Bad Titles for Horror Movies

For those who like their humor absurd with a dash of lame, here’s a list of 25-plus-one really awful titles (and ideas) for horror movies. The inspiration for this rather useless expenditure of mental activity goes back to a conversation I had with my friend and fellow horror writer Mark McLaughlin in 2001, when he and I were in process of writing two collaborative stories together. Not incidentally, these are “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic,” published in The HWA Presents: Dark Arts, and “A Cherished Place at the Center of His Plans,” published in Mark’s omnibus collection Hell Is Where the Heart Is and subsequently recognized with an honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

Mark is one of the funniest guys I know, and his years-long experience of editing The Urbanite, one of the finest small press horror magazines around (now sadly deceased), gave him a hilarious window into the world of truly awful titles that many novice writers attach to their horror stories. He told me he was particularly amused at the number of submissions he received every year whose titles were utterly banal and boring even though the authors obviously meant them to be ominous and mysterious, e.g., “The Box,” “The Crypt,” “The Vampire,” and so on. Only a Jack Ketchum can title a story “The Box” and have the supernal excellence of the story itself impart the necessary sense of awesome horror and mysterious fascination to the title. Only a Stephen King can title a novel It and make it work. And only a Thomas Ligotti can title a story “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” or “The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, Citizen of Geneva” and make it reasonable (but that’s a different case and category altogether).

I have no idea why Mark’s and my long-ago conversation came to mind a few days ago. But when it did, I found my head suddenly filling up with lists of awfully absurd and absurdly awful titles not for horror stories but for horror movies. I offer them to you in the hope that you will neither use them nor allow them to be used by others. We already have enough badly titled horror movies to last us a lifetime.

25 + 1 Really Bad Titles for Horror Movies

1. Screech
2. The Mewling
3. Heckraiser
4. Candydude
5. Disco, Monster, Disco!
6. The Bride of Weasel Man
7. Re-Constipator
8. The Gnat
9. Night of the Lactating Dead
10. Prancer
11. Alien Colonoscopy
12. The Beast from 2 Fathoms
13. Arbor Day
14. My Funky Valentine
15. Tales from the Outhouse
16. The Tickle Pit of Doctor Gigglehausen
17. I Waltzed with a Zombie
18. Curse of the Care Bear
19. Heckbound: Heckraiser II
20. Frankenstein and the Monster from Cleveland
21. Rosemary’s Baby-Daddy
22. That Booger Fella
23. Alien, Shmalien
24. Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes
25. Salem’s Sandlot
26. The Lincoln Log Murders