10 Horror Movies That Got Better YEARS Later

While films don't physically change once they've been released, they are forever being measured up against society, which is nothing if not ever-evolving. And so, though the tangible elements of a movie can't get better or worse, how audiences engage with a film can vary wildly over time, one way or another.

This can often result in a classic movie eventually feeling dated to modern viewers, but there are also instances where a picture actually benefits from the passage of time. Certainly, that's never truer than in the horror genre, which has consistently held up a mirror to the anxieties of human existence. So, perhaps it's not terribly surprising that many ahead-of-their-time horror movies only get their full appreciation years, even decades later.

That's absolutely the case with the following 10 horror features. Regardless of how they were received upon their original release, they've since taken on a whole new lease of life in subsequent years as contemporary audiences connected with them in a totally different way.

It's often said that a film doesn't belong to the director once it's released into the world, and the fluid response to these horror movies is surely proof perfect of that.

Though Psycho II will always be popularly regarded as an inferior sequel to Alfred Hitchcock's iconic original, it's also a film that got a majorly bad rap for decades.

While many dismissed it out of hand as a belated cash-in coming some 23 years after the first movie, Psycho II has actually been vindicated by time as the first major horror legacy sequel. 

Literally, decades before we had Halloween 2018 or Scream 2022, Psycho II saw the murderous Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) return home after spending 22 years in a mental institution. At the same time, a new killer - or perhaps Norman himself - starts offing some of the locals.

All the typical legacy sequel hallmarks are here - namely, dusting off a couple of O.G. characters to stand alongside a bevy of new ones, while offering up a number of homages to the original movie - and it's a genuinely very well-crafted sequel, even if it unavoidably suffers from being a follow-up to one of the greatest horror movies of all time. 

Psycho II's own legacy, however, lies in setting the template - albeit inadvertently - for basically every navel-gazing legacy sequel, good or bad, that followed.