10 Utter Trash Horror Movies You Loved Anyway

There's nothing quite like a horror film that manages to be both genuinely terrifying and exquisitely crafted from a technical and storytelling perspective.

But let's face it, we don't always want to sit down and watch a restrained, psychological A24 horror movie - sometimes we just want to indulge our sleazier side with a shamelessly trashy slice of gonzo horror.

And there's certainly a huge audience for that type of horror flick, which eschews pretensions of class and just doubles down on the gratuitous exploitation, insane gore, and campy theatrics.

On paper, it's tough to argue that these 10 horror films are anything but pure trash - they're full of bad acting, wooden dialogue, stilted direction, and so on, but that doesn't mean they're not without their charms also.

Whether entirely self-aware of their own tawdriness or simply committing hard enough to their insane concept to win the audience's respect, these trash-fire horror movies each earned themselves a cult of committed, die-hard fans.

While it's tempting to dub these films "guilty pleasures," for many fans there's no guilt whatsoever - the movies deliver exactly the pulpy, classless time they promise on the tin...

Let's kick things off with the most recent film on this list, James Wan's utterly unhinged supernatural horror flick Malignant.

Pre-release there were persistent rumours that the film had performed horribly with test audiences and Warner Bros. basically had no idea what to do with it - a claim that's evidently confirmed by the bonkers end product.

For its first two thirds, Malignant is a relatively by-the-numbers genre romp - a familiar murder-mystery yarn in which a terrifying, long-haired individual named Gabriel is venturing on a killing spree, all while cops investigate the case via moldy detective procedural tropes.

The dialogue is awful and the performances stiff throughout, but Malignant earns a place for itself in the annals of genre legend when its bats**t third act arrives.

Without giving things away if you haven't seen it yet - and you really should - Wan introduces a game-changing reveal sure to leave even the most seasoned horror buff's jaw on the floor.

Wan leans aggressively into the unapologetically idiotic campiness of the scenario, delivering a narrative rug-pull worthy of the world's most messed-up telenovela, combined with a festival of brutally creative violence sure to leave gore-hounds cackling with glee.

Since Malignant's release, many have suggested that Wan basically made the film as a joke, to see what madness he could convince Warner Bros. to let him make in exchange for directing the second Aquaman movie. It's incredibly easy to believe that.