The 32 greatest horror movies that aren't actually scary
Sep. 20, 2024For anyone looking for spooky thrills, minus the chills
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We all know someone who can’t “do horror.” Even when we know that movies are all made up works of fiction and that nothing on the screen is real, it doesn’t stop fully grown adults from being scared like children at a really good horror movie. Thankfully, not every horror movie is designed to elicit scares. There’s actually some really amazing “horror” movies that aren’t so scary at all.
Whether it’s close to Halloween and you’re jonesing for laughs, or it’s just a dark and spooky night and you’re in the mood for something different, there are hundreds, if not thousands of amazing “horror” movies that de-emphasize scares in favor of laughs, cheers, and sometimes, even tears. Horror-comedies, horror-romances, kung fu horror (yes really), there’s more to the genre than masks and chainsaws.
For scaredy cats who can’t stand horror, here are the 32 greatest horror movies that aren’t so scary at all, and more than worth watching.
32. Army of Darkness (1992)
While all the movies in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy qualify as not-so-scary horror movies, the 1992 installment Army of Darkness stands tall and stands alone as a fine sequel that makes even scaredy cats say, “Hell yeah!” In this direct sequel to Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987), Bruce Campbell returns as wise-cracking Ash Williams who is flung back in time to the Dark Ages and is challenged to fight an army of the dead before he can return home. (Good thing he has his boomstick.) Army of Darkness is a dramatic left turn from its predecessors, trading in spooky frights for fist-pumping action and killer one-liners. Remember: Shop smart, shop S-Mart.
You can already hear the song in your head, can you? Conceived by Dan Aykroyd and directed by Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters is a landmark 1980s comedy that combines horror and action in one slimy package. You know the story already: Three disgraced academics (played by Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Harold Ramis) and one Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) team up and start a business of catching spooks and specters in New York City - just in time for them to stand against the Sumerian (not Babylonian) deity Gozer. A revolutionary genre-bender that launched an enduring franchise, the original ‘84 Ghostbusters delights as much as it frights.
Ever watch a horror movie and think, “What if everyone knew kung fu?” In 1980, master director Sammo Hung unleashed Encounters of the Spooky Kind, a landmark release that kicked off a brief boom of action-oriented horror-comedies in Hong Kong. Hung plays a poor rickshaw driver who is marked for death by his unfaithful wife and rich client, who’ve recruited a sorcerer to assassinate him. This leaves Hung fighting for his life in an abandoned temple, trading blows with vampires from Chinese folklore called jiangshi. While the movie’s jiangshi monsters are surely frightening, it’s hard to scream when you’re laughing and cheering so much from the movie’s dazzling martial arts mastery.
In this mumblecore zombie comedy, an array of A-listers like Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, and so many more gather as the eccentric inhabitants of Centerville, USA. This small American town becomes our window into a worldwide zombie apocalypse, one caused by ruthless corporations engaging in polar fracking. Lethargic but never dull, The Dead Don’t Die is a quietly angry picture, a political movie wrapped in the guise of a gooey zombie movie. There’s more brains in its head than its maws, and The Dead Don’t Die will have you thinking more than screaming.
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Wolfman’s got nards! In this delightful homage to the classic Universal Monsters, a group of kids come together to combat an unholy alliance of monsters led by Count Dracula. An underrated 1980s gem, The Monster Squad bombed at the box office but has gone on to be a beloved cult classic for its unique mixture of Amblin-style whimsy and affectionate nostalgia for horror movies of yore. Amid the surging popularity of slashers like Freddy and Jason, The Monster Squad put the limelight back on the OG monsters who built Hollywood.
In this feminist cult classic horror-comedy, Megan Fox stars as a drop-dead beautiful high school student who is secretly on a killing spree to satisfy the bloodthirsty demon that possesses her. Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama, Jennifer’s Body devilishly toys with expectations of mainstream horror, a genre that frequently occupies itself with women’s figures. Released at the height of Fox’s sex symbol status via the Transformers franchise, Jennifer’s Body is a knowing and clever movie that failed to excite critics during its release in 2009. However, the #MeToo era has seen the movie enjoy positive reassessment, with its story about a vengeful woman unleashing hell on the men who used her body as a vessel for their gain.
In this lively homage to classic Hollywood creature features, Kevin Bacon stars as a Nevada handyman trying to outrun ancient worm-like monsters who dwell in the desert sands. A masterful balance of horror and humor, Tremors quakes with pure entertainment value that takes its schlocky premise surprisingly seriously. (Mostly.) Screenwriters S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock were inspired while working for the U.S. Navy making safety videos in the desert, and wondering what would happen if a monster rose from the ground. The movie’s grounded factor comes from the fact that the writers worked with National Geographic documentarian Ron Underwood to design the creature, with Underwood eventually helming production as director.
It’s a teen slasher, a black comedy, a time travel epic all wrapped up in one madcap package. From music video director Joseph Kahn, Detention follows a group of misfit high schoolers whose principal believes one of them is a serial killer preying on the student body. On the night of prom, the students are stuck in detention when they find out their stuffed bear mascot is a time machine they must use to stop the apocalypse. Yeah, there isa lotgoing on in Detention, but Kahn’s chaotic filmmaking gives the movie a passing grade. Surely, a movie with Backstreet Boys needle drops can’t bethatscary.
A gothic romance that was mistakenly advertised as a hair-raising horror film, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak deserves more than it got in its short life in theaters. Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, and Jessica Chastain star in this haunting drama set in Victorian England, in which an aspiring writer moves into a remote mansion with her sister and her husband and investigates the truth behind the spirits that dwell inside. Crimson Peak is spooky, sure, but its soul-stirring atmosphere is inviting and not at all hostile. It’s a movie especially suited to chill out on dark and stormy nights.
Shortly after the success of Coraline - another choice spooky movie for scaredy cats - studio Laika released ParaNorman, from directors Sam Fell and Chris Butler. An eye-pleasing stop-motion feature (notably the first to use a 3D printer to create the character models), ParaNorman tells of a 11-year-old boy Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) who can communicate with ghosts and must stop a witch’s curse that plagues his Massachusetts hometown. ParaNorman is an all-ages delight that imagines the challenges of growing up through a haunted house filter.
Preluding hit TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed by just a few years, 1996’s The Craft is a hellraiser of a good time that some critics call a rite of passage for all young women. At an elite parochial school, four teen outcasts practice witchcraft to level their school’s social playing field, but they soon learn that playing with fire means you get burned. While The Craft didn’t spellbind critics during its theatrical release, the movie enjoys positive reassessment as a freshly original teen movie and a progressive-leaning cult classic. Truly, dark magic has never looked so good.
Before AMC adapted Anne Rice’s classic novel for television, director Neil Jordan teamed with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and a very young Kirsten Dunst for a handsome imagining for the big screen. Based on Rice’s novel, the movie follows Louis de Pointe du Lac (Pitt), a strange man who tells his traumatic life story as a vampire to a San Francisco reporter (Christian Slater). A timeless goth classic, Interview with the Vampire avoids scares for sex appeal, with abundant insinuated homoeroticism between Pitt’s Louis and Cruise’s sinister Lestat.
Park Chan-wook is a sensual filmmaker whose work spans all different genres. At the height of Twilight’s worldwide popularity in the late 2000s, the South Korean auteur delivered his counterprogramming masterpiece Thirst, an erotic vampire thriller in which a Catholic priest becomes a vampire and falls for his childhood best friend’s wife. A forbidden romance that digs its teeth into new places in the genre’s untainted flesh, Thirst makes the implicit eroticism of vampires more than explicit.
Imagine if the horror classic The Omen was actually hilarious. That’s the basic conceit behind the horror comedy Little Evil, from writer/director Eli Craig and released by Netflix. Parks & Recreation’s Adam Scott stars as a man who learns his mischievous new stepson is actually the Antichrist and works hard to stop him from carrying out his evil obligations. Suitable for anyone who may find The Omen too frightening, Little Evil brings a sense of chipper humor to a wildly dark story.
You’ve seen Gremlins. Now see Shadow in the Cloud. Roseanne Liang’s fist-pumping horror thriller brings audiences into the darkened skies of World War II, following a female RAF Pilot Officer named Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) who boards an American B–17 bomber for a top-secret mission to deliver sensitive cargo. While the truth of Maude’s mission is eventually revealed, most of the movie is a pulse-pounder where there’s something far more evil than enemy fire waiting above. A pulpy action feast with smart social commentary inside its bulletproof casing, Shadow in the Cloud soars high for anyone looking for thrills and chills.
Deep in the forest of the dead, escaped prisoners and yakuza gangsters team up to survive. In Ryuhei Kitamura’s midnight banger Versus, two runaway convicts - one played by action star Tak Sakaguchi - reluctantly team up with several deadly yakuza hitmen to escape a haunted forest that is overrun with zombies. Produced on a miniscule budget, Versus combines samurai cinema and martial arts mayhem with zombie horror to deliver a rare, one-of-a-kind treat that catapulted Kitamura’s career in his native Japan.
When two generational slasher icons meet, all hell breaks loose. In Ronny Yu’s non-canon sequel to both the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises, Freddy Kruger (Robert Englund) manipulates his return by seeking to control the machete-wielding Jason Voorhees (played by stuntman Ken Kerzinger). Inevitably the two monsters face off in a cinematic smackdown, with a new group of helpless teenagers caught in the crossfire. While Freddy vs. Jason dwells in the same darkness its monsters come from, it’s hard to be scared when Freddy and Jason duke it out to a headbanging nu-metal soundtrack.
Just before The Walking Dead became a primetime hit, Ruben Fleischer’s star-studded Zombieland made surviving the undead look like a hell of a good time. Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson, and Abigail Breslin team up as living survivors in the zombie apocalypse who roam the country on a mission to find safe haven. 10 years later, the gang reunited for Zombieland: Double Tap, which sees them all on another road trip while dodging more evolved zombies. There are a lot of zombie comedies out there - one might say a horde of them - but you’ll be hard-pressed to find ones better.
What is there to do but wait out zombies to “blow over” with a pint at your favorite pub? Edgar Wright’s era-defining cult classic smashes up zombie horror with the get-her-back romantic comedy to create something that still feels so fresh after all these years. Simon Pegg stars as Shaun, an appliance store employee who is dumped by his girlfriend on the eve of a zombie outbreak. When the dead walk, Shaun teams with his best pal Ed (Nick Frost) to rescue not just his girlfriend, but his mum and her new boyfriend to survive the nightmare. Shaun of the Dead wasn’t the first comedy-horror, but it’s easily one of the greatest.
Ever had to endure going to a party you never wanted to attend in the first place? That’s the idea that underscores this lean and mean horror-thriller from director Karyn Kusama, about a man (Logan-Marshall Green) still mourning his son’s passing when he attends a party thrown by his ex-wife (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband (played by Michiel Huisman). Meanwhile, a strange guest (John Carrol Lynch) has ulterior motives that, you might say, kills the vibe. Set over the course of one fateful night, The Invitation reveals how even those closest to us can drag us down. Nowthat’sscary.
Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he’s your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.
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