9 Classic Horror Films That Spawned Countless Imitators

Horror has never been the most original genre out there. Every once in a while, a truly unique movie hits theaters that blows everyone away and does something different, but then it inevitably spawns imitators trying to capitalize on its success. If you've seen one or two mainstream horror films, for the next few years, you've basically seen them all.

These influential movies usually come around once or twice a decade, and they completely shape the genre's immediate future. Right now we're in the Paranormal Activity era, where everything is about found footage, faux realism, and supernatural phenomena. That wasn't the case back in the '80s, for example, where the trend was realistic serial killers in masks chasing down scantily clad teenage girls. It's all just so repetitive.

Of course, there's never just one type of horror movie coming out, and there are always films that will break the mold. The vast majority of mainstream flicks hitting theaters don't do that, though.

Even if these movies don't directly rip anything off, it's clear the studio only financed them because another one did so well recently. From the 1960s all the way up until today, these 9 movies are reminders that sometimes in horror, if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

A lot of people complain that the horror genre is overstuffed with Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity ripoffs, but at least that's better than the million terrible Saw wannabes we got throughout the 2000s. That was the decade of torture porn, truly one of the darkest times to be a horror fan.

The original Saw was a unique film that didn't have that much gore in it other than the climactic scene where Gordon cuts through his foot. Unfortunately, in the sequels the franchise was forced to keep upping the brutality to a ridiculous extreme, and because Saw was at the top of the box office every year, it ushered in countless films where characters are simply tortured in a room for two hours.

That's entertaining, right? RIGHT?

These movies were all marketing themselves not on being so scary, but on being so violent. Torture films had been around going back to Mark Of The Devil in 1970, but they typically existed outside the mainstream as weird little exploitation flicks you'd find in the back of the video store.

For a few years after Saw, it got to the point where nearly every horror movie hitting theaters from major studios involved people screaming in pain for 90 minutes. How is that fun? Genre fans should at least be thankful that Paranormal Activity brought back some subtlety.