There are a lot of bad horror movies out there, but some have great scenes that stand out in the best way. Which have the brightest silver linings?
Content Warning: This article contains descriptions of graphic violence.
Not every horror film lives up to audience standards, seen most recently in the mass disappointment directed at the 2022 reboot of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. However, even in the worst of films, there can still be one moment that makes watching them worth it.
Whether it's a scene that momentarily redeems awful characters, like in Truth or Dare, or something memorable that stands out in an otherwise slower movie, like in Hostel: Part II, these moments shine in a way that the rest of their movies don't.
With its messy script and a cast full of some of the worst new horror movie characters of the decade, Truth or Dare is a largely disappointing film. One of its biggest flaws is that it ostensibly centers around a group of friends, but the characters all treat each other so terribly that it's hard to believe they even remotely care about each other.
However, when Penelope is dared to walk back and forth on the roof of a house until she finishes a bottle of vodka, her friends all rush to help her without even one nasty remark. They run around the house with a mattress to catch her if she falls, and actually succeed in saving her life. Their realistic concern for and efforts to help her result in a truly heart-pounding scene.
The famous franchise's fifth installment is arguably the worst Friday the 13th movie. It is reviled among fans for the "copycat Jason" plotline that could have been interesting had it not been handled so poorly, and its overloaded and underdeveloped cast of characters.
However, there are some silver linings: more characters means more opportunities for creative kills. When Eddie finds his girlfriend dead in the woods, he is attacked from behind. "Jason" wraps a belt around his face, binding him to a tree trunk, and puts a stick through the loop. What follows is a slow and gruesome kill that is one of the more creative points of the otherwise middling movie.
Signs is one of M. Night Shyamalan's more divisive films, with its reception being fairly love-it-or-hate-it. Those who hate it cite its dull acting and nonsensical writing as reasons to ignore it. While its alien antagonists end up being laughable, the first sight of them is successfully shocking.
The home video depicting the reveal is realistically shaky and unfocused, and the viewer feels Merrill's stress as he tries to get a decent look at what's going on. The video zooms in on a hedge, but viewers don't realize it's zoomed in right on the tall, green alien too until it moves. Like the first glimpse of the adult xenomorph in Alien, the creature was in plain view without anyone realizing it.
The Collection and its 2009 predecessor, The Collector, are middling movies at best, with their villain, their deadly traps, and the blood and gore they cause thought by most to be just cheap imitations of the Saw franchise. However, this sequel kicks off with a single scene that has one thing Saw lacks: a ridiculously high body count.
The protagonists visit a nightclub that turns out to have been rigged with traps by the Collector, who, in the last film, had stuck only to home invasions. A machine like an enormous thresher descends from the ceiling, mowing down dozens upon dozens of unsuspecting clubbers. Those who manage to escape the spinning spikes are crushed to death by the descending ceiling of another room.
Perhaps knowing that there was nothing else interesting in one of Dark Castle Entertainment's worst horror films, the promotion for House of Wax drew on the public's divisive opinion of socialite Paris Hilton. Shockingly, shirts reading "See Paris Die" were sold, inviting audiences to the theaters to watch her character be killed off.
The scene itself is fairly well done. Hilton's character Paige tries to escape Vincent in a tense chase scene. As she runs over a grated floor, she must dodge Vincent's knife stabbing upward at her feet. When she hides among the cars in the garage, Vincent almost leaves, but he spots her as she tries to run and she meets her end via a large pipe.
The original 2006 film Hostel had its detractors, but Hostel: Part II was poorly received even by fans, who concluded that Hostel would have been better as a standalone film. In addition to the unpopular decision to kill off the sole survivor of the first movie, it's considered uncreative and overly focused on gross-out gore.
The exception is Lorna's death scene. She is blindfolded and hung upside down from the ceiling, and a woman credited as Mrs. Bathory strides in and lays down in the ornate tub beneath her. What follows is a creative but graphic scene and its slow pace and flair for the dramatic make it stand out from the rest of the movie.
Despite being advertised as a thrilling showdown between two of the greatest killers in horror, Freddy vs. Jason wound up being dragged down by an unsatisfying story with too much focus on what many felt were irritating new characters. However, the climactic sequence where Freddy and Jason actually get to whale on each other is a sight to behold.
Director Ronny Yu has a history in Hong Kong action films, which is shown here in the greatest way. Freddy's cleverness and speed are an even match for Jason's brute strength. They throw each other around the area, too tough to be killed and too relentless to give up trying to kill the other. All the while, Camp Crystal Lake is burning down around them.
Though it would take a while to list off everything wrong with the 2019 Pet Sematary remake, one of the major changes made (spoiled in the trailer) is that Ellie is the Creed child killed and brought back, not Gage. Most felt this does little for the story, turning it from a harrowing exploration of grief to a substandard "creepy child" movie.
The plotline has its moments, though. Soon after Ellie's return from the grave, Louis bathes his daughter and tries to brush out her hair, but the brush catches on the mortician's staples still holding her skin together. The look on Louis' face as he is forced to see that he hasn't fixed anything, that something terribly wrong is there just beneath the façade of normalcy he's trying to create, is heartbreaking.
This obscure, subpar anthology centers around a reporter who delights in covering murders. She wanders into a museum whose artifacts induce visions of horror and death, one of them about Sybil, a girl who overdoses on the wrong party drug and is thought dead but is really paralyzed.
The scene of Sybil awake for her own funeral prep is horrifying. Michelle Scattolon's terrified, plaintive delivery of Sybil's pleas for someone to realize she isn't dead is great, as are her final screams as the morticians do their work.
The sixth and (at the time) final Nightmare on Elm Street installment was panned by critics and isn't fondly remembered by fans today. But despite reducing the once-terrifying Freddy Krueger to goofy comic relief, it does have one legitimately tense scene.
Carlos, a deaf teen, loses his hearing aid in his nightmare. The sequence is absolutely silent, as Freddy taunts a terrified Carlos from behind, knowing he can't hear him coming. Then he cranks Carlos' hearing up to extreme sensitivity and drops a pin from the catwalk. Carlos catches it just in time and then looks up to see Freddy with a whole handful of pins. Despite Carlos' pleas, Freddy drops them all, the sound of them hitting the floor putting Carlos in utter agony.
