10 Recent Horror Movies That Had No Right To Be This Good
These horror films went so much harder than they needed to.
No movie genre has fans as passionate and dedicated as horror - they're an insatiable bunch who will seek out every last film they can get their hands on.
They're also optimistic and encouraging, willing to see the good effort in even a bad horror movie.
But all the same, sometimes new horror films just invite low expectations from the jump, either because the very idea of the film isn't remotely compelling, the marketing is terrible, or the studio just sent it out to die.
And yet, it's always a joy when a movie defies through-the-floor expectations and actually turns out to be pretty damn great.
That's absolutely the case with these 10 horror films, each of which had no right at all to be quite this good.
Each movie left horror fans skeptical of their ability to deliver the goods, and yet, when crunch time came, they knocked it out of the damn park.
There's probably a lesson in here about judging a film before you've seen it for yourself and the virtues of low expectations.
Above all else, remember that even the most dubious horror movie could end up surprising you...
10. Presence
Even accepting that Steven Soderbergh is one of the most talented and versatile filmmakers working today, his new supernatural thriller Presence probably shouldn't have worked - at least not nearly as well as it did.
Soderbergh's film unfolds entirely from the perspective of a ghost, as it observes a family that moves into the house it currently occupies.
Despite the marketing selling this one as an outright horror flick, it's really more of a family drama with some fringe genre elements which only really announce themselves later on.
And so, it's easy to see why Presence alienated more casual film fans, even if critics were largely united in their praise for Soderbergh's unconventional style and the script's cleverly genre-bending approach.
There's a reason that we've never seen a film shot entirely from the POV of a ghost before, and certainly not one filmed entirely on a consumer-level mirrorless camera as Soderbergh did here - it's really, really hard to make that combination compelling for a feature-length runtime.
Yet Soderbergh, ever the fascinating cinematic tinkerer, defied the odds and delivered one of the most unique experiences of the year, if not the decade so far.