20 Recent Horror Movies That Made ONE Big Mistake
These horror movies will be forever haunted by ONE huge mistake.
Any film, regardless of genre, is the sum total of thousands of creative decisions both big and small that pass through the hands of potentially hundreds of people, but sometimes all it takes is one big misstep to derail everything.
Sometimes one single artistic choice can cause the vast majority of the audience to switch off almost instantly, at which point it's clear that the filmmakers seemingly didn't think it all through fully.
And that's certainly the case with these 20 horror films, each of which evidently made one mistake which doomed the rest of the project.
Now to be fair, "doomed" is probably a bit dramatic given that some of these films were still critically and commercially successful regardless, but each nevertheless committed one filmmaking sin that ultimately held it back.
In some cases a relatively minor change might've swiftly fixed things up, while in others the overall project clearly needed a broader rethink on the basis of this big screw-up.
No movies are perfect of course, but sometimes a single mistake can be so overpowering that it ends up tainting all that hard work elsewhere...
20. Giving The Strangers A Backstory - The Strangers: Chapters 2 & 3
The new trilogy of The Strangers movies are, admittedly, terrible for many reasons, but the one thing that rankled fans above all else? The boneheaded decision to give the masked killers backstories in the second and third entries.
Numerous flashbacks reveal how Pin-Up Girl and Scarecrow became the murderous psychopaths we know them as, going all the way back to their early childhoods.
But of course, the entire appeal of the original Strangers movie was that the killers were total unknowns who broke into people's homes and killed them simply because.
Lending context to the killers' lives and pathologising their actions only makes them less interesting, as is so often the case with slasher sequels which over-explain the nature of their villains.
It's as though the producers realised they didn't quite have enough material to fill three movies and so decided to tack on a ton of flashbacks to meet a contractually obligated runtime.