The Best Unintentionally Funny Horror Movie Scenes, According To Reddit
Invite an evolutionary biologist to a comedy club, and two things will happen. First, they will probably pay for drinks out of gratitude, which will help with the second thing: They'll explain the theory that humans developed the ability to laugh as a means of communicating that a perceived threat was actually harmless. It's a hypothesis that Smithsonian Magazine explains in great detail, in case you want to learn more about the idea after you've deleted the evolutionary biologist's phone number.
Maybe that's why scary movies – especially the bad ones — have the potential to send audiences into an uncontrolled cascade of the giggles. Whatever the director's original intent, a slasher flick is always on the bleeding edge of turning into slapstick if it isn't handled correctly. It's this phenomenon that's kept Mystery Science Theater 3000 alive across three iterations, and made Troll 2 the solid gold standard in late-night movie selections for freshman dorms around the world.
And while the demarcation line between camp and self-seriousness has always been difficult to pinpoint, there are a handful of Hollywood moments that live on in infamy, filmed in earnest but executed poorly enough to garner reputations as the worst of the worst. Frequenters of Reddit's /r/horror forum recently broke down a few of their choice examples, and the results were clear: Sometimes a swarm of bees gets you Candyman; sometimes it gets you Wicker Man.
The Wicker Man: the ultimate B-movie
2006's The Wicker Man remake has been a point of fascination for the snarky and the stoned for 15 years now, and it offers viewers two heaping scoops of ridiculousness across its 102-minute runtime. From Nicolas Cage's ... enthusiastic take on the line "how'd it get burned?" to his flat out cold-cocking a middle-aged woman, there's no shortage of cinematic gold. But the pièce de résistance, according to Reddit users, comes in the movie's final moments when Cage, wearing what could best be described as the exact opposite of a beekeeper's hat, cries out to the heavens: "Not the bees," he shouts, his tone indicative of the labor pains one must experience if one is to birth a thousand memes.
Then there's Jason Voorhees and his insatiable drive to wrap teenagers up in sleeping bags and wreck their camping trips. While the sleeping bag scene in Jason X is played for laughs, its predecessor in Friday the 13th VII is as straight-faced as a seven-movies-deep slasher kill can get — even if it plays like a monster beating the dust out of a rug. The 2009 remake inexplicably goes for the gusto when Jason bags up another youngster, this time stringing them up over a campfire like a toasty piñata. Jason gets another mention on the forum thanks to the "booting the stereo" scene from Jason Takes Manhattan.
And of course, it wouldn't be the internet if Troll 2 didn't make an appearance. Between its iconic "Oh my God" and, well, literally every other scene, it shall live on in our hearts, if not our logical minds.