Just about everybody likes to be scared, and October is the time of year when we all become horror fans for thirty one dreadfully gleeful days. But not every horror movie is built to be scary. Some of them are totally gonzo pictures that indulge their peculiarities. Some of them are sly comedy commentaries on the genre. And some of them are so incomprehensible that it's anybody's guess as to how they got made in the first place, in both financial and creative . These sorts of horror movies can still be frightening, of course, but they mostly endure on the strength of their idiosyncrasies instead of how effectively they inspire blind terror.
So to celebrate horror's totems of unbridled craziness, Screen Rant has compiled a list of the 15 Most Ridiculous Horror Movies Ever Made. Our selections range in taste level; some will be too overwhelmingly bloody for more squeamish viewers, while others might just be too deranged. "Ridiculous" can mean a lot of different things, after all. Not every film on here is for every viewer, but every film on here, for good or for bad, smart or stupid, nasty or zany, lives up to the definition of the word:
House (1977)
There’s a lot about Nobuhiko Kobayashi’s cult classic monument of weirdness, House, that just plain doesn’t make any sense on paper. Why, for example, would Toho, the legendary studio responsible for backing many of Akira Kurosawa’s best films, for giving the world the gift of Godzilla, and for co-producing a number of great Studio Ghibli works, ever put its muscle behind a psychedelic, phantasmagoric horror romp? And why did Toho commission Kobayashi to make his movie as a response to the success of Jaws? House (the title of Kobayashi’s original script) probably didn’t quite turn out how Toho pictured it, but maybe that’s for the best.
If the film had gone the way they thought it would, after all, we wouldn’t have this over-the-top gem of wanton comic strangeness to behold and adore today. House doesn’t care about reality. It scarcely cares about making sense. Instead, it goes full-throttle on intentionally crummy-looking special effects, apparently because Kobayashi wanted the film to look as though a child had made it (he took inspiration from the things his daughter personally found frightening), and on screwball terror that, frankly, isn’t actually all that terrifying. It’s too busy being loopy to be scary; characters get eaten by pianos and bitten on the butt by floating disembodied heads. The results are stunning in their comical, outre creepiness.
Zombeavers (2014)
You know that the zombie niche has gotten too bloated for its own good when this is where filmmakers feel they must turn for inspiration: Undead, wood-gnawing, semiaquatic rodents. That’s it, kids, we’ve reached the apex of zombie movies. Everybody pack up and go home. We’re done here.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with camp. In fact, most of the movies on this list fall under that designation, and of those that do, many are worth investing your time in. But Zombeavers is, pound for pound, the campiest of the bunch, a film in which a colony of beavers are mutated into feral monsters by spilled canisters of toxic waste; they attack a bunch of teens staying at a cabin in the woods (natch), who one-by-one turn into beaver-human hybrids as they suffer bites and scratches from their attackers. The beavers brought to life through the absolute cheapest puppetry imaginable, while the hybrids’ buck-toothed visages inspire fits of the giggles instead of the fantods. That’s all by design, of course, but you can’t expect to score points among the B-movie diehard set just by making a bad movie on purpose. “Cheesy” only gets you so far.
Teeth (2007)
Gentlemen, cover your nether-regions. Teeth, more than any movie on this list, is movie watching repellent for guys everywhere, though if you can steel yourself for the film’s gory specifics, it’s absolutely worth a watch: It’s smart, unsettling, and blackly comic, assuming that you find the basic conceit of “vagina dentata slasher” inherently funny. That’s a tough pill to swallow - the gallows humor here works best in practice, rather than on paper - but Teeth is a surprisingly great flick, even if the premise alone is enough to make most male viewers consider ing up with the nearest monastery and going celibate for a while, or for the rest of their lives. If horror cinema has taught us anything, it’s that the vengeance of a woman scorned is never pretty.
In case you’re still not sold on Teeth - maybe you’re crying “misandrist!” as you read this - rest assured that the film’s theme of sexual trauma goes both ways: “Vagina dentata,” which enjoys global mythological roots, is very much a thing rather than a nasty invention of the movies, a metaphor for how mankind is inevitably consumed by mother nature. There’s more on Teeth’s mind than severed man-parts, in other words, though there are many of those, and in light of the film’s slim running time, they come at a pretty even clip. If the allegory here is scholarly, though, Teeth invests itself in a level of delightful trashiness at the same time. It’s a movie that’s as savvy as it is bizarre.
Rubber (2010)
Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber apologizes for itself within its opening minutes, as Stephen Spinella stands before the camera and rambles about “no reason” movies - movies where things happen, you guessed it, for no conceivable reason - before stepping aside and letting Dupieux’s slasher homage unfold. Normally, that kind of meta self-awareness wouldn’t qualify a film as “ridiculous” right off the bat, but when the film focuses on a town under siege by a sentient car tire with head-popping psychic powers, then yeah, the shoe pretty much fits, doesn’t it? Like many other entries on this list, Rubber doesn’t really care about coherency as much as it does about staging sequences in which people’s noggins explode while a tire stares them down.
Frankly, Rubber packs such a nutty plot summary that Dupieux’s artistically-minded interests about cinema detract from, rather than add to, his villain’s gloriously bloody killing spree. Think about it: He shot a movie about a tire that goes full-Scanners on nearly everybody it comes into with, save for Roxane Mesquida, ostensibly the film’s final girl but really just the object of the tire’s inexplicable sexual fascination. When you’re going that far overboard, you really don’t need to make any excuse for your movie’s absurdity, and Rubber is nothing if not absurd.
From Beyond (1986)
Ever seen Slither? Are you a fan of The Thing or, for that matter, Leviathan? Do you enjoy curling up before bed with an H.P. Lovecraft book? Then From Beyond is going to be like catnip for you, a goopy, gruesome adaptation of an early Lovecraft tale first written in 1920, in which a mad scientist creates a device that allows human beings to perceive planes of existence outside the normal scope of reality. There’s a catch, of course, which is that the machine works in reverse, too. In Lovecraft’s story, the extra-dimensional fiends are mostly hinted at rather than shown. In Stuart Gordon’s film, they’re on full display tormenting horror luminaries Barbara Crampton, Jeffrey Combs, and Ken Foree, and boy are they disgusting.
From Beyond feels like a black metal track turned into cinema; it’s insane, figuratively but almost literally, as the monster designs and sheer volume of icky-sticky special effects might push the average viewer right to the edge of losing their minds. It’s violent, it’s grisly, it’s baudy, and it’s an essential for anybody with a fondness for mind-bending oddity, eldritch monsters, exploitative nudity, and body horror. Watching the film, you feel like you’re riding enger to Gordon’s driver, and every second that goes by, he puts his foot down on the gas just a little bit more until suddenly, you’re stuck in full throttle. From Beyond is grotesquely outlandish, and that’s exactly what makes it worth watching.
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Here we have a movie that manages to blend comedy with all-around freakiness; this is the picture that popularized the brain-eating zombie trope that we all know about and love, but which modern pop culture has mostly discarded. Like the paleo diet, the gray matter diet is complete malarky - zombies don’t really care about what they eat, just that they’re eating it, whether it comes from a person’s head, torso, or extremities. (Per The Walking Dead, the undead aren’t even picky about eating humans, either. A horse or a chicken will do in a pinch.) But if you’re the type that likes their zombies chowing down on cerebellums like pork buns, well, The Return of the Living Dead is totally your movie.
Apart from the fundamental comic value of hearing zombies make pointed demands for brains whenever occasion calls (in this film’s mythology, zombies can, in fact, talk), The Return of the Living Dead is notable for actually being effectively freaky. The movie’s most memorable creation, the Tarman, lives up to his legend and then some; he’s an oleaginous ghoul, more horrifying to look at than your average walking corpse. Plus, who can forget the scene where punk rock gal Trash shuffles off her mortal coil by fulfilling her own “worst way to die” scenario? The Return of the Living Dead is equally as well known for its punchlines as for its horror, but the film’s kooky tone pushes it into the realm of the ridiculous quite handily.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)
Note: Coulrophobes, look away. Seriously, stop, right now. Killer Klowns from Outer Space was not made for you. Actually, it probably was, because only people suffering from a deep-rooted fear of jesters and mimes would probably find Stephen Chiodo’s ode to the circus genuinely scary; all the same, Killer Klowns from Outer Space will not be your jam, though for everybody else it’s a hilariously terrible (terrarious? Hilarible?) ride. Granted, the movie really only tells one joke over and over again, but with different packaging - aliens that look like clowns (sorry, "klowns") land on Earth and start capturing or disposing of people using the traditional instruments of the clowning trade.
So they melt people with acid pies, capture them in cotton candy cocoons with their phasers, turn humans into popcorn, and kill audiences with lethal shadow puppet shows. There’s something truly alarming about seeing these age-old amusements turned into lethal weapons, but Killer Klowns from Outer Space is ed less for being frightening and more for its amateur garishness. It’s a fun movie, and an enthusiastically gonzo movie, instead of a scary movie. Just make sure to stay away if you ever had a bad childhood experience at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)
Also falling under the category of “things that kill that do not usually kill”: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. If you grew up in the 90s, then you might recognize the name of the short-lived television show on Fox Kids, which filters the cartoonishness of the film through an actual cartoon. John DeBello’s film might be live action, but in many ways it’s more of a caricature than the TV series based off of it, as well as its 1988 sequel. How so? Start at the beginning, where scrolling text reminds the viewer that audiences laughed off Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds upon its release on the basis of believability, until the case of Hopkinsville, Kentucky’s 1975 takeover by 7 million blackbirds changed everybody’s minds about the film’s authenticity.
The joke here is obvious, and the parody that follows that introductory parable is even more obvious. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes doesn’t go for subtle; it aims for the cheap seats. But what do you expect? The whole thing is a send-up of the very B-movie style DeBello emulates, with a side hammy political satire for Gerald Ford’s much-ridiculed “whip inflation now” campaign in the 1970s. Asking for it to be well-made, or well-written, or well-acted, or witty, or, well, anything other than tacky would be like asking Julian Fellowes to write a series of fart jokes into Downton Abbey.
Basket Case (1982)
The most mind-boggling thing about Basket Case isn’t necessarily its premise, though that does indeed boggle the mind. No, what’s more puzzling than that is the fact that somehow it managed to beget two sequels. Maybe viewers really latched onto the concept: Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) shows up in New York City with a locked basket that happens to contain Belial, Duane’s deformed and pissed-off Siamese twin. They were coned from birth and separated from each other in their youth, leaving Belial with a deep-rooted grudge against the doctors who operated on them. Hence their trip to the Big Apple, where the brothers aim to get a little revenge.
What a plot! It’s emotional, it’s personal, it’s intimate, and in practice it’s just plain looney-tunes. Belial is legitimately scary, even though he’s essentially a lumpy hand puppet with the skin tone of a rotting pear: He’s a ruthlessly brutal killing machine as liable to take out robbers breaking and entering into his room as the surgeons responsible for cutting him from Duane’s side. But Basket Case isn’t a purely scary movie, and it doesn’t try to be. Frank Henenlotter didn’t have the budget to do that. Instead, he aims for pure, preposterous schlock and hits the target to wildly entertaining and nauseating results.
The Stuff (1985)
Horror remakes are just about verboten these days, but if someone felt like yanking a horror flick from the 80’s and freshening it up, they could do no better than The Stuff. We’re more health-conscious today than ever, it seems, what with our growing national obsession with kale smoothies and mega cleanses a film that skewers diet trends and health food fads sounds kind of perfect for that kind of social climate, and what better way to do that than with piles and piles of murderous yogurt? You might crave your Chobani, but what if your Chobani craved you right back?
The Stuff is the kind of goofy you want to embrace rather than shun. Larry Cohen has a sardonic sense of humor that keeps the movie afloat and undercuts its natural wackiness. In the grand pantheon of horror film baddies, “killer yogurt” ranks right up there with, well, “killer c(k)lowns” and “killer rabbits,” though in fairness, the “stuff,” as it’s called, doesn’t kill you right away: First it turns you into a brainwashed zombie. Then it kills you, and horribly. (Poor Garrett Morris.) But if mind-controlling alien organisms that look like blobs of Cool Whip invite credulity, The Stuff is a good enough time that you’ll happily accept its winking nonsense.
