's dilated stare (too much fun in the 70s) and Brolin's decent into lunacy.

A superb sequence has Rod Steiger trapped in a bedroom, covered in flies and ordered to "GET OUT" by a seriously creepy demonic presence - this is delightfully kitsch horror and more fun than the critics could freely admit.