8 B-Horror Movies You Will Unironically Enjoy
Is there a point when something stops being “so bad that it’s good” and simply becomes good? And are there even some examples of B-horror movies that were actually just plain good to begin with? The answers, as you already know, are yes and yes!
From Hollywood’s early days right up until the modern cinematic era, the horror genre has always been a relatively cheap and profitable side of the business, which means that even some movies that we consider stone cold classics, like The Blair Witch Project, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Night of the Living Dead, were all considered B-horror movies when they started out.
For this list of great B-horror movies, I've decided to leave the bonafide GOATs out and focus on some rougher diamonds. The eight movies listed below are all shocking in their own way, but each one is also made with a level of care and artistry that far exceeds its schlocky premise — or in other words: good, unclean fun, done right.
From the name to the setup — a malevolent weather front that attacks a small, East coast, island community — to the $1 million it cost to make: everything about The Fog screams B-horror, yet most of the people involved went on to have amazing careers.
You probably already know that John Carpenter directed it (his follow-up to Halloween) and Jamie Lee Curtis stars, but the cinematographer, Dean Cundey, went on to shoot movies like Back to the Future and Jurassic Park — and it shows!
If you enjoyed watching Widow’s Bay this year, in particular the first episode, you’re gonna have a blast with this one.
Years before he began wielding $100 million budgets for Marvel and DC, James Gunn honed his idiosyncratic craft at Troma Entertainment, the legendary B-horror studio behind such classics as Surf Nazis Must Die and The Toxic Avenger.
That background is the reason why, after making his name as a screenwriter on the live-action Scooby-Doo movies, Gunn went back to his roots for his debut feature Slither, a gross-out sci-fi horror about an alien parasite that terrorises the residents of a small community.
Budget-wise, we’re definitely stretching the B-horror definition with this one, but Slither is a nothing if not a B-horror homage dressed in studio clothing. Trust us, don't let Jenna Fischer and Nathan Fillion's names on the cast list fool you, this movie is grotesque enough to earn the distinction.
It’s no coincidence that a lot of the filmmakers on this list went on to have great careers — the ability to conjure movie magic on a tiny budget is a skill that a lot of filmmakers have been able to scale up, at least when given the opportunity.
Nobody embodies that leap quite like Peter Jackson, a director who learned his trade by finding increasingly gruesome ways to keep horror fans (and perhaps himself) entertained long before he set foot in places like Middle Earth or Abbey Road studios. Take the most notorious scene from Bad Taste, his splatter-fest debut, in which a man falls off a cliff and proceeds to try and put his own brain back together.
If you are enough of a degenerate for that to sound like your kind of thing, there's more where that came from.
The most famous movie we’ve included here is probably Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, the future Spider-Man director’s wonderfully creative and at times truly shocking debut. The story follows a couple (played by Bruce Campbell and Ellen Sandweiss) on a getaway to a cabin in the woods where they encounter various demons and evil spirits.
A few years later, Raimi softened his touch considerably and added a good bit more humour for Evil Dead II (which is more or less a remake of the first one), so if you’re looking to avoid the more problematic stuff we’d recommend starting there instead — but, this micro-budget B-horror classic remains a singularly nasty little masterpiece.
Unlike the names above, Stuart Gordon is still best known for his first movie, Re-Animator, even though he went on to help create stuff like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers reboot. The reason for this was that his debut was enough of a bomb to derail his career and only found its acolytes a while later. In terms of vibe and style, however, it’s aged like a fine wine.
If you watched The Substance a couple of years ago and liked the look of those neon green syringes, you’ll feel right at home in this story of a medical student who invents a glowing, chemical cocktail that reawakens the dead.
If you saw Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma this year and were wondering what to watch afterwards (aside from Jane Schoenbrun’s previous movies and the Friday the 13th series, of course) look no further than Sleepaway Camp, an infamous B-horror slasher from 1983.
Directed by Robert Hiltzik, the first movie in the Sleepaway Camp franchise focuses on a summer woodland getaway where teenagers are picked off one-by-one by a ruthless killer. Been there done that, you say? Perhaps, but few B-horror classics can boast a twist as good as this one has, not to mention the queer cinema undertones that have seen it reappraised in recent years as a trashy, John Waters-esque classic.
The Camp Miasma homage is simply the latest part of that long revival.
If you’re already a fan of the James Gunn cult favourite mentioned above and have yet to see David Cronenberg's Shivers, a movie that clearly inspired it, make sure to add it to your spooky season watch list this year.
This wasn’t exactly the body horror godfather's debut but it was one of the earliest movies in his filmography that cemented his brand. The plot, like the one in Slither, involves a kind of parasite, only this one is made in a lab by a mad scientist who wants to make people lose their contemporary inhibitions. This involves unleashing his creation — a slimy slug that makes people insatiably horny — onto the residents of a wealthy apartment complex.
It’s about as fun and gruesome as it sounds.
After all that blood, sex and guts, why not close out your B-horror marathon with a little bit of B-horror sentimentality. Targets was the first movie of Last Picture Show director Peter Bogdanovic, who somehow made it for a shoestring at Roger Corman’s studio in the late ‘60s, while still managing to convince a washed-up horror legend to more or less play himself.
The main plot, the one that Bogdanovic sold the film on, follows a rogue gunman who goes on a killing spree (it was only a year after JFK, which is one of the reasons why it bombed), but the real story (and really the heart of the movie) sees Boris Karloff play an ageing horror movie actor as he contemplates retirement and, essentially, death.
It was one of the former Frankenstein star's last ever screen appearances before passing away in 1969. It was also one of his very best.
