The Horror Movies Everyone Claims to Hate and Secretly Rewatches

Scroll any horror discussion long enough and you’ll find someone declaring their hatred for a movie half the room privately loves. That gap between what people say online and what they actually watch again is more interesting than the movies themselves.

There’s a specific kind of horror opinion that shows up constantly, in one form or another: someone announcing that a beloved, critically adored film is actually bad, overrated, boring, whatever the word of the week is. Nine times out of ten, it’s not really a hot take. It’s a loud take from a small, vocal minority — and the rest of the audience just quietly keeps watching the movie anyway. Somewhere along the way, “unpopular opinion” stopped meaning “opinion most people disagree with” and started meaning “opinion I saw repeated a lot in comment sections.” Those are not the same thing.

Take Ari Aster’s “Midsommar.” It gets dragged constantly for being slow, for being “just a breakup movie with flowers,” for not being as tight as “Hereditary.” And sure, it’s a different kind of film — brighter, stranger, more of a folk-horror fever dream than a haunted house. But go look at how often people rewatch it, how often it gets cited as someone’s introduction to elevated horror, how many film students still dissect that final shot years later. A movie that people actually hated wouldn’t have that kind of staying power. It would just fade. “Midsommar” hasn’t faded — it’s become one of the most referenced horror films of its decade, which is a strange fate for something supposedly despised.

It’s not really about the movies

Here’s the pattern worth naming: horror fandom has a weird relationship with consensus. The second a movie gets too popular, too acclaimed, too “elevated horror darling of the festival circuit,” a backlash shows up almost on schedule — not because the movie got worse, but because liking the consensus pick starts to feel less interesting than being the person who saw through it. Contrarianism is cheap to perform and it reads as sophistication, even when the underlying opinion is thinner than the one it’s pushing back against.

Declaring you hate the movie everyone loves is a much easier way to seem like you have taste than actually building an argument for something nobody’s watching yet.

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The other usual suspects

“Midsommar” isn’t alone here. Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” gets the same treatment — mass walkouts, a legendary F CinemaScore, endless jokes about how unwatchable it is — and yet it’s one of the most dissected, dug-into horror-adjacent films of its era, with entire essays written about its biblical allegory. Robert Eggers’ “The Witch” spent years being called “boring” by people expecting jump scares, and it’s now widely credited with kicking off the entire modern folk-horror wave that “Midsommar” itself belongs to. Even something as divisive as “Halloween Ends” — genuinely messy in places — gets flattened into “the worst thing ever made” by a conversation that has no room for “flawed but interesting,” only “masterpiece” or “trash.”

Why the hate never actually kills the movie

The tell is always the same: these aren’t movies anyone forgets. Nobody’s writing six-thousand-word breakdowns of films they genuinely don’t care about years after release. The loudest hate in horror tends to cluster around movies that got under people’s skin enough to leave a mark — and getting under your skin is, definitionally, what a horror movie is supposed to do. A film that actually failed to connect doesn’t generate this much ongoing arguing. It just gets forgotten, the way most genuinely bad horror does within a year.

So the next time you see someone confidently declare that a well-regarded horror movie is secretly terrible, it’s worth asking what they’re actually reacting to — the film itself, or the discomfort of everyone else agreeing on something first. Sometimes the backlash is the compliment nobody meant to pay.

OpinionMidsommarHorror DiscourseElevated Horror / Feenanoor