20 Horror Movies So Good You Overlook Huge Flaws

There are so, so many horror movies out there, for it is such a popular genre, and they are easy to make with low budgets. Most horror films fly under the radar to some extent; we tend to remember the really great ones or the notable turkeys. As such, it's easy to forget that most horror flicks aren't amazing or terrible, but they're somewhere in between. 

That, alongside the genre's (perhaps unfair) association with sequels, remakes, and duds, is why the best horrors stand out so much. When the stars do align in exactly the right way for a truly awesome horror movie, fans, reviewers, and the general public get justifiably excited, and the work's flaws are more likely to be forgiven. 

To give some noteworthy examples, the following 20 horror films all have some huge problems lurking within - poor casting choices, bad characters, questionable writing decisions - and yet, thanks to how strong they otherwise are, all of this is easy to ignore. No movie is perfect, after all, and these gems all compensated for their various shortcomings many times over. 

Kicking off with an iconic hit from Blumhouse Productions...

To start with, let us wind back the clock to 2010, which was a rough time to be a horror fan. Mainstream western horror was absolutely dominated by subpar studio horror flicks, especially remakes and sequels, and this is why 2010's Insidious was such an incredible breath of fresh air. It was a studio horror film that was, firstly, really good, and secondly, genuinely terrifying.

Thanks to director James Wan's mastery of suspense and jump scares, Insidious was streets ahead of most of its contemporaries, and it was an undeniably exhilarating watch. As such, even though it does lose its way in the final stretch, that's a lot easier to forgive. 

The final act unfolds in a spiritual realm called The Further, and this section is distinctly mediocre compared to the rest of Insidious, while the Lipstick-Face Demon - the one who appeared in that jump scare earlier in the movie - looks like a silly Darth Maul cosplay once he properly arrives. Nonetheless, because the earlier sections were so damn good, it's easy enough to overlook this. And besides, Insidious does pull it back at the very end with an unsettling cliffhanger ending that reaffirmed it as, flaws and all, one of the very first horror classics of the 2010s.