15 Awesome Horror Movies With Lower Critical Scores Than They Deserve
3. Black Christmas (1974)
Rotten Tomatoes: 71% (Average Score: 6.26/10)
Metacritic: 65
While the scores on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are solid enough, they are bewilderingly low considering that Black Christmas (1974) is not only one of the all-time greatest slasher movies but also a 1970s horror classic.
Subtle and wonderfully restrained yet tripwire-tense and truly frightening, Black Christmas is a nerve-shredding exercise of tight, suffocating suspense even though it never actually shows its villain properly. It's also got Jess (Olivia Hussey) who is one of the all-time greatest Final Girls in any horror movie, as its lead.
Perhaps this was another example of critical bias against the slasher sub-genre; otherwise, given how much this particular slasher film gets right, these scores are pretty hard to explain.
Its legacy has been tainted a little by not one but two underwhelming remakes - a weak (if audacious) remake from 2019 and an unbearably dreadful one released in 2006 - but it remains a horror classic regardless. If only more slasher films were this good.