10 Horror Movies That Pissed You Off Straight Away
If you could reach through the screen and slap the director, you would.
Once upon a time, films used to operate like literary novels, taking their leisurely time unfolding the action, characters and plot, but since the dawn of the blockbuster there has been a constant push to begin with a bang and keep the pace up from there - something only exacerbated by the digital age, where an average audience's attention span is the length of a TikTok.
Horror holds a special place in this paradigm, generally needing to give audiences a quick scare or start laying down the dread early on. But that doesn't mean every film gets it right. Or, indeed, that audiences take things the way they were intended.
Some directors stumble into an anger-inducing opening by accident, and some go out of their way to alienate audiences, baiting us to walk out the cinema in a blinding rage. After all, who wants to see Lars von Trier kill an infant, Wes Craven kill the main character, or Rob Zombie kill any hope of us respecting him as a director?
Sometimes these openers doom the film, sometimes the film manages to pull things back, but in each of these 10 horror movies, none of us were happy from the get.
10. 3 From Hell (2019)
The death rattle of the Firefly Family trilogy, 3 From Hell is set years after the presumed death of the Fireflies (think redneck Mansons), in which Rob Zombie brings back Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), Otis (Bill Moseley) and Captain Spalding (Sid Haig), resurrecting them from their fate in The Devil's Rejects - not literally, unfortunately. The old gang break out of jail and scramble for the Mexican border, not reckoning on who’s waiting for them on the other side.
Now, it’s hard to go into 3 From Hell without knowing you’re watching another Firefly movie, and yet we still reserve our right to be outraged. After defecating on whatever innovations and gory good-will he’d notched up with trilogy opener House of 1000 Corpses, Zombie’s Devil's Rejects put the family to bed for good, ending them in a wall of gunfire. And yet, 3 From Hell brings them back like it’s nothing, opening on news reports about their carnage and incarceration.
As if that wasn’t enough, he then hits us with a double-whammy, killing by far the most interesting character of the lot, Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), via lethal injection. If that was going to be Spaulding’s fate, why not let him die in the previous film’s shootout, and not include him at all?