The 11 Fright Night Films That Didn't Actually Scary Anyone All (2024)

• Saw (2004)

  

  "Saw" is a franchise that shows no signs of stopping, with ten films to its credit. The original was a locked-room horror film that managed not to be that terrifying. Gross? Sure. Saw is a good example of a potential new horror subgenre called two guys arguing. It's more about the argument than it is about the horror.

• The Haunting (1999)

  

  The Haunting is stacked with well-regarded name actors, Lilli Taylor, Liam Neeson, Owen Wilson, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and based on the classic first adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House that bears the same name.

  The problem with the film is that it takes the basic concept and then drops the main psychologically driven plot within it to a more pedestrian idea. It's made by people who don't understand horror and don't have faith in what makes Jackson's novel so terrifying in the first place.

• Host (2020)

  

  Host was a sensation during the pandemic that used the idea of everyone doing Zoom meetings online as a hook. It's not very scary because, realistically, who does a séance during a Zoom meeting? No one because no one really wants to be on Zoom. The other issue is that it is one of those movies made to catch on to a trend. Host is the Roller Boogie of screenlife films.

• Deep Blue Sea (1999)

  

  Deep Blue Sea isn't scary, but the film itself doesn't seem to mind. The filmmakers start out with a faux seriousness that turns into a hilarious send-up of itself by the mid-point that is more entertaining than any horror story that this crew could have come up with. I'm not sure any of this was strictly intentional, but it works wonderfully just the same.

• Hostel (2005)

  

  It is painful to watch, but probably not for the reasons Eli Roth intended. The idea of Hostel seems to be, at its core, "let's torture some hot people." The film has no characters to empathize with, so scares don't happen. The graphic violence can make you cringe, but you don't feel for the characters.

• Firestarter (1984)

  

  Firestarter was one of the run of Stephen King adaptations that were not scary because they were made by people who didn't understand the horror genre. They were people who didn't understand what makes King's books work. I mentioned Roller Boogie earlier in this list, and the funniest thing is that Mark L. Lester, the director of this version of Firestarter, actually directed Roller Boogie. He was, perhaps, not the best choice for the job.

• Army Of The Dead (2021)

  

  Zach Snyder directed the Dawn Of The Dead remake from 2004, which was a great mashup of comedy and horror. It was genuinely scary and funny at the same time. It helped that James Gunn wrote the script. With Army Of The Dead, it's funny but not scary. You've got a massive army of hungry zombies, and then it's undercut with zombie love and pregnancy.

  Yeah, no.

• The Conjuring (2013)

  

  The Conjuring seems like a winner, and it may be for some, but it seems lacking in power for scares. It's based on a couple who claimed to be paranormal investigators, Edward and Lorraine Warren. We could go into the claims that the Warrens were frauds, but from the cinema standpoint, most of the movie's scares are based on jump scares that either take too long or are ineffective. The lead actors make a great effort, and it is to their credit that the film works as well as it does.

  During the scene where the gross ghost feet float by, are we supposed to be scared by the ghost's need for a pedicure?

• Red Dragon (2002)

  

  Thank goodness that the bad taste of this ill-advised Thomas Harris adaptation was washed away by the superlative artwork also known as Bryan Fuller's Hannibal TV series. Even with the TV censors, Fuller's masterpiece ran laps around this 2002 film in scares and gore. All this talent, and this is what we got. Two words tell what went wrong here, and they are Brett and Ratner.

• World War Z (2013)

  

  World War Z is another case of throwing out the book's plot, which made it riveting and terrifying in the first place, in favor of some dull family drama and zombies who run so fast that the whole world should be toast within about thirty seconds. I consider Train To Busan to be the novel World War Z's true spiritual adaptation because Train To Busan is full of the humanity that World War Z lacks.

• Signs (2002)

  

  Many alien invasion films aren't that scary. Even though the concept seems promising, they are sometimes undermined by the effects or hammy acting. In Signs, M. Night Shyamalan seems to be going for more of a mediation on family and grief rather than being concerned with making this a scary film about aliens.

Dolores Quintana