Sure! As if to say “Isn’t horror what you said you wanted?” I think that horror is a tricky genre, because it’s so easy to make, but also easy to make shitty. Most of the movies count on scares being about generic death and violence, which IMO are too inevitable to be interesting. Your average housecat could easily match the sadistic glee of a slasher movie villain with a weeks work. What I realized when trying to write horror screenplays in my teens is that “scary” can be an elusive quality. That what motivates people and what forms the bases of their reactions is where things get interesting. For me it becomes a sort of meditation upon why something seems to press my buttons in a certain way.
Maybe. Many of the examples here such as the best movies of Cohen, Carpenter, Gordon, Henenlotter, et al are IMO competent pulp movies. They are not generally “bad” but simply playing in what is regarded as a disposable pop culture medium. Problems of suspending disbelief occur due either because of excess, or when the ambition drastically exceeds the budget.
Whereas I think of “so bad it’s good” as being more naive. Usually true art brut as a result of faulty premise, severe style-over-substance, bulldada dialog and acting, etc. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come around to thinking of most of them as awfully tedious in their pacing when one is not stoned and riffing them with friends (I miss that so much!). SBIG is not rare, but examples which aren’t also boring are. Most of what really pushes the so bad it’s good quality I think is naive earnestness which veers into extreme absurdity, and that is hard to capture or fake. The key to making an entertaining bad movie is to strive to make a good movie and fall drastically short - not in trying to make a bad movie in the first place. And to not run out of ideas!
