10 More Horror Movies Where Pranks Brutally Backfired
3. The Butterfly Effect (2004)
Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey sci-fi horror The Butterfly Effect takes the implication of its title to its logical extremes and beyond, looking down the barrel of Evan's (Ashton Kutcher) life as he flits back and forth in his own timestream and attempts to right the many wrongs of his and his friends' lives - to frequently disastrous consequences.
For reasons better known to our easily pleased cousins across the pond, messing with the postal service is considered the gold standard of pranking in the US of A. As such, in the first section of The Butterfly Effect, Evan and his buds put a small explosive in someone's mailbox, only for a woman to come check it, infant daughter in hand.
Needless to say, they're both killed when it detonates, and the ripples of this event expand outwards across the lives of the perpetrators. No matter how many times Evan travels back to this prank, he can't seem to fix things, and every attempt to do so only gives rise to other miseries; turning himself into a double-amputee, turning his pal into a psychopath, killing his girlfriend.
Well, you can't win 'em all.