As someone who has loved horror more than any other movie genre, I’ve seen everything imaginable. There are the all-time classics like Halloween, The Exorcist, and The Shining. There are my personal favorites, the gory 80s slashers represented by Friday the 13th franchise and so many other similar silent and masked killers.
Modern horror, from It Follows to Weapons, has been killing it too. Horror also had a lot of really bad movies. Sometimes a low budget and an amateur crew make something that’s hilariously bad. Other times, a huge studio gives in to fan service with another passionless sequel in a popular franchise. There have been so many very terrible horror movies, but these eight are the absolute worst of the bunch.
8
‘Birdemic: Shock and Terror’ (2010)
This might be the worst horror movie ever made, but it can’t be higher on the list because it falls under the “so bad it’s good” category. Birdemic: Shock and Terror is on the level of The Room, and writer and director James Nguyen is as eccentric as Tommy Wiseau. You have to admire his passion, but wow, what a hunk of junk this one is. On the surface, nothing is amiss in the premise, with the film taking inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds, along with a more modern message about climate change. Then the movie starts.
The only shock and terror in Birdemic is the absolutely atrocious acting and the laughable special effects. Alan Bagh and Whitney Moore are two young lovers (or whatever they’re supposed to be) on the run from hordes of killer birds, made up of the worst CGI you can think of. There is scene after scene of muffled dialogue overlayed with badly drawn floating birds and characters shrinking away from something that isn’t there. It’s mind-boggling that this ever got made.
7
‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ (1966)
Manos: The Hands of Fate is like Birdemic. It could easily be number one or two on most worst horror movie lists, but it’s just so unbelievably dumb that it’s entertaining if you’re in the right (or altered) state of mind. It’s part of one of the best episodes of Mystery Science 3000. Without them mocking it though, this tale about a stranded Texas family ending up in the presence of a cult is such a rough watch.
Director Harold B. Warren and had never made a movie before and, oh boy, does it show. Everything is disjointed, with so many cuts due to the inability to film any scene for more than several seconds. Worse, is that it was filmed with no sound, meaning all of the dialogue was dubbed in later. Imagine all of those bad American dubbed Godzilla movies but worse! The script is abysmal and nothing makes sense. To watch it is to throw away 70 minutes of your life that you’ll wish you had back.
6
‘Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday’ (1993)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday takes the cake for the most disappointing movie I’ve ever seen. The Friday the 13th movies dominated horror in the 80s. However, after New Line purchased the franchise from Paramount, they decided to do something different. The ninth film has the wildest of plots, with Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) blown to bits in the opening scene, only to live on as some demon worm who can inhabit the bodies of others.
Jason Goes to Hell takes such an easy formula and overthinks it. The Friday the 13th movies may have gotten silly, but they still lived in a more realistic world that didn’t dive too deeply into the supernatural. Fans watched to see Jason hack up horny teenagers. Taking Jason out of the movie was a disaster. Even if he’d stayed, it wouldn’t have helped much. The writing is bad, the characters off, and the score lacks the chilling sting that had been so great in the past. Even the last shot of Freddy’s glove pulling Jason’s mask down to hell can’t save this trash.
5
‘Skinamarink’ (2022)
There was so much hype around Kyle Edward Ball‘s Skinamarink. One critic after another wrote about how utterly scary it was. The fear wasn’t supposed to be in the plot. There isn’t much of one outside of faceless kids in a creepy home alone at night unable to find their father as strange occurences happen around them. The fear was supposed to be in the atmosphere, but if it was there, I couldn’t find it.
The found footage-type feel to everything is indeed pretty creepy. Ball takes the promise of the atmosphere and does nothing with it. Everything is off-kilter, with characters filmed from behind or the camera pointed away, and with very little dialogue. It’s unnerving at first. After 15 minutes, it becomes excruciating. At 100 minutes, Skinamarink is the longest feeling movie I’ve ever seen. It’s all concept, nothing more. Oh, look, it’s another corner of a ceiling again! How terrifying.
4
‘The Exorcist: Believer’ (2023)
The Exorcist is such a bizarre franchise. The original tops many greatest horror movie lists. The second is considered among the worst, the third is an underrated classic, and everything after is meh. In 2023, fresh off destroying the Halloween franchise, director David Gordon Green set his sights on another with The Exorcist: Believer, where two young girls go missing, only to come back changed into something demonic.
The Exorcist: Believer is not besieged by bad acting. It has a respectable cast headlined by Leslie Odom Jr. The script is not worthy of them. It’s a mess of nothingness that drags on and on with zero scares. It’s not so bad it’s funny, it’s just bad, boring, and lifeless. The worst sin of all is how it disrespects Ellen Burstyn and what it does to her character, Chris MacNeil. The Exorcist: Believer flopped so hard that Blumhouse canceled an intended new trilogy and handed the reins over to Mike Flanagan. He can’t possibly do any worse.
3
‘The Haunting of Sharon Tate’ (2019)
Sometimes horror can be offensive. It’s hard not to be. It can work if done right. The Coffee Table is offensive. It’s also the most anxious I’ve ever been watching a movie. A Serbian Film is extremely offensive. Still, it’s made well. Then there’s The Haunting of Sharon Tate with a plot so jaw-dropping it’s unfathomable how this was ever greenlit. Hilary Duff stars as Sharon Tate, the tragic actress who would be murdered by Charles Manson‘s cult in real life. This time though, before she meets her fate, Tate starts having visions of what’s to come, turning a heartbreaking true-crime story into the supernatural and absurd.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate was written and directed by Daniel Farrands, the same man who had horror fans scratching their heads with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Even if you can accept the disgusting plot, Farrand’s writing and direction leave much to be desired. It’s B-level, badly acted crap that will leave you feeling gross for having seen it. The victims didn’t deserve to have their deaths mocked like this.
2
‘Verotika’ (2019)
In 2019, rock singer Glenn Danzig decided to make a movie. He shouldn’t have. Danzig might know music, but he doesn’t know how to make a film. Verotika is worth a laugh if you want to torture yourself, but that’s not a reason to watch it. Verotika is an anthology film, split into three parts, all written by Danzig, and not a single one of them are redeemable. Every segment about Verotika is steeped in sex. It badly wants to be provacative and fails in every way.
Verotika is a film made by people who had no idea how. The editing is clunky to the point of distraction. The acting is so difficult to endure that you have to wonder how anyone made it though the casting process. The direction, the writing, the lazy special effects is all horrible. If you want lots of nudity and blood and guts, go for it, but who knew that even those two standbys could be so boring. Verotika isn’t a misfit. It’s unfit.
1
‘The Human Centipede 3’ (2015)
When Tom Six‘s The Human Centipede came out in 2009, audiences were shocked by the premise of a surgeon who would sew people up ass to mouth in a human centipede. It was disgusting, yet still watchable as a decent movie. The Human Centipede 2 stays off this list by being effectively disturbing and uncomfortable. But then came The Human Centipede 3, the worst movie I’ve ever put myself through, no matter the genre. Dieter Laser is back, now as a Texas prison warden living in a movie within a movie where Bill is obsessed with The Human Centipede 2. Sure, why not.
To watch any entry in this franchise is to accept that you’ll be disgusted by the mix of body horror and torture porn. The movies exist to gross you out. The Human Centipede 3 has that, with smashed and eaten male organs and loads of gore, so how is it so utterly boring? The plot is nonsensical, the characters irredeemable, and next to nothing happens. I wasn’t offended by the content. I was offended by the lack of it. If you haven’t seen it, stay far, far away.