The horror genre is one of the oldest and most consistently popular in cinematic history, but that longevity has seen it fall into a few bad habits. When fans think about the very best horror movies the genre has to offer, they often picture a handful of key tropes. Masked killers, haunted houses, creepy children; all have become staples of modern horror in a way that makes the tropes almost synonymous with the genre itself. While all movies typically make use of familiar genre tropes, it can sometimes — as is the case with modern horror — overrely on certain ideas.
Some of the broadest tropes are vague enough to be applied in many different ways, but there are also certain elements that horror movies have done to death. Recent horror movies are still employing the same ideas that the genre has been using for decades, making certain aspects of their stories feel both unoriginal and uninteresting. While the following tropes might have worked once upon a time, they’ve since become overused clichés that the horror genre needs to swiftly abandon.
Jump scares are one of the things that have almost become a given in horror movies, with films building tension only to pay it off with moments designed to take the audience unaware. Keeping fans guessing about how and when these jump scares will come has become something of an art, but too often, filmmakers rely on the same tired method of delivering them. One of the genre’s most pointless and overused tropes is using an animal to deliver an unexpected jump scare, often a cat, mouse, or some other small and relatively harmless creature. By employing this now-tired trope, even the most terrifying horror movies can make audiences laugh, because it has, quite simply, been done far too many times. Where it once worked brilliantly in movies like Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien, it has since come to feel lazy and overused, and it’s a horror trope we could really do without.
It’s easy for this horror movie trope to be overlooked, because it’s not always entirely obvious. Over the years, the horror genre has developed a bad habit of leaning on the simple idea that victims are unable to leave or escape a location, even when it’s entirely unearned. Supernatural horror is technically exempt because there can always be more fantastical powers at play (such as in The Evil Dead), but more typical slasher films, like Scream, Halloween, or The Strangers, have no excuse. Keeping characters confined to a single building, especially houses in residential neighborhoods, has been getting increasingly unlikely as the years have worn on. Particularly when it comes to escaping killers like Michael Myers, who typically moves pretty slowly, simply running away to safety should be an option. While it would undoubtedly affect the movie’s central horror ideas, it’s a trope that the genre uses too readily, even when all logic seems to defy its efficacy. Horror movies need to evolve past it, because it often seems to prevent any genuine innovation.
One of the cornerstones of all the biggest slasher movie franchises is the idea of the Final Girl: a character (who is usually, but not always, female) who survives the events of the movie despite the best attempts of the killer. While this particular trope works very well in a broader sense, the way it is often employed needs a little fine-tuning. One thing that seems to happen in almost every slasher movie is that the killer manages to successfully wound the Final Girl, often in a way that would mean certain death for any other character. Think about it: how many times has Ghostface expertly dispatched numerous victims, only to seem hopelessly ineffective against Sidney Prescott? It’s a trope that spans numerous franchises, with almost every noteworthy Final Girl in modern horror having been dealt a vicious blow, only for her to survive and beat the killer. It’s not necessarily the entire trope that doesn’t work, but the clear inconsistency with everything that happened prior is both jarring and incredibly overused.
If there is one thing that has come to characterize modern cinema across practically every genre, it’s franchises. The idea that only a select few movies should stand alone, and that most should be expanded upon with sequels, prequels, reboots, or spin-offs has become increasingly prevalent in the past two decades. Horror movie franchises might always have existed, but the notion of exploring every unturned stone in their narratives is a relatively newer development. Even so, it has led to many horror movie franchises forgetting their best ideas, instead dumping huge amounts of exposition on audiences that aren’t always for the best. Many franchises have opted to give fans a greater insight into the villain’s personal story, but all too often, this simply serves to dispel some of their terrifying mystique. While it has worked well on a handful of occasions, this is another horror trope that, for the most part, simply needs to disappear before it kills any more great horror franchises.
Fans of horror and slasher movies have grown increasingly aware of a simple fact: no character is totally immune from an abrupt and painful death. However, there are certain supporting figures that typically fall into specific roles; the boyfriend is almost always the key suspect, the most promiscuous character is usually among the first to die, and any character assigned to protect the prospective victims by watching out for the killer will undoubtedly be killed. As the trope typically only kills off supporting or peripheral characters, it’s not too offensive, but the more you think about it, the more annoying it gets. Taking a character whose job is to be on high alert for a dangerous killer and invariably having them caught totally unaware by that exact person is, all in all, pretty stupid. If there is any character at all in slasher movies unlikely to be surprised by the killer, it’s the one literally waiting for them to emerge, but somehow, every horror movie uses this same predictable twist, and we’re supposed to react to it every time. It’s a minor trope overall, but it’s also probably the laziest, and it needs to disappear fast.
