The 50 Least Scary Movies of All Time

Director: Rob Zombie
Stars: Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell, Daeg Faerch, Sheri Moon Zombie, Danielle Harris, Brad Dourif, William Forsythe, Danny Trejo, Kristina Klebe, Tyler Mane

Jamie Lee Curtis is rolling in her grave-and she's not even dead yet! This ugly remake full of horror convention sad sacks and hillbilly drama should have ended with Myers' escape from the mental hospital, but Zombie insists on cramming the entirety of Carpenter's 1978 masterpiece into the final act, forcing you to sit through the far inferior version of events you know all too well. The only thing worse than Rob Zombie's Halloween...is Rob Zombie's Halloween 2.

Director: Dario Argento
Stars: Julian Sands, Asia Argento, Andrea Di Stefano

Gone are the fantastic visual styles of the giallo that catapulted director Dario Argento to worldwide fame. The English dubbing is scarier than anything else you'll find on screen, except maybe for Julian Sands' beautiful coiffure. The Phantom is as pretty as Christine, but he occasionally romps naked with rats. Weird? Yes. Scary? Not really. Sorry, Dario.

Director: Fritz Kiersch
Stars: Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong, John Franklin, Courtney Gains

Nothing takes us out of a scene quicker than bad child acting, so you can imagine how difficult it is to get into a movie with a cast full of underwhelming kids. Add to that a lot of religious sermonizing and it's impossible to keep your eyes from rolling. We wish we could send this one back up the cornhole from which it came.

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Stars: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Martin Crewes, James purefoy, Eric Mabius, Colin Salmon, Joseph May

Hollywood takes one of the most popular video game franchises of all time, cuts out the atmosphere, suspense, and anything else that made it cool, then adds a bunch of action that's flatter than Milla's chest.

Director: Eli Roth
Stars: Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Rick Hoffman, Eyþór Guðjónsson, Barbara Nedeljáková, Jana Kaderabkova, Jennifer Lim

Not only did we not care if the annoying, underdeveloped protagonists lived, we actually hoped they'd die. No matter how many successful shoulders he stands on, director Eli Roth seems more concerned with sculpting his chest hair then directing a good film. Hostel opened the doors to a sub-genre of "torture porn" clones that now fill clearance shelves across the country.

Directors: Mitchell Altieri, Phil Flores
Stars: Taylor Cole, Josh Henderson, Scout Taylor-Compton, Joe Egender, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Samuel Child

The original April Fool's Day, released in 1986, is one of the better slasher movies of its time, underrated today and featuring one of the horror genre's strongest third-act movie twists. Twenty-two years later, nobody wanted a remake, yet that didn't stop co-directors Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores from removing the original's single-location setting, clever plot turns, and general entertainment values and crapping out a lifeless fail that would have been subpar even during the post-Scream slasher resurgence of the late '90s.

Director: Carol Frank
Stars: Angela O'Neill, Wendy Martel, Pamela Ross, Nicole Rio, John C. Russell

Have you ever seen Halloween? So have these guys. Nice production values, but, released in 1986, Sorority House Massacre was too late to the party of slasher knock-offs. Seriously, John Carpenter could sue.

Director: Jonathan Liebesman
Stars: Jordana Brewster, Taylor Handley, Matt Bomer, Diora Baird, Lee Tergesen, R. Lee Ermey

How scary can a movie be when it's merely prologue and you know who will and won't survive? Furthermore, an icon should not be born from casual opportunity, as is the case when Leatherface just happens to grab a chainsaw after bashing in his first skull. Good thing he wasn't braining someone in a porn shop or his iconic implement might have been a giant rubber schlong.

Director: Renny Harlin
Stars: Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Socupco, James D'arcy, Ralph Brown

Father Merrin's origin story was already covered in Exorcist 2: The Heretic, and it wasn't chilling then either. Originally this fourth film was a thoughtful study of faith by Paul Schrader, the kind that is so scary because it feels real, but the studio wanted more action, so the director of Cutthroat Island was brought in. Confounding reshoots and craaaazy CGI jackals turn this into a movie that should have been exorcized from the get go.

Director: Eric Red
Stars: Mariel Hemingway, Michael Pare, Mason Gamble, Ken Pogue

By the time you get to the scene where the werewolf is driving the car, the only howling going on is the laughter choking you to death. (Note: We're laughing at you, not with you.)

Director: Gideon Raff
Stars: Thora Birch, Gideon Emery, Kavan Reece, Gloria Votsis, Derek Magyar, Todd Jensen

This was supposed to be a remake of the 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis joint Terror Train, but tragically "terror" was removed both from the title and this uninventive piece of torture porn trash. The best we can say is that Thora Birch as a wrestler scares the interest right out of our flaccid members.

Director: Joe Chappelle
Stars: Ben Affleck, Liev Schrebier, Rose McGowan, Peter O'Toole, Joanna Going, Nicky Katt, Clifton Powell, Michael DeLorenzo

The frightening book had creatures, apparitions, murders, rape, and enough horror for a whole franchise but the film version has Ben Affleck in a cowboy hat and Peter O'Toole longing for the days when he was anywhere but here.

Director: Jim Gillespie
Stars: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Anne Heche, Bridgitte Wilson, Muse Watson

When your villain is dressed like the Gorton's fisherman, we could give a fuck what you did last summer. That's about as scary as Jennifer Love Hewitt's acting reel...oh wait, that WOULD be scary!

Director: Uwe Boll
Stars: Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff

The only thing scary about infamous hack director Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark is its casting—specifically, the fact that Tara Reid plays an archaeologist. Who wears glasses to make her look smart. Otherwise, this wholly inept video game adaptation is a laughable compendium of terrible acting and visual effects that would feel out-of-date in an Atari game.

Director: Alexandre Aja
Stars: Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart

French director Alexandra Aja has made some of the best horror films of the last 10 years—namely, High Tension and his The Hills Have Eyes remake. Nobody's perfect, though, so, inevitably, Aja was bound to slip up. Giving supernatural scares a shot in Mirrors, Aja completely failed at trying to merge ghosts and a loaded mythology with his usual splatter-flick visuals. The end result is a sloppy mess that Aja's biggest fans will forever deny ever happened.

Director: Wes Craven
Stars: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Judy Greer, Joshua Jackson, Shannon Elizabeth, Milo Ventimiglia, Portia de Rossi, Mya

One day, someone will make a modern-day werewolf movie that doesn't bite harder than a famished Wolf Man. Until then, we'll have to settle for hate-watching Wes Craven's epic 2005 failure Cursed, the Los Angeles-set, wannabe Scream-with-lycanthropes debacle that will forever haunt Jesse Eisenberg. Hey, all great actors need that one early horror misfire in their filmographies, no? Brad Pitt and George Clooney have them. As for Eisenberg's Cursed co-star Mya, well…she'll always have the Bulworth soundtrack.

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Stars: Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Paris Hilton, Jared Padalecki, Jon Abrahams, Robert Ri'chard, Brian Van Holt

Why in the holy hell are these kids going inside a spooky wax house to call for help? The only reason people went to see this is to watch Paris Hilton take it in the face. Why does it feel like we've seen that before?

Director: William Malone
Stars: Stephen Dorff, Natasha McElhone, Stephen Rea

It's hard to tell what's going on here as the filmmakers throw a lot of overlapping images at the screen to terrify and/or confuse the audience, but anyone familiar with this new thing called "the Internet" will see through Hollywood's opportunistic attempt to cash in on new technology for another lame movie. We can't wait for death via iPad!

Director: Steve Miner
Stars: Julian Sands, Lori Singer, Richard E. Grant

Any movie forcing the audience to sit through a Lori Singer performance has made a torture film, not a horror film. While there are a lot of nice touches in both the script and direction, the film as a whole fails to terrorize-unless you're afraid of British fops with ponytails.

Director: Jamie Blanks
Stars: Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Michael Rosenbaum, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, Christopher Plummer, Loretta Devine, Robert Englund, Danielle Harris

A friend of a friend insists that this Scream-inspired movie is scary, but when a brooding figure in a fuzzy parka recreates a bunch of urban legends to kill some co-eds, logic is the first victim. (How scary is death via Pop Rocks anyway?) Without spoiling the ending outright, let's just say that the person improbably playing the overpowering killer went on to successfully kill a child in real life a few years later.

Director: Ulli Lommel
Stars: Suzanna Love, Ron James, John Carradine, Nicholas Love

Director Ulli Lommel is a hack who rips off the best elements of Halloween, The Exorcist, and The Amityville Horror, and still fails to generate more scares than snores. The man who made this haunted broken mirror tale deserves seven years bad luck. And he got it, becoming one of the most hated direct-to-DVD directors the horror community has ever turned on.

Director: Richard Brandes
Stars: Rachel Miner, Mimi Rogers, Michael Berryman, Mickey Jones

There's an effective horror short somewhere in Penny Dreadful, or even a standout segment in a Creepshow-styled anthology film. But watching a madman terrorize a young mental patient while she's trapped inside a car for 92 minutes? That's a paper-thin concept that very few legitimate masters of horror could successfully pull off, let alone a no-name hack like Richard Brandes. There's a reason why Brandes hasn't directed another movie Penny Dreadful, emphasis on the "dreadful."

Director: Stephen King
Stars: Emilio Estevez, Pat Hingle, Laura Harrington, Yeardley Smith, Frankie Faison, Leon Rippy

This is the first and (mercifully) only attempt Stephen King made to direct a feature. That's good because, unlike writing, making a movie is not something you want to give your first shot while your nose is buried in a pile of China White. Maybe the car that ran over Stephen King in 1999 was someone exacting revenge for making them sit through this junk.

Director: Jamie Blanks
Stars: Marley Shelton, Denise Richards, David Boreanaz, Katherine Heigl, Jessica Capshaw, Jessica Cauffiel

You can't get mad at director Wes Craven or screenwriter Kevin Williamson—they couldn't have possibly known that the success of Scream would breed an large crop of shitty, unimaginative slasher movies with pretty faces. The worst of all the post-Scream cash-ins is Valentine, an inert stalk-and-kill flick in which a killer wearing a Cupid mask hunts down beautiful women who made his life a living hell back in high school. When Denise Richards' "stuck-up chick" performance is the least painful thing about your movie, you know you're in trouble.

Director: Luis Llosa
Stars: Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuhrer, Jonathan Hyde

The killer snake is a comical mix of crappy CGI and giant-dong-looking rubber hose. Ice Cube and J-Lo's acting? Now that was horrific.

Director: John Simpson
Stars: Keir O'Donnell, Jessica Lucas, Laura Breckenridge, Katheryn Winnick

In this anthology, what starts out strong as a story of an intruder dressed as a scary clown quickly becomes one disappointing short story bumping into another until the survivors are all reunited in one far-fetched finale. Jake Wade Wall wrote the equally forgettable remakes of The Hitcher and When A Stranger Calls, and this film will hopefully prevent him from writing anything else.

Director: Marcus Nispel
Stars: Jared Padalecki, Amanda Righetti, Danielle Panabaker, Travis Van Winkle, Derek Mears, Aaron Yoo, Arlen Escarpeta, Ryan Hanse, Willa Ford, Julianna Guill

Audiences followed Jason from Crystal Lake to New York, to hell and into outer space, but this remake will send them running for the shitter. Despite being granted a full pass by the MPAA ratings board, the filmmakers have taken one of the most iconic film villains and removed his rotted balls.

Director: David R. Ellis
Stars: Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Mykelti Williamson, Nick Zano, Krista Allen, Andrew Fiscella, Haley Webb, Justin Welborn

Honestly, if every death sequence is going to be precisely telegraphed minutes in advance via x-ray, how scary can this movie get? The 3D gimmick kept theatre-goers distracted, but home viewing leaves this ugly film exposed for the dull experience that it really is. Death, go blow your shit loose.

Director: Hideo Nakata
Stars: Naomi Watts, Simon Baker, David Dorfman, Gary Cole, Elizabeth Perkins, Sissy Spacek, Ryan Merriman, Emily VanCamp, Daveigh Chase

Hideo Nakata, the man behind the original Japanese films, helms this one, but something is lost in translation. Let's sum it up with the line: "Mommy, the drain is clogged and the water smells like dead girl."

Director: Rachel Talalay
Stars: Robert Englund, Shon Greenblatt, Yaphet Kotto, Breckin Meyer, Lisa Zane, Lezlie Deane, Tobe Sexton, Ricky Dean Logan

Despite an amazing performance by Yaphet Kotto's hair, the infamous Freddy Krueger is reduced to a punch line in rubbery makeup that makes you feel bad for Robert Englund as he cashes his last steady check. It's really sad to see this franchise reduced to slapstick comedy and a dismal 3D finale.

Director: Wes Craven
Stars: Kristy Swanson, Matthew Laborteaux, Michael Sharrett, Anne Towney, Anne Ramsey, Richard Macrus

Two years after A Nightmare on Elm Street and this is what Craven is reduced to. Although he would sink further with Cursed and Vampire in Brooklyn, this derailment marks a start to a pattern where horror seems more like a novelty. While the idea of keeping a pet robot around in hopes of scoring with the girl next door is taken to a creepy extremes, Kristy Swanson acting like a homicidal robot made us want to power down.

Director: Steve Beck
Stars: Tony Shalhoub, Matthew Lillard, Embeth Davidtz, Shannon Elizabeth, Rah Digga, Alec Roberts, F. Murray Abraham

This film can't bother even making one ghost scary, so imagine sitting through 13 CGI fails that make William Castle's campy, kid-friendly 1960 original look like the scariest movie of all time.

Director: Mike Nichols
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, James Spader, Kate Nelligan, Richard Jenkins, Christopher Plummer

Mike Nichols directed The Graduate and seduced audiences across several generations. Here, he slaps some pubic hair on Jack Nicholson's face and sticks him in this tepid romantic monster movie that's all huff and puff-no matter how good Michelle Pfeiffer looks, nobody's blowing anything.

Director: Neil LaBute
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Ellen Burstyn, Frances Conroy, Kate Beahan, Leelee Sobieski, Molly Parker, Diane Delano

Acclaimed screen and stage director Neil LaBute clearly lost his mind while remaking one of England's most beloved cult films, since he seemingly closed his eyes and let loose a drooling Nic Cage, who turns up the bat shit switch and screams his way to a finale where he dons a bear suit and starts punching women in the face.

Director: Andrew van den Houten
Stars: Jessica Butler, Holter Graham, Kelly Carey, Amy Hargreaves, Art Hindle, Taylor Piedmonte

Jack Ketchum can write one hell of a disturbing novel, but his tales make for some tepid horror films. Case in point: this adaptation of his excellent novel Offspring. The title villains look like Troll dolls, and by the time the movie's over you just want to hang them on your ceiling fan, turn it on high, and watch them suffer.

Director: Jimmy Huston
Stars: Cecile Bagdadi, Joel S. Rice, DeAnna Robbins, Sherry Willis-Burch, John Fallon

Slasher movies wore out their welcome by the late '80s, but you'd figure that, in 1981, this film could have coaxed up some new ideas and scares. Nope. As far as terror goes, Final Exam gets a failing grade.

Director: Lee Harry
Stars: Jean Miller, Eric Freeman, Elizabeth Kaitan, James L. Newman

Have you seen the original Silent Night, Deadly Night? Well, Part 2 contains 45 minutes of footage from the original in flashbacks, so you don't have to. The hero of the film, Eric Freeman, is a man who acts with his eyebrows and is incapable of subtlety. Instead of watching this whole movie, just type in "GARBAGE DAY!" on You Tube for some unintentional comedy gold.

Director: John Carpenter
Stars: Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Mark Hamill, Michael Pare, Meredith Salenger

Muddling the original 1960 film's socio-political context and replacing it with a hungry, hungry Kirstie Alley mistaking little blonde children for Twinkies would have been an inspired move, but one just as lifeless as this dull outing with bizarre Aryan, er, alien children doing dirty deeds.

Director: Mark Jones
Stars: Warwick Davis, Jennifer Aniston, Ken Olandt, Mark Holton

Comedy comes in little packages as this runt of a franchise takes the title villain on a quest for gold that became more embarrassing with each of the six installments. Jennifer Aniston somehow escaped this laugher with a career, but it's hard to believe she had any "friends" after this.

Director: Wes Craven
Stars: Michael Berryman, Janus Blythe, Kevin Spirtas, John Bloom, Tamara Stafford

Producers yanked the film away from director Wes Craven before it was complete in order to cash in on the success of Elm Street. Which is probably why you're left with a mishmash of a movie whose idea of story development is to give every returning cast member a flashback to pad the running time. Even the family dog. Woof.

Director: Robert Kurtzman
Stars: Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Chris Lemmon, Wendy Benson, Tony Crane, Jenny O'Hara, Kane Hodder, Tony Todd

Drowning yourself in djinn and juice couldn't combat the memories of this putrid film! Zing! The producers were so concerned with creating a new horror icon based on the puns of Freddy Krueger that they forgot Freddy was a scary pedophile to begin with, while the Wishmaster just looks like something children would laugh at in the dark.

Director: Tobe Hooper
Stars: Robert Englund, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor, Jeremy Crutchley, Vanessa Pike

Creator of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tobe Hooper x awesome Stephen King story about a possessed folding machine in a dank factory should have been amazing. Instead we get the cinematic equivalent of watching two horror greats trying to wash out the stink of failure.

Director: Nelson McCormick
Stars: Brittany Snow, Scot Porter, Dana Davis, Jessica Stroup, Collins Pennie, Kelly blatz, Idris Elba, Jonathan Schaech, Brianne Davis

Jamie Lee Curtis' 1980 film had the same title, but that's where the similarities end. This time around, a group of made-for-TV kids party in a hotel and die. You'll scream when you see how much of this film doesn't take place at the prom! You'll hide in terror when a girl goes into her hotel room and backs into a lamp! You'll gasp in horror when you realize you wasted a couple hours of your life to see this garbage

Director: Joseph Sargent
Stars: Lorraine Gray, Michael Caine, Mario Van Peebles, Karen Young, Judith Barsi, Lance Guest

In the original Jaws, when the shark didn't work, they didn't show it. Now, you don't even need to look closely to see the tracks it slides on. The idea of a shark chasing a family down the coast is bad enough, but why the widow Brody doesn't move to a high rise in Kansas is just confusing. The scariest part of this movie is Mario Van Peebles' Jamaican accent, mon!

Director: Rick Rosenthal
Stars: Jamie Lee Curtis, Busta Rhymes, Tyra Banks, Bianca Kajich, Sean Patrick Thomas, Katee Sackhoff, Daisy McCrackin

This is the film that killed the franchise (it literally killed off Jamie Lee Curtis!) and left the cadaver vulnerable for Rob Zombie to resurrect and sodomize. Mr. Myers, are you really America's most feared cinematic slasher when Busta Rhymes can go "Dangertainment!" on your ass and survive to tell the tale?

Director: Jan de Bont
Stars: Lily Taylor, Liam Neeson, Owen Wilson, Catherine Zeta-Jones

The original Robert Wise production used atmosphere and sound design to ramp up the tension in his psychological thriller. Jan de Bont and Steven Spielberg figured that CGI overkill and laughable performances would be much scarier, so they cheated the audience out of a subtle creep-out and instead treated them to an FX demo reel.

Director: Uwe Boll
Stars: Jonathan Cherry, Tyron Leitso, Ona Grauer, Jurgen Prochnow, Clint Howard, Will Sanderson, Michael Eklund, Kira Clavell

This noisy crap-fest introduced America to hack director Uwe Boll, a man more hated than Al-Qaeda and as subtle as an autopsy performed by a rhinoceros horn. Devoid of scary moments, the film relies on janky footage from the Sega video games to supply its shocks. Low point of the movie: When the villain is asked why he seeks immortality, he responds: "To live forever." Thankfully his decapitated (yet still living) head is crushed and our scare-less misery does finally end.