10 Horror Movies With Amazing Concepts But TERRIBLE Execution

As horror fans, few things are as disappointing as sitting down to watch a brilliantly-premised horror flick, only to realise halfway through that it's fumbled the ball big time.

While not all great movie ideas can themselves lead to great movies, it's painful when the execution misses the mark this much, ensuring the film might be far worse than merely mediocre - it just might be genuinely awful.

That's unfortunately the case with these 10 horror films, each of which boasted terrific setups which seemingly laid the groundwork for excellent films, only to completely whiff the most important thing of all - the execution and general follow-through.

Perhaps the director struggled with the movie's tone and style, or the casting wasn't quite right, but most often it was simply a case of the screenplay failing to extend a compelling synopsis out to feature length.

These movies instead got bogged down in their very worst ideas, populated the runtime with deeply irritating characters, and arrived at wholly unsatisfying climaxes. 

And like that, all the potential of that brilliant central idea fizzled away, leaving only a monument to unrealised potential behind. What a damn waste...

The marketing for Antebellum seemed to imply that it was a horror film about Black people being kidnapped and sent back through time by white supremacists to live on Southern slave plantations. If nothing else, it was one hell of a provocative idea.

But in a classic case of a movie being grossly mis-marketed, it actually turns out that Antebellum is a single temporal narrative - there's no time travel involved, and protagonist Veronica (Janelle Monáe) and her fellow slaves have simply been kidnapped and imprisoned within a Civil War reenactment park.

Even so, that was probably a workable premise if the movie didn't bend over backwards to try and make a plot twist out of it, saving the Big Reveal for the very end of the film, by which point large swaths of viewers had lost interest.

Much as Antebellum sounds like a great idea for a feature-length Black Mirror episode on paper, the howlingly on-the-nose writing, awkward narrative structure, and obvious last-minute twist add up to a deeply underwhelming experience, no matter the solid lead performance from Janelle Monáe.