10 Worst Horror Movie One-Liners

Horror is known for being home to some of the industry’s most clichéd, cheesy and hilariously terrible film scripts. Independent filmmaking is especially common within the horror genre and one of the main pitfalls of independent cinema is the inherent lack of quality control.

While big movie studios can often be overbearing and too commercially focused, the flip-side of that is a production with no studio to implement some semblance of quality control. Thus, writers and directors are given complete creative control, which, as we’ll see, isn’t always a good thing.

It’s not only independent horrors that feature nutty dialogue, however. There are just as many big budget horror flicks which boast their own laughable lines that somehow managed to get past entire teams of producers and studio execs.

While it would be easy to poke fun at the screenplays of shoestring budget movies like Birdemic or Shark Attack 3 which are almost defiantly awful, this list is going to take a look at the most bonkers one-liners in (at least somewhat) professionally made horror films.

Again, let us emphasise somewhat in that sentence!

The sequel to 1984’s Christmas slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night was doomed from the get-go. The filmmakers have said that they were given “a dismal amount of money” to produce the film and were instructed to re-edit the first installment using archival footage and pass it off as a new movie.

Director Lee Harry wanted to make a real sequel however, and managed to shoot some scenes but ultimately did not have enough of a budget to complete filming and therefore filled in the remaining run time with archived material from the first movie.

The finished product was, as expected, a commercial and critical failure. It has, however, enjoyed a cult following due to its unintentional hilarity. It’s been made famous by one particular quip from the main character, Ricky Chapman as he embarks on a murderous rampage. In the scene, Chapman walks down a residential street, occasionally offing people with a revolver.

He encounters a man taking out a trash can. “Garbage day!”, Ricky shouts, making an already goofy performance even worse, before producing the gun and shooting the man through the metal trash can. His delivery of the line sounds almost sarcastic rather than psychotic and cements the movie as a “so bad it’s good” cult classic.