10 Worst Pranks Gone Wrong In Horror Movies – Armessa Movie News

While pranks gone wrong are a horror movie staple, the worst instances of this trope feature practical jokes that would never have been funny, even if they didn’t end in disaster. Horror movies are often filled with characters trying to get gruesome revenge on their tormentors. Giving a villain a sympathetic backstory is a surefire way to ensure viewers won’t feel too bad when the movie’s main characters start dropping like flies. An early example of this approach can be seen in 1980’s original Friday the 13th, where the killer’s first victims are two camp counselors who ignored a drowning child in favor of canoodling.

From PG-rated horror movies to R-rated gore fests, scary movies are filled with similar instances of characters earning their bloody comeuppance with a momentary lapse of judgment. Maybe the most common way for characters to ensure their own demise is a prank gone wrong. A classic slasher trope, the “prank gone wrong” consists of a practical joke that is needlessly cruel, blatantly unsafe, and practically designed to maim or seemingly kill the unfortunate victim, thus ensuring they will return for revenge years later. Whether they resulted in deaths, vengeance-fueled killing sprees, or both, the worst thing about these pranks is that they weren’t even good practical jokes in the first place.

10 Halloween Ends

In the opening scene of Halloween Ends, this final installment of 2018’s rebooted Halloween trilogy flips the script of the franchise’s usual formula. This time, the babysitter looking after a seemingly sweet kid is the victim, and the kid is the one terrorizing him. Of course, the child doesn’t think to move out of the way when his babysitter, Corey, breaks down a door to escape the attic. As a result, the child is sent sailing down three stories to his inevitable death while Corey is sent on a guilt trip that will eventually transform him into a serial killer.

9 Dude Bro Party Massacre 3

This one is at least a parody of the trope, but it still merits inclusion because of how deftly 2015’s underrated Dude Bro Party Massacre 3 skewers this classic slasher cliché. In an over-the-top exaggeration of the typical horror movie “Pranks,” a fraternity tries to broadcast a rude joke about the stuffy Dean over the college radio. Instead, they accidentally hijack the air traffic control frequency and cause a pair of passenger planes to crash into each other. While obviously ludicrous, this gag is scarcely any sillier than many pranks featured in entirely self-serious slasher movies.

8 Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II

Like so many slasher sequels, 1987’s Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II has no connection to the original movie. Instead, Stephen King’s heroine Carrie seems to be the primary inspiration for this gory horror movie. After the eponymous catty prom queen cheats on her boyfriend, he gets back on her by tossing a stink bomb under her dress while she is onstage. To everyone’s horror, her dress then ignites like a firecracker, and poor Mary Lou is almost instantly turned into a badly burned, vengeance-fueled ghoul.

7 Unfriended

2015’s Unfriended is a 2015 screenlife horror movie wherein a group of unlikable teens are picked off one by one while sharing a Skype call. The group is held collectively responsible for the death of their former friend, who took her own life after a humiliating viral video of her was passed around on social media. In the movie’s big final twist, viewers learn that the seemingly sweet Final Girl, Blaire, is the one who thought that sharing a video of her unconscious friend after she soiled herself would be a classic practical joke.

6 Sorority Row

While the original House on Sorority Row is an underrated ‘80s horror movie that is worth seeking out, its loose 2008 remake, Sorority Row, is a far sillier affair. Here, a group of sorority girls plan an elaborate prank. Megan’s boyfriend Garrett has been cheating on her, so, naturally, they fake Megan’s death, make Garrett believe he is responsible, and drive out to a steel mine to hide the “Body.” When Garrett stabs the corpse (really Megan’s very much alive body), this entire poorly planned prank unravels, and Megan, inevitably, ends up genuinely dead.

5 Catacombs

2007’s Catacombs is one of those horror movies that isn’t worth seeking out until its killer ending. An anxious American student joins her outgoing sister to an underground rave in the Parisian catacombs, which is already a terrible idea. There, her friends are all killed off as she flees from a masked killer. When her sister and supposed “Friends” reveal that the entire setup was all an unbelievably elaborate practical joke, the heroine’s reaction makes the horror all too real for them.

4 Trick R Treat

2007’s Trick ‘R’ Treat is one of the best horror anthology movies of all time, and this is due in no small part to the segment “Halloween School Bus Massacre.” In this story, an autistic child is led to a quarry by older teens, who tell her a school bus full of kids had been drowned there years earlier. When the kids then decide to terrify this child by dressing as zombies and attacking her, her decision to leave them behind when the real zombies arrive seems pretty reasonable.

3 Slaughter High

1986’s Slaughter High has a lot of problems. Its teenage American characters are played by British thirty-somethings, its ending makes no sense, and its title was a last-minute change caused by another movie using the original name, April Fool’s Day. However, the biggest issue with Slaughter High is the opening scene’s “Pranks,” which explains how the killer, Marty, ends up scarred and catatonic. A string of sociopathic psychical, sexual, and violent humiliations, these practical jokes seem more like torture than pranks and are sure to make viewers loathe the main characters before the movie has even begun.

2 Terror Train

Like Slaughter High, Terror Train opens with a so-called “prank” that would always have been a wildly grotesque crime even before it “Went wrong.” A shy freshman is told that Jamie Lee Curtis’s horror movie heroine wants to get in bed with him, only for his classmates to leave him beside a female cadaver. The freshman falls out of a window to his apparent death shortly after, but again, this is one “practical joke” that wasn’t practical or funny even before it went off the rails.

1 Carrie

The most famous horror movie “prank gone wrong” is also one of the worst since what seemed like a mean-spirited prom interruption instead ended in manslaughter. Famously, Carrie White uses her psychic powers to kill everyone at her prom after she gets a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on her head. However, even if Carrie had chosen to laugh off this prank, the practical joke still kills her date before she even snaps. A falling bucket hit Tommy’s head so hard that he immediately dies, making Carrie‘s horror movie prank one of the least funny practical jokes in the genre’s history.