10 Horror Movies Hated By Critics But Audiences Loved

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 33%

Critics haven't ever scored Paul W.S. Anderson's films well, and while they generally have a point, they're so far off the mark with his 1997 sci-fi horror Event Horizon.

Reviewers largely condemned the film as a style-over-substance exercise that was overly reliant on gratuitous violence, with many feeling that it fell sharply off a cliff after a solid opening sequence.

Audiences of 1997 weren't thrilled either, admittedly, with its brutal "D+" CinemaScore and disastrous box office performance, whereby it failed to even match its $60 million production budget.

But Event Horizon fared much better on home video, where it quickly became a hot seller, enough that Paramount even offered Anderson the opportunity to release a Director's Cut with all the footage he was originally forced to cut.

That is, until the deleted footage was discovered to be too deteriorated to be commercially releasable.

All the same, Event Horizon is held up today as a card-carrying cult classic, enough that it's even been referenced in something as mainstream as Thor: Love and Thunder.

And nobody seems more thrilled about the film's re-evaluation than Anderson himself, who in a recent retrospective told Inverse:

"It's finally got the reaction now that I was hoping it would get 25 years ago... Filmmaking is a long race that you run. It's not all about the opening weekend."