10 Horror Movies That Made You Say 'WTF Were They Thinking'

There's a reason the first Exorcist never names the demon.

Exorcist 2
Warner Bros.

Not every movie can be great or even basically good, and that's certainly true of a genre as wildly oversaturated as horror.

But in the very least viewers want to appreciate what a filmmaker was trying to do and respect the effort that went into bringing their work to the big screen.

Yet sometimes that just doesn't transpire through, and by the time the end credits roll, audiences are simply left trying to figure out what the hell the director was thinking.

Sometimes a movie just feels too far off-base that it's clear something went horribly wrong during production, and whatever they were aiming for, they categorically missed their target.

From horror flicks that bungled their "timely" social commentary to ones that screwed up the most basic technical aspect of lighting a damn scene, to making an otherwise brutal death scene unintentionally comical, these movies all made some serious miscalculations.

Are they all totally awful films with no redeeming features whatsoever? No, but it's tough to comprehend what was going through the minds of those in charge. Because chief, whatever this actually is, it just ain't it...

10. "Evil Dies Tonight!" - Halloween Kills

Exorcist 2
Universal

While one can at least appreciate that David Gordon Green was trying to do something different with Halloween Ends - albeit unsuccessfully - it's much tougher to make sense of the abject mess that was the second movie in Green's trilogy, Halloween Kills.

First and foremost, Kills is a treatise on the perils of mob mentality with all the nuance of a toddler's understanding of the subject.

Much of the film is centered around an angry Haddonfield mob, led by Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), attempting to track Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) down, leading to a tragic outcome when an escaped mental patient, Lance (Ross Bacon), is mistaken for Myers and ends up leaping to his death.

Couple this with the mob's laughable, cult-like mantra of "Evil dies tonight!" and it becomes impossible to take seriously anything Green might be trying to say about the dangerous power of an angry mob.

All people really wanted out of this movie was to see Myers slaughter a bunch of people and for Green to set the stage for the final showdown in the next movie.

Instead he got totally, pointlessly extra with the social commentary and embarrassed himself as a result.

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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.