Horrible horror films:
Quarantine: The only movie with the ending on the cover! I can't think a movie that was supposed to taken seriously but ended up becoming an unintentional comedy quite as effectively as this one. It wasn't really compelling, interesting, or scary, but it's impossible not to laugh when the camera (it's a found footage movie) is used to beat an infected zombie to death.
Saw: Yay, torture porn. I want to make a caveat and say the first movie was actually pretty darn good and it actually surprised me. Then the lesson the series had was "people like inventive traps! Let's just make a terrible narrative to give them more!" and several totally unnecessary sequels ever, the film series is just a messy pile of shit with no redeeming factors.
Paranormal Activity: I'm not going to bother explaining why staring at a room where nothing is happening except for a shadow or something moving until the big reveal at the end is bad, but fuck these films.
I Am Legend: Fuck you, movie. Fuck so so hard. Your cheap ass Hollywood ending completely destroyed the point of the novel and the story to begin with. Instead of being a bunch of mindless monsters who just want to eat Will Smith, in that scene in the novel, the monsters break into his lab - and then rescue the monster he was experimenting on without harming the protagonist. The entire point of the story was that he was the monster, where he killed and captured and experimented on living, thinking things that he thought were just feral monsters and not people. He was the legendary monster the monsters talked about. The fact they completely eroded that in favour of "HURR MONSTURS ATTACK AND KILL BECAUSE DUM BEASTS LOLOL" was just the worst.
World War Z: Okay, full disclaimer; I bought World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide because at the time, I was caught up in the pop culture zombie train and heard they were really good books. They turned out being fucking awful, pretentious nonsense of Max Brooks masturbating his own ego and making really dumb, unbelievable situations that can picked apart with only passing scrutiny and survival tips that aren't based on any intelligible research and rather just speculation; I'm pretty sure most of his ideas would actually get somebody killed in any survival situation, let alone a zombie one. I am prefacing with this because I want to make it clear that my dislike for the movie has nothing to do with the books being better; I actually hate the books more.
Anyways, none of that matters because World War Z the movie has absolutely NOTHING to do with the books and only shares a title and a premise of a global zombie outbreak. That's it. The human wave of zombies was pretty ridiculous (for those not in the know, the zombies run and jump really fast and far and climb over each other's bodies to overcome obstacles like the giant ass walls they have in Israel and somehow spill over without breaking every bone and becoming immobile because they go on to overrun Tel Aviv), but none of the scenes were really scary or effective, and the finale of Brad Pitt injecting himself with a virus to be ignored by the zombies was not only kind of cringe worthy, but when you have some zombie fuck chattering his teeth at Brad Pitt through a glass door and my girlfriend comes home from work, sees this, and bursts out laughing, you are not making an effective horror movie. Seriously, this movie is trash.
Horror films I liked:
The Mothman Prophesies: I absolutely love this movie. It's just a mindfuck the whole way through and instead of relying on monsters and gore, it effectively has the characters deal with inexplicable events and a really dreadful unknowable force moving things behind the scenes. It can actually be pretty unsettling, and I really recommend it.
*Cloverfield: Putting the star next to this because I hate found footage and my enjoyment of this movie came in retrospect, but I really like the premise of the movie and how it just followed average people caught up in a pretty terrifying monster attack and trying to survive. The effects were great, and only seeing brief glimpses of the monster as it continued to be an unstoppable force was pretty awesome.
Alien: The movie starts off painfully slow, but it's a classic, and I have a feeling if I hadn't grown up in the age of Alien vs. Predator and video games and already drowning in horror movie tropes, it would have been genuinely terrifying. I really feel like the game Alien Isolation probably perfectly captures what it felt like for filmgoers in the 70s seeing that film.
The Myst: Probably not a good movie, but it's one that stuck with me largely because of the whole mystery of what happens if you go out in the mist, and that ending was genuinely a tragedy that totally one-upped the books.
Cabin in the Woods: I hesitate to call this a horror movie because it's straight up a comedy, but it's hilarious and it pulls apart horror tropes in the best way possible, and that climax scene where all the monsters are released is movie gold.
Army of Darkness: Groovy.