Here are the 13 (or so) Most Disappointing Horror Movies of 2024!

Let’s start out with a few films I simply haven’t found the time to watch this year, but that’s because I really have found any and every excuse to see them yet. Having been burned numerous times by the House of Blum through the years, I did not rush out to see AFRAID. Same goes for the tween horror film TAROT. Both of these films had terrible word of mouth and though, most likely, I’ll be seeing them soon. I simply haven’t taken the time to see them yet. THE CROW is a different story as simply from the trailers, I can tell what kind of blasphemy the film is without seeing it. With the original THE CROW hitting right at the perfect time in my life, I cherish that flawed, yet beautiful film. I’ll most likely see it, but I have yet to feel like punishing myself enough to do so.

So let’s get into some disappointments that I did see. And there’s no better place to start than Blumhouse, the once great leader of modern horror has devolved into a surefire stamp of all of horror’s worst tropes. Zero character. Nonsensical plots. False jump scares. Bad acting, even from notably decent actors. And worst of all, not scary in the least. Out of the three big Blumhouse releases this year, I’ve seen two of them and regret every minute of that decision. AFRAID aside, which we already know I haven’t seen, I did endure the idiocy of the haunted swimming pool known as NIGHT SWIM. While built around a surprisingly interesting plot, NIGHT SWIM simply goes down a laundry list of scary things that might happen in a pool. There are some downright brainless decisions and sacrifices during the climax and some truly unlikable performances from Kerry Condon and Wyatt Russell, but it is the script with some of the stupidest dialog you’re going to come by that makes this one downright unwatchable.

Another plopping from Blumhouse came soon after NIGHT SWIM this year in the turdulous form of IMAGINARY. Now, Blumhouse has been known to swipe old concepts and make them modern, but with IMAGINARY they did something quite unique in that they started eating their own tail. IMAGINARY swipes substantially from INSIDIOUS, where a child is tempted to another dimension known as the Further…I mean the Imaginary, which serves as a twisted prison for monstrous creatures. The acting is really bad, especially from the leads. It’s only worsened by a predictable and repetitive script which builds to a reveal seen from the ticket booth. Worse yet, the production looks awful with scenes being way too dark to see what’s happening and editing obscuring much of the flow of the story. This is wretched stuff from beginning to end. While I’ve known what to expect from Blumhouse, the level the company has sunk in recent years is a true disappointment given the impressive rise to greatness the company had a little over a decade ago.

Nepotism is inevitable in just about any profession, but man does it show big time when the spawn of a big Hollywood director is given the opportunity to make a movie. Sometimes you get a Brandon Cronenberg and it’s a pleasant and astounding surprise. Then sometimes you get HUMANE from Caitlin Cronenberg, sister of Brandon and daughter of David. While there are some interesting ideas in this one like the door to door exterminators, the way the modern issues are crammed into this futuristic nightmare world are heavy handed and downright dumb. HUMANE just feels like the world seen through the eyes of a privileged college student, with little or no nuance or worse yet, knowledge of how the real world works. The decisions these characters leap to in order to serve the story are so broad. And the ending, where everyone is rewarded for basically being pieces of shit for the entire movie fails to be ironic as it seems the people behind this one see them as somehow virtuous for what they are, rather than looking at who they are. This is just an off-the-mark movie from beginning to end with nary a likable character to be found in the whole thing.

Speaking of nepotism, M. Night Shamalayan’s daughter Ishana shat forth THE WATCHERS this year and it was so bad, I couldn’t even muster the might to give it a full review. For some reason, it seems lengthy villain denouements seem to be a curse M. passed down to Ishana. This is another case where there is a premise full of promise and that premise is stretched to exhaustive lengths before the runtime is about to come up and a character basically has to sit the whole audience down and explain not only the whole movie, but the backstory, the motivations, and how its going to end to the audience. The best kind of mysteries give you the info right away in order to solve them. The worst kind makes shit up as it goes along and then tells you how it all makes sense. It’s sad seeing talented actors like Olwen Fouéré, and even decent actors like Dakota Fanning and Georgina Campbell lower themselves to have to read this remedial script that doesn’t trust the audience to have two brain cells and feels the need to explain everything.

Speaking of good actors lowering themselves to a bad movie, M. Night offered up his own terrible film for the masses this year in TRAP. Once again, the promise of the premise if betrayed once again and instead of keeping the movie entirely in the concert as the trailer seems to convey, the third act moving the action out of the arena where Josh Hartnett and his on-screen daughter are trapped slides this movie’s cheese right off the ritz. While ludicrous, the lengths Hartnett’s character goes to elude the police at least were entertaining. But once Hartnett shows up at home and the actual hero of the movie is introduced in the last twenty minutes of the movie, this film simply lost me completely. Why introduce a new character minutes before the end when you have Hartnett’s daughter there the whole time and she could have played this part? On top of that, M. Night has to cram his other daughter Saleka in there in a major role she definitely doesn’t have the acting chops for. And as with THE WATCHERS, it all comes down to a lengthy third act explanation of things and events that there is no way the audience could predict, much less understand. We were shocked at THE SIXTH SENSE because the ending was there all the time. Now, M. Night is just making shit up as he goes which is the equivalent of pissing on your leg and telling me it’s raining.

Disappointments can also come from expectations from what the director has done before and how that compares with their latest offering. Take OUT COME THE WOLVES for example which is Adam MacDonald’s follow up to the excellent BACK COUNTRY bear attack movie from a few years ago. This time, the star of BACK COUNTRY, Missy Peregrym takes on a pack of wild wolves that have attacked her childhood bestie and her husband. In BACK COUTNRY, MacDonald put together quite the tricky emotional situation as Peregrym says no when her boyfriend proposes to her, causing much conflict when a hungry bear arrives. In OUT COME THE WOLVES, another emotional sticky wicket is formed with a love triangle between Peregrym, her childhood bestie, and her husband. But while the conflict in MacDonald’s last film was pretty simple, OUT COME THE WOLVES emotional core is a mess, making it hard to root for any of them. This just leaves the conflict with the wolves, but while Peregrym’s battle with the bear felt realistic and brutal, here against the wolves she feels more like a Marvel superhero and realism is tossed in the dumpster. This one simply failed to compare with MacDonald’s previous good work.

Speaking of disappointing follow-ups, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury shocked the world with their debut INSIDE, but has since failed to achieve that kind of horror greatness. Sure there were some ok films like AMONG THE LIVING, KANDISHA, and LIVIDE, but even they pale in comparison to the brutality of their first film. THE SOUL EATER is another disappointment. It’s not a terrible detective thriller, with some fine performances from Virginie Ledoyen and Paul Hamy, but it’s nothing outstanding either. Riddled with cliches you’ve seen from pretty much every buddy cop/detective film since LETAL WEAPON, THE SOUL EATER has a few gruesome scenes, but the cliched outweigh the original substantially. I always hope Bustillo and Maury will deliver the goods they did with INSIDE, but they keep falling short.

THE STRANGERS CHAPTER ONE disappointed by promising a new take on the STRANGERS franchise, yet delivering an almost shot-for-shot remake of the original. No one wants a remake of a film released in 2008. No one. I understand why they wanted to make a franchise out of this property, but so far, even PREY AT NIGHT failed to deliver the goods for me. In chapter one of this new trilogy, we get the same story, yet with less interesting actors. Renny Harlin has gotten a bad rap over the years, but he still is a solid director. I understand that he promises something different with this series in the second one, but he forgot to make the first one interesting enough to make us want to see the next one. I’m still curious about Chapter Two, but my excitement, which was pretty big for this series, has waned exponentially.

How do you ruin a movie in the last few minutes of the film? THE BEAST WITHIN will show you. Just let the viewer know that nothing you’ve been watching has been the truth. It’s a surefire way of having the audience leave your movie with a feeling of betrayal. Now, this movie wasn’t great to begin with. Kit Harrington keeps proving that he is not a very good actor the more roles he gets post-GAME OF THRONES, offering up a grunting and growing performance as an abusive husband who just might be a werewolf. The werewolf stuff isn’t impressive, covered in dark shadows and quick edits to cover up the bad effects. Most of the transformation stuff comes from Harrington flexing his back muscles. Much ado about nothing and none of the film really holds up after the late in the game revelation, but there you have it. The filmmaker was trying something artsy and metaphoric but failed miserably, knocking the knees out of any momentum he had with that decision.

Speaking of disappointing performances, THE EXORCISM actually had some promise, trying to be some kind of meta-textual version of THE EXORCIST. It most likely was a pitch for an EXORCIST reboot that got scrapped, as it felt a little too much like THE NEW NIGHTMARE was to A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. Still, as meta as the film was, it relapses into tropes by the midway point and we have pretty much every exorcism/possession cliché you can imagine show up. Crowe seems drawn to exorcism films, maybe because of his troubled personal life, but man, he should just steer clear of them. His performance here is lazy and uninspired.

BLACK CAB wasn’t a terrible movie, but this movie that teeters between an oft-told ghost story about a crying woman on the side of the road and a descent into madness story of a cabbie who kidnaps a woman felt absolutely aimless. It’s a film that didn’t know what it wanted to be; supernatural or grounded thriller, and was hardly either. Nick Frost is ok here as the haunted cabbie, but I feel his strengths are more in his comedic work. I also felt that the entire story felt as if it were done by filmmakers and screenwriters who really hadn’t seen a lot of horror movies as much of the stuff that was supposed to be scary was done better in other films. Just an all around miss, this one was for me.

I just saw THE FRONT ROOM last night. Maybe I’ll do a review of it. Maybe I won’t because I actually feel like this little acknowledgment is all the film deserves. Apparently, even the mighty A24 can disappoint occasionally. Let’s begin with the inscrutable face of the film’s star Brandy. Smooth like a seal and expressionless the entire way through, Brandy proves that acting, once again, is not her forte. The film tries hard to make her relatable, but the way she can spout lines with nary a crack in her face is truly a talent. On top of that, the script doesn’t do her any favors. In one scene, her husband sees his father’s urn for the first time on a mantle and instead of taking a second to empathize with him on this sad occasion, Brandy complains that her mother-in-law moved one of her sculptures to put it there. The film is full of these moments where if it isn’t about Brandy, it just isn’t. On top of that, the film relies way too much on the grossness of incontinence. Yes, it is nasty, but there is no need to show multiple scenes of a toilet filled with feces over and over again. This movie’s one move is to disgust you with shit. Shit on the walls. Shit on the couch. Shit on clothes. And to make matters worse, Brandy cleans the shit up with her long as braids dragging all through it. If Brandy’s acting and presence weren’t unwatchable enough, the amount of human waste in this movie seals the deal.

This final one is more of an honorable mention. JOKER 2: FOLIE A DEUX, not a horror movie, was by far the biggest disappointment I had at the movies this year. I don’t want to heap onto the bandwagon, but the way the film misses the mark of both being a musical and having something new to say about the character makes me wonder if the first film had nothing to do with talent and was more of a happy accident than anything else. The painful courtroom stuff. The songs that had nothing to do with what was going on. The fact that Arthur has no active role in anything in the entire movie. It truly is an achievement to mess this up so badly. Some say director Todd Phillips did this intentionally, but I doubt anyone would want to do something this bad and have your name attached to it. As a comic book fan and a fan of cinema, this film offended me and left me speechless in the end. Let’s just all pretend that this sequel never happened.