15 Horror Films That Prove Hollywood Hates You

Made for $500,000, and intended as a fast and cheap cash-in on John Carpenter’s Halloween, Friday The 13th grossed $5.8 million in its first three days of release, going on to make more than $100 million for Paramount. Of the pictures the studio released in 1980, only Urban Cowboy and Airplane! made more money.

Independent companies usually distributed cheap horror pictures, and the fact that a major studio released Friday cannot be overstated. Its success proved you didn’t need big stars, expensive effects or a good script to enjoy a monster hit, just a B-grade exploitation movie that played to necking teenagers. This was ironic: Drive-ins, the home of B-grade horror, were in decline, and as multiplexes began inheriting their audiences – those that hadn’t been lost to VHS – studios catered for them with pictures that were slick, calculated and bland.

The formula was simple: little known actors in their first lead roles, a budget low enough to ensure profitability and some special effects to entertain the adolescent demographic. It wasn’t a formula for creating great (or even memorable) films, but it rarely failed at the box office.

The trouble with standardizing the creative process is that it sucks all the life out out of filmmaking, resulting in films that please no one. Here are 15 examples.

If you haven’t seen the 1980 original, it was the first slasher movie to pair Jamie Lee Curtis with Leslie Nielsen (why not?), so the people behind this remake sensibly ignore it and start over. Unfortunately, those people are Nelson McCormick and JS Cardone, the ‘creative’ duo who also remade The Stepfather very badly.

Donna (Brittany Snow) is preparing for her senior prom when her former teacher, who attacked her three years earlier, escapes from the nut house and comes after her pursued by some inept cops. So it’s 88 minutes of and-then-she-woke-up false scares and bimbos wandering off by themselves, plus there’s a pure-evil villain who changes his appearance by shaving and wearing a baseball cap, which of course allows him to evade capture until the climax.

And that’s pretty much all that can be said about this interchangeable, by-the-numbers time-waster. The only movie in the franchise worth watching is Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) with Wendy Lyon, who in the best scene tries to make out with a cheerleader in the shower. For reasons of plot, you understand.