15 Awesome Horror Movies With Lower Critical Scores Than They Deserve

Is there any genre critics get wrong more than horror? Quite possibly not.

A strikingly large number of good horror films have middling, dismissive critical scores that are very surprising to say the least, especially since quite a few of these examples are well regarded by horror fans and much of the general public too.

There are many different reasons for this and it will vary from film to film. Often it seems reviewers will be put off by a horror film's prioritisation of an uncomplicated, shock-based plot, or alternatively by a horror film's focus on violence. In such cases, the stuff the film does get right seems to be overlooked, which is a huge shame.

Looking on the bright side, most of the best 2010s horror movies got the high scores they deserved so this trend of good horror movies being written off by critics is perhaps a thing of the past, but the low scores attributed to many excellent horror films in previous years are still pretty infuriating.

Some of these will leave you speechless...

Rotten Tomatoes: 36% (Average Score: 4.88/10)

Terror Train, a 1980 Canadian slasher movie which is pretty much Halloween on a train, was unpopular with critics but has gained a cult following from horror fans and it's arguable that the fans were fairer on Terror Train.

Look, it cannot be denied that the majority of slasher cinema is pretty terrible. Even the ones which are more watchable are usually still full of flaws and 6/10 films at most but that doesn't mean every slasher film should be immediately dismissed by critics, which is what often seems to happen. Some of them aren't half-bad, like this one.

Terror Train is one of the better slasher films out there for sure. The train setting gives it a nice sense of claustrophobia, it provides plenty of gleeful thrills and the villain changing disguises between each killing makes this tenser than most in the subgenre, so this more than stands out in the wave of rip-offs that Halloween inspired.