The disconnect between Audiences and Critics with Horror Films - Critical Opinion vs Audience Opiniom

[Frank D'arbo]

Audiences and Critics don't always see eye to eye.
For example, The Boondock Saints was absolutely despised by critics but went on to be loved by Audiences (20something on RT vs A 7.8 on IMDb.


However, this happens almost all the time with horror films

Here's just a few off the top of my head
Hereditary is one of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the century yet Audiences have given it a D on Cinemascore.
Bug was given F by the same site despite being decently received by critics.
Posessor is in the high 80s low 90s on RT yet a 6.5 on IMDb.

Why do you think that is?
Any other instances where this happened?

 

[R00T]

i think a lot of critics view horror from a more "artistic" perspective. they look into the meaning of what's on screen beyond the horror, while audiences view it from a more practical perspective: "Did it scare me?"

i wanted to use "The Thing" but the metacritic is 57, while the rotten tomatoes is 85 and the imdb is 8.1. i do still think its because the critics are looking at it from a different perspective than the audience.

 

[The Shadow]

i think a lot of critics view horror from a more "artistic" perspective. they look into the meaning of what's on screen beyond the horror, while audiences view it from a more practical perspective: "Did it scare me?"

i wanted to use "The Thing" but the metacritic is 57, while the rotten tomatoes is 85 and the imdb is 8.1. i do still think its because the critics are looking at it from a different perspective than the audience.

Some films- The Thing among them- are also reevaluated over time. It was ignored by audiences and dismissed by critics when it came out, but is seen as a classic today.

 

[DamageJoy]

Critics, general audiences and fans have different tastes.
For example as a critic, you may despise dumb popcorn flicks so you will hate the Bayformers movies, as a generic cinema goer you might enjoy the Transformers movies and as a Transformers fan you will hate it to death.

Same goes to horror, if you like genre movies you might enjoy something predictable. See how you might enjoy the new Alien movies as a generic movie fan, think it as a critic that they are okay and as an Alien and Aliens fan you will roll your eye and wonder why is this franchise not buried already.

Some films- The Thing among them- are also reevaluated over time. It was ignored by audiences and dismissed by critics when it came out, but is seen as a classic today.

Yeah. Back in the day it was panned as a shlock gore fest, but since then it seems like it's an actually darn good movie with themes and stuff like that.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Horror has a particular concentration of bad films with terrible production values, which critics don't like.

 

[White Devil]

Critics feel everything should aspire to be Citizen Kane. Horror fans just want to see gore and tits.

 

[Standardized Profile]

Horror movies usually have disappointing stories and characters. They get about halfway through the story, and sometimes it's quite good, then it's stabbing, screaming, CGI, and gore for 50 minutes. There are many exceptions, but if you look at the whole genre I think a lot of it follows this pattern. And critics don't like this pattern. (They don't like the exceptions either, but that's because they aren't fair to the genre.)

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Critics feel everything should aspire to be Citizen Kane. Horror fans just want to see gore and tits.

That's not true. Horror is not universally panned, just the bad ones, and there are a lot of those.

 

[White Devil]

That's not true. Horror is not universally panned, just the bad ones, and there are a lot of those.

I mean horror is a genre in which truly awful films are actually good, just not in the ways critics usually decide are good. Troll 2 for example, is an awful fucking movie but also immensely entertaining at the same time. Your average film critic is usually an art house snob that wouldn't dare lower themselves to consider something so plebeian can be "good".

 

[Pointless Pedant]

I mean horror is a genre in which truly awful films are actually good, just not in the ways critics usually decide are good. Troll 2 for example, is an awful fucking movie but also immensely entertaining at the same time. Your average film critic is usually an art house snob that wouldn't dare lower themselves to consider something so plebeian can be "good".

That's "so bad it's good", though, which is not the same thing as good. The Man Who Saved The World is hilarious but it's one of the worst films ever made.

 

[Zvantastika]

Why do you think that is?

Critics used to be people that went to school and knew a thing or two about making movies and the general technical details behind them, so they would have an informed view of a movie and they could easily see if the balance between story, actors, pacing and camera work where good enough, but of course their own opinion of the movie itself would always be a matter of debate because it is their own taste after all and we all differ in that one. So a critic would simply bring up points of "maybe this movie could had done better with different actors" or "the pacing was too rushed for a thriller" and those criticisms would be valid because they might be based on facts such as past thriller movies having a slower pacing in general and actors who had a history of being bad, but going into the "I don't like the story because it is boring" territory would make it more of an opinion rather than a criticism because it's not based on something factual but merely emotional.

We now jump to current day where you don't need anything to be a critic and you can see the problem. Not saying that every single critic on those sites is a random fag who just happened to have the critic label just because the idiot have been writing rants for a while now, but it does happen a lot, just click on their names and you'll see that all they have to show is that they have been writting for other trash sites but nothing else, no merits of anything or any mention of a cinematography school.

Now that we know that lots of current critics are trash because they are ignorant and emotional on a profession that requires education and a cool leveled head, we jump into the horror genre. Just as any other genre, there doesn't seem to be a consensus on what does horror actually should be, for some it's cheap jump scares, for others it's the psychological torture, so we already might have a problem on a genre we can not define that easily. If critics focused on the pacing and general intention of the movie itself, it would make sense that psychological horror must have a slow pace and focused on story and scenery, a gore fest horror would focus on effects and fast pacing action, etc, so unless whoever watching the movie understand all of this and can make an educated techincal reasoning on the movie itself rather than "I don't like it because blood makes me nervous, so horror movie is trash", we'll always have huge discrepancies between horror fans and critics.

Any other instances where this happened?

Basically everywhere lol, in movies it happens a lot in any other genre not just horror, like the retards complaining that the Godzilla movie had too many scenes of monsters fighting each other, or the critics bashing Sonic because how dare they not make a deeply philosophical movie for kids who like blue hedgehog that goes fast. In other media it is the same thing, like videogames and its critics, journalists and reviewers who are obviously idiots that either got paid for a good score or have an agenda against certain companies or subjects.


TL;DR : It happens because we lowered the bar and anyone can be a critic now and it happens everywhere because there is always something to review or complain about.

 

[Unassuming Local Guy]

Critics have long been known as self important idiots who only like things if liking said thing makes them look more intelligent or important or artistic or whatever. They only like it if it's "deep", which usually means it's a surface level look into psychology or it's about how evil white people are.

There are only two real exceptions. The first is if they're paid to say they like it. Ghostbusters 3, for example. The second is if not liking it would result in major audience backlash. They always, no matter what, love Marvel movies, despite said movies being completely brainless. Well made, sure, but not worthy of the ridiculous mountains of praise they always get.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Horror is for plebs. I only watch gialli that got the thumbs-up from Cole Smithey.

 

[PaleTay]

Scream the TV show was actually really good , especially for a slasher but got a ton of hate from critics because having the slasher target a woman was sexist.

I feel like most horror is shit, the killer/monster isn't interesting or scary enough, and they don't develop the cast. In the older movies especially, the main character seems like a stand-in for the audience not really being that scared, and than overcoming their fears.

 

[Mexican_Wizard_711]

I can't say much about the critics in the past, but for me, it seems that modern critics are trying find hidden message about art or something. and so get mad when movie doesn't

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

I learned in the 80's that critics hate fun and enjoyment.

With horror, I don't take advice from soy-filled faggots who review movies on the internet. They don't like it because "oh, it was uncomfortable to watch" well... IT'S SUPPOSED TO, YOU IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKERS!

"New and Fresh!" usually means "Sucks and gimmicky" and "Tired and overdone" means "Good solid horror."

And despite what the critics babbled, everyone I knew when The Thing came out couldn't stop talking about how awesome it was. Same with Aliens, Terminator, hell, even They Live was considered good by the people I hung around with.

And if you want to know why you should ignore critics for every genre, just remember what they kept saying about Battlefield: LA, even ones who made cartoons.

They couldn't understand why the alien infantry had weapons grafted to them. "Oh, what, are they supposed to use the gun to eat? LOL!"

No, you dense motherfucker. They're an advanced race with high tech, those are warrior drones, kept in storage so they don't consume resources when they aren't needed, you fart huffing faggots.

But try to explain that to them and they stare at you blankly and then go "Well, that's not how humans do it, so that's stupid."

Fuck critics. They hate fun. They hate enjoyment. They want everything to have meaning, preferably Commie meaning, and to have their existence validated.

Fuck you, I'm paying money. They're dancing monkeys and that's it, so they better get to dancing.

 

[albert chan]

Horror films have always been a unique genre, but I think it’s because they try to make horror into such a realistic point of view that it loses the appeal of what makes horror “horror”. If anything, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and “US” proved this.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

Horror is a lot like comedy in that there is a vast gulf between what critics look for and what your average Joe wants out of it. Like comedy, horror is very cheap to make; even the stuff that gets high critical praise barely costs $10 million to make so it's a ridiculously profitable genre. And often what's profitable is the kind of cheap thrill or slasher stuff critics hate with a passion. A good comparison would be Adam Sandler's body of work, especially his early stuff like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Those movies were despised by critics upon release but they made a shitload of money and there are normal people who at least like Adam Sandler's early stuff. Friday the 13th is the same way; you had critics who railed against them, including Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel who flat out advocated boycotting Paramount, but Friday the 13th became a huge moneymaker for Paramount which is why they squeezed 8 movies in the space of 9 years.

This isn't even getting to the moral busybody stuff critics have been trying to pull for decades. Peeping Tom for example got slammed as some morally reprehensible piece of garbage when, if you actually watch the movie, was an interesting psychological thriller that calls into question the voyeuristic nature of watching movies. Then of course there were the splatterhouse and slasher movies in the 70s and 80s. To your average horror fan, those kinds of movies are just dumb fun, but to critics at the time they were disgusting filth.

There are major exceptions to the rule of course; some horror movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and even The Evil Dead received unanimous praise by critics. Even so, your average critic is the exact person horror doesn't cater to, so you'll often see a huge divide between what the critics say and what the horror fans say.

 

[Next Task]

Firstly, Hereditary is awesome.

Secondly, I think there's this mindset that critics get into the longer they've been reviewing, where they prize novelty more and more. Seeing so many films, a fair amount of them are basically the same - and that's definitely true for horror. So because they see more films than most people, they become much less interested in the same thing, even if it's done decently, and more taken with things that are surprising, or different, or take big risks even if they don't really pull them off. Your average cinemagoer doesn't prize novelty nearly as much - or if they do, they don't have the same heavy film experience.

Add in that horror is one of the most subjective genres and the increase in 'journalists' who are ideologues who demand everything Makes A Statement that they agree with, and the disconnect becomes more pronounced. But then, most of the horror films I've seen recently I would say were fairly reviewed, at least from the general gist I got from Rotten Tomatoes. The ones that I thought were over-praised weren't bad, just usually being reviewed by people who placed greater importance on those things, like novelty, allegory and artiness. Decent films but not the amazing works of art they were claimed to be.

Jordan Peele's films are a good example. I should rewatch Get Out at some point, because it didn't feel like the plot actually worked once the twist is properly revealed - but it had some very good performances and aspects to it. And I greatly enjoyed Us - up until the last 15 minutes and the ending, which I thought didn't work at all. Both good films, though with flaws - yet he was being hailed as the Next Great Filmmaker, a new Hitchcock or Kubrick.

It's obvious why he's overpraised, even as I think he's a good filmmaker. But that's more an example of the third reason I suggested for this disconnect than the first one, though considering these are mainstream reviewers, the presence of a minority genre filmmaker is likely a novelty as well. Which, to be fair, horror isn't known for its prominent black auteurs, considering the closest analogue is likely M Night Shyamalan.

 

[Fek]

Critics have been up their own ass since as far back as I can remember. They hate fun and especially whatever niche audiences tend to like. I just picture each one of them as some contrarian sneering Frenchman, frankly. You seen Monty Python and The Holy Grail?

Yeah..basically that.

Get Out

I never understood why that was supposedly a horror movie. To me, it played out like some black dude's fever dream about upper-middle class white America. I actually found it far more hilarious than any comedy I had seen in quite a while at the time. Maybe more of a horror-comedy ala Gremlins, or something?