10 Worst Horror Movies Of 2023
4. Dear David
No, don't confuse it with the same-titled rom-com also released this past year - John McPhail's Dear David is an adaptation of Adam Ellis' popular Twitter thread of the same name.
Easy though it is to scoff at movies adapted from tweets, this one actually had a ton of potential given the spookiness of the original viral ghost story. Yet as it turns out, expanding a bunch of tweets into a worthwhile feature-length film is actually pretty damn difficult.
And so, Dear David fails to recapture the sinister vibe of Ellis' original thread while struggling to bring anything new or inventive to the table, instead padding the story out with yawn-inducing bloat to reach a 95-minute runtime.
In terms of scares - or at least, attempts at scares - there's absolutely nothing here you haven't seen done much better elsewhere, while the "fleshed out" story ends up robbing it of the original's claustrophobia-laced suspense.
The lesson here? Not every creepypasta needs to have its movie rights sold off.