How to Make a Terrible Movie

By: Reach for the Sky

It's not easy making a truly awful movie. Sure, you can just write a lazy story, hire actors who phone it in, and cover it up with some tacky special effects, but then you'll still only get a lackluster pop-culture cash-in like 2012. If you want to serious about your terrible movie, you have to apply yourself.

If this is your first time making a crap movie, it's a good idea to start with horror, which is particularly easy to screw up. Now you have to decide if you want to drag a franchise down with you. You could start right off the bat with a new despicable concept, like Drag Me to Hell, but remaking a part of or continuing an already fairly unsuccessful series can be just as effective. Take Final Destination*, which promises right off the bat to be universally despised by an obnoxious almost-but-not-quite-the-same-title-as-the-first-movie-in-the-series that seem to be all the rage these days. It took the series right into the ground with beyond-disgusting gore scenes(one of which even I think was too much), hilariously douche-baggish characters, and dialogue so bad it goes past self-awareness back down into unintentional hilarity. 

Last Friday, Nightmare on Elm St. hit theaters with bold new techniques for making audiences weep for their wasted money. Not content to simply make a terrible movie, or even to ruin a successful series, they actually strived to make the movie as bad as possible while fooling audiences into thinking it would be good. Every horror scene went like this: A teenager would be doing normal teenager things (reading, walking, hallucinating) and they would be accosted by subtle, creepy, atmospheric horros for a bit, which would then be completely shattered by Freddy jumping at them. It could be replicated by watching a screamer on YouTube and watching all the related videos. It stops startling the audience after a couple of times and becomes annoying and repetitive at unheard of levels. The scenes were so blatantly copied from one another they could sue themselves for plagiarism and somehow come out ahead. I once made a stab at Drag Me to Hell for cheap scares; Nightmare absolutely destroys that movie in this regard. The volume of the movie actually felt completely normal for a horror film, after I erected a sound-proof booth around my seat. It topped it all off with a lame sequel set-up, the rotted cherry atop a sundae made from anteater milk. I am not exaggerating when I say that this movie approaches The Star Wars Holiday Special in terms of outrageously bad production.

*This movie was actually quite self-aware, a parody of the Final Destination series possibly. Still pretty bad.