10 Horror Movies That Aren’t Scary Anymore

There’s a reason horror is an infinite genre; everlasting and ever fruitful, promising (and usually delivering) an adrenaline rush of fear and anticipation that’s just as good as any theme park ride. Horror movies are great, and the best ones are the perfect mix of fun and scary, with frights that get under your skin and stay a while long after the credits have rolled. These could be new horror movies or old ones, from any decade at any time, perfectly crafted to scare the pants off of you.

Though it’s meant to freak out the broadest possible audience, horror is often very specific, each movie echoing the time period in which it’s made, whether that was intentional or not. Because of this specificity, there are those older horror movies that, while great, have lost a little bit of their power — just because their kills, or the method of their scares, or their very plots now feel old-fashioned. The stuff that scared us back then often isn’t enough to scare us now, and even the spookiest scene can be marred, just a bit, by an old trend or piece of technology that today’s audience has outgrown.

That’s enough to make what used to be a scream-inducing death feel goofy and anachronistic, enough to take you out of the movie entirely while you recover from how ancient it all suddenly feels. These moments — scary voicemails, evil arcade games, killer TV broadcasts — are still plenty frightening, but the immediacy of the threat has been lost over time, replaced by the feeling that what you’re watching has transformed into a rather quaint time capsule. Most of these movies are still great, as long as you ignore the corded phones and waterbeds.

READ MORE: The Best Horror Movies of the Year So Far