20 Things Horror Movies NEED To Stop Doing
13. Padding Runtimes
The late, great Roger Ebert once said that no good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough, and he's absolutely right, but horror is definitely a genre that can easily unravel with longer, more unwieldy runtimes.
Sure, auteurs like Ari Aster can be trusted to do interesting things with more expansive runtimes, but more often than not when a horror film crosses well over the two hour mark it risks diluting its own sense of tension.
A good recent example is The Conjuring: Last Rites, which clocked in at 135 minutes and certainly felt every single one of those minutes, given that it was overstuffed with subplots and creaky, drawn-out set-pieces.
Compare this to the recent cult horror films Scared S**tless and Good Boy, both of which were well-received with extremely tight runtimes of just 76 minutes and 73 minutes respectively.
Again, any film should be as long or as short as it needs to be in order to tell its story, but let's be real here - how many two-plus-hour horror films actually make good use of all that time?