If you’re a horror movie fan or have looked at rotten tomato scores, you’ve probably seen that there’s a disproportionately large amount of bad horror movies. While all genres have their fair share of bad movies, horror gets the short end of the stick. 

There are many reasons for this, one of the biggest reasons being the lack of new interesting ideas. Most horror movies you can find have derivative tropes or are just ripoffs of other popular movies. For example, with the release of Halloween in 1978, there were an increasingly absurd amount of “slasher” films that came from it. You might even know one of them pretty well; Friday the 13th released just 2 years later. 

These unoriginal ideas don’t always lead to bad movies but more often than not they are cheap cash grabs off of the original. It’s gotten so bad that There are whole movie studios based on this idea, like the infamous asylum films.

Another big reason for these awful movies is that horror movies are very cheap to make compared to other genres. When the Blair Witch Project was released in 1999 it grossed over $248 million in the box office with a budget of only $300,000. I don’t think I need to tell you that it was an unbelievable success. From this people tried to recreate the magic of Blair witch with the same found-footage style to mostly negative effect.

I should also mention Paranormal Activity that had an insanely low budget of only $15,000. This movie performed similarly to the Blair Witch Project with almost $200 million at the box office and also spawned rip-off movies of the same type.

While these two movies might be an extreme examples, things like this are unbelievably common. It’s just simply easier and cheaper to make rip-offs than original ideas like the amazingly atmospheric Midsommar or the wonderfully devastating Hereditary. As horror movies continue to evolve we can only hope that more new fresh ideas come to the surface in place of the thousands of generic slashers and low-budget found footage movies.