It’s almost everyone’s favorite time of year: spooky season and horror movies are the only things on our minds. From the cult classics to slasher favorites, there’s a lot of spine-tingling goodness in the scary movie realm, and all it needs is an audience.
Of course, for all the praise you can sing about horror films, there are some tropes that can turn even the best movie into a tragedy. When an escape is evident, but they’ve got to run back into the house, or when the killer is right in front of the victim, and they run upstairs instead of towards the backdoor — you know, the tropes that just drive you crazy.
One Reddit user asked horror fans to share their most overdone horror tropes or the ones they just can’t stand at all.
The responses are great, and we think you’ll find a lot that you agree with here. We know we did! Do you ever get frustrated when booby-trapped bodies start falling out of the ceiling?
They’ll throw literal books at a possessed person, but suddenly a character says these five words, and they snap out of it? No thanks!
If you’ve got a weapon and you need to, you know, kill the killer, why don’t you aim for the jugular? Also, if you’re running from a car, you most definitely don’t need to make it easy for them to chase you — they’ve already got the advantage.
There’s a website called Does the Dog Die? for a reason — we’re over horror movie animal deaths.
This one might still work for horror fans, but we always know where it will lead. If the main female character comes from an adoptive family, chances are, they’ve got some relation to the killer.
We’re sorry, but when we read this one, we didn’t think of horror movies; we thought about THAT Twilight scene, you know, the one.
This trope is the stuff nightmares are made of (we’re laughing at ourselves, it’s okay).
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense.
We get that it’s necessary for the spooky vibe, horror lighting, and all, but can we get at least a little natural light coming in from somewhere?
If you’re going to celebrate getting rid of the bad guy with, well — some adult content, maybe you should make sure they’re dead. You know you’ll get to enjoy it more than once that way.
This is a major pet peeve of ours, too. Shock is real; we get it, but can you just…get moving?
It’s always the focus of a scene, too. That well-placed knife just out of reach, the glass jar, the candlestick — close but never close enough.
The truth is, as long as there is horror, there will be tropes that drive you crazy — but it’s almost part of the game now. How many films will they show up in? Will you make it through a favorite without finding a mind-numbingly agonising trope? You never know until you tune in.
