20 Tired Horror Movie Tropes (That Still Have Life In Them)

We love horror movies. They capture fears beyond our imagination in nice 90-minute packages, allowing us to handle the horrors within our imagination that we have to face in everyday life: unpaid bills, the loneliness of modern life, looming climate collapse, or every new dumb Elon Musk idea being treated as if it was worth billions in taxpayer money. But a love for horror movies also has to deal with its well-established tropes. We’ve had plenty of opportunities to criticize the worst ones, or as we also like to call them, “the scripts for Paranormal Activity sequels.” Here, however, we focus on the glass half full and discuss the horror movie tropes that can still spook us. 

Indeed, the thing about horror movies is that some basic tricks can still be very effective. The new Scream, for example, managed to pull off the exact killer-behind-the-victim trope that the original Halloween did so well, while at the same time calling back to Randy watching that very same scene in the original Scream. That’s like a fourth-dimensional, tesseract-like bundle of tropes all intertwined together, and it totally worked. Also, yes, we liked the new Scream. A bunch of you probably disliked the joke about Elon Musk (the Paranormal Activity 9: The Shyamalan Cut of “geniuses”) so yeah, we’re very proud of our 5cream t-shirt. Anyway, you know what else we like? Awesome, still-promising horror tropes like…