20 Great Horror Roles Ruined By Terrible Acting

Joaquin Phoenix has been one of America's greatest living actors for the best part of 20 years, giving many outstanding performances in movies such as The Master, Joker, and You Were Never Really Here, while poor performances from him are pretty darn rare.

These days, it'd probably be fair to say that Phoenix's worst-ever work was as Napoleon Bonaparte in Ridley Scott's ill-judged Napoleon biopic, in which he was chronically miscast, but before that? His worst turn was arguably in the role of Lucius in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. This was especially damaging as, despite the horror-centric marketing (which Shyamalan has retrospectively expressed regret for), this one is really more of a Gothic romance, and, as half of the film's main pairing, Lucius was an important character to get right. 

Alas, while Bryce Dallas Howard does some of her best work in the lead role of Ivy Walker, Joaquin Phoenix is so emotionless and bored that he might as well have been in one of the Twilight movies. As a result, this ruins not only Lucius but also fatally undermines the romance at the heart of the story, and subsequently the movie as a whole.