As entertaining as they are, some scary movies have more than their share of narrative issues,
and if you pull at one plot thread, the whole story starts to unravel. From slasher classics
to zombie blockbusters, these are the horror movies with some of the biggest plot holes.
John Carpenter's Halloween is a horror classic that spawned an entire franchise. It's a perfect
example of the slasher genre that became so popular in the 1970s and '80s. Even today,
people still wear Michael Myers' infamous mask on Halloween. In the world of horror movies,
the mask has become iconic even if you've never seen the film, you've probably seen the mask.
Oddly enough, a mistake involving the mask creates a plot hole within the original film.
Michael is seen wearing it several times before someone actually breaks into a hardware store
and steals some masks along with a couple other items on every serial killer's shopping list.
The mysterious thief is clearly supposed to be Michael, but the timeline is backward.
It might make sense if there were actually two killers running around wearing the same mask,
but that is definitely not the narrative of Halloween. This could have been easily
remedied by including the incident in the hardware store before Michael was ever shown
wearing the mask but, for some reason, the filmmakers didn't think this was necessary.
In the 1986 remake of The Fly, rogue scientist Seth Brundle believes he has invented a way for
humans to teleport between locations. He hopes that his two "telepods" will make this possible,
and he thinks that he's getting very close to victory. However,
they're not perfect just yet. He tests them out with a baboon that results in the
animal being turned inside out. Somehow, he's confident enough to try teleporting himself.
Unfortunately, his experiment goes horribly wrong. A fly slips into the telepod during
the experiment. Over the following days, he realizes that his DNA has merged with the insect,
and Brundle is rapidly transforming into a bizarre new hybrid.
So, if multiple organisms enter the telepod together, they can merge into one but this
explanation doesn't actually hold up under scrutiny. Technically, the telepod would
be full of invisible bacteria as well. So if the machine had the power to combine the DNA
of multiple living creatures, Brundle should have become some sort of human-fly-bacteria
hybrid. He would transform into an even stranger creature than he becomes in the film's final act.
In any long-running franchise, fans are bound to spot a few contradictions and continuity issues,
and the Friday the 13th films are no exception. With 12 movies, a TV series, and a few
novelizations and comic books, the iconic villain Jason has been terrorizing people for decades.
In 2003, horror fans saw Jason face off against Freddy Krueger
from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the film Freddy vs. Jason.
As the two battle it out, Freddy uses Jason's biggest weakness against him: water. Supposedly,
Jason is terrified of water because of what happened to him at Crystal Lake as a child.
But this left longtime fans confused. In the original Friday the 13th movie,
audiences see Jason in the Lake. He's no stranger to the water, and in later films,
Jason finds himself in heavy rain and lakes more than once. It just doesn't seem likely
that Jason suddenly developed an intense fear of water when he came face to face with Freddy.
There's one particular scene in The Lost World: Jurassic Park that still causes debate
decades after the movie's release. Towards the end of the film, the S.S. Venture crashes into
a dock while transporting a captured T-Rex. It's quickly revealed that all the crew members have
been killed. It's implied that the T-Rex on the ship was responsible for the carnage. However,
the T-Rex is still contained in the cargo hold, and the ship hasn't sustained any major
damage not even the control room where the crew was killed. There's really no
satisfactory explanation for it within the film. However, there is one popular theory.
Some fans believe that velociraptors were able to board the ship and kill the crew. Also,
a raptor is small enough to realistically fit into the control room, so this explanation makes more
sense than a giant T-Rex squeezing in. But in the final cut of the film, nothing was added to
fill that gap in the narrative, and viewers were left wondering how a murderous T-Rex managed to
let itself out of a cage, slay a ship full of people, and then cleverly lock itself back in.
"Life, uh, finds a way."
In Signs, aliens invade Earth but as it turns out, they have a specific weakness that makes
them relatively easy to defeat. After his home is infiltrated, Graham Hess tries to
protect his family from the invaders with little success. It looks like the end is near until his
brother Merrill hits an alien with a baseball bat and knocks it against a glass of water.
Surprisingly, the liquid burns its skin, and they realize that water is fatal to the aliens.
Here's the problem: if these aliens were really "allergic" to water,
they would have perished shortly after entering Earth's atmosphere because,
as anyone with a basic understanding of science knows, water vapor is present in the air.
We can't help but wonder if all of their ships landed in areas without any rainfall
or high humidity. Plus, shouldn't an advanced civilization capable of
space travel have realized that Earth mostly consists of something that is deadly to them?
The "twist" at the end can be shocking when you're caught up in the excitement of the story
but only if you don't think about it too hard.
It's also odd that this revelation was actually discussed earlier in the film.
"I heard a theory that, uh, they don't like places near water."
You'd think that everyone would be prepared to take on the aliens with buckets of water
and squirt guns but, of course, that would have been a very different movie.
In Zombieland, the protagonists have all been dodging the undead for a few months by the time we
meet up with them: Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock know that they need to keep their
wits about them at all times. That makes their decision to let loose at an abandoned amusement
park come across as pretty out of character for all of them. Wichita and Little Rock have heard
that there aren't any zombies in the area, but it seems unlikely that they would all be
on board for this plan especially since the park doesn't measure up to Tallahassee's standards.
"That place totally blows."
Eventually, Wichita and Little Rock get the lights and the rides up and running, which
begs another question how is power still being supplied to the park in this post-apocalyptic
society? Naturally, zombies begin flocking to the noise and lights of the park,
and the group has to escape. It all makes for a dramatic scene,
but it's not like the foursome never makes mistakes when it comes to protecting themselves.
However, this just feels like they were looking for trouble when they should have known better.
A Quiet Place is centered around a unique concept the world has been invaded by some
sort of alien species that hunts solely with their sense of hearing. The Abbott family
Lee, Evelyn, and their children Regan, Beau, and Marcus has been surviving by communicating
in sign language and restructuring their entire lifestyle so they barely make a sound. When Beau
takes a battery-powered toy from a convenience store and alerts a creature to his presence,
he is killed instantly which is likely what prompts Lee and Evelyn to try for another baby,
despite the high risk.
By the end of the film, the family has experienced even more loss but considering how sensitive the
aliens are to every little sound, it's remarkable that any of them have survived. We're supposed to
believe that the family has managed to build a soundproof room for their newborn baby,
coated their farm with sand to mask their footsteps, silently harvested crops for food,
and somehow masked every random sneeze without getting the attention of the ravenous creatures.
It's a genuinely suspenseful and moving film, but when you really think about it,
the central premise is pretty thin.
When the writers started working on the script for Paranormal Activity, they never anticipated
that one throwaway line would actually create a massive plot hole within the franchise.
In the first Paranormal Activity film, Micah and Katie worry about the mysterious events going on
in their house, so they hire a psychic to come over and give them advice on the situation.
He warns the couple to avoid negative energy in the house, then Micah attempts to make a joke.
"We shouldn't let you mother come over any more."
Paranormal Activity 3 came out a few years later and suddenly, that quip about Katie's mother no
longer made any sense. A major plot point in Paranormal Activity 3 is the death of Katie's
mother when she was just a little girl. So, it seems that the filmmakers just decided to look
the other way on this one or another plausible explanation could be that Micah is a huge jerk.
Jordan Peele proved himself to be a masterful filmmaker with his directorial debut,
Get Out but upon closer inspection, there's a nagging plot hole in his follow-up film, Us.
When Adelaide wanders into a house of mirrors as a little girl, she's pulled underground by
her "tether" a doppelgänger who is likely the result of a government experiment gone wrong.
The tether takes her place in the outside world. Adelaide, however, suffers in a labyrinth full of
other tethers, who are forced to mimic the lives of their counterparts above ground.
The real Adelaide eventually decides to lead a rebellion. She organizes the tethers and plans
for them to go above ground, kill off their doubles, and start a revolution.
When they rise above, the tethers are all wearing red jumpsuits and carrying gold scissors.
It definitely makes for some striking visuals,
but how did they get the materials or funds to create the uniforms? It's a massive operation,
and the film never gives viewers a logical explanation about it.
Don't feed them after midnight. Don't expose them to sunlight. And do not, under any circumstances,
get them wet. Those are the rules for taking care of the mysterious creatures called the
mogwai in Gremlins. The mogwai can be deceptively cute but their aggression can also prove deadly.
Gremlins is certainly endearing and entertaining, and it's one of the rare crossovers between
the horror and holiday film genres. But the wintery setting actually presents a plot hole.
If a mogwai gets wet, it will multiply, and you'll have a serious problem on your hands.
However, there's snow on the ground during the film and the mogwai are
shown running around in it many times. As pretty much everyone on the planet knows,
including screenwriters, snow is just frozen water crystals.
By the film's own logic,
they should have multiplied like crazy almost every time they stepped outside.
The town would have been overtaken in minutes but this wasn't how it played out. Luckily for
the people of Kingston Falls, the mogwai only multiplied when they touched liquid water.
I Am Legend follows virologist Robert Neville as he struggles to survive in the ruins of Manhattan
after a devastating virus sweeps across the nation. The disease has killed most
of the world's population and turned a small percentage of people into violent zombies.
When the film begins, Neville only has his German Shepherd Sam for companionship.
He spends his days trying to discover a cure for the virus
and attempting to contact any remaining survivors through a radio broadcast.
One day, the unthinkable finally happens: Neville meets two other survivors. Anna and Ethan have
driven to New York from Maryland after hearing Neville's broadcast. There's only one small
problem with that explanation it simply isn't possible. At least, not in the theatrical version
of the movie. After the virus started spreading, Manhattan was completely quarantined, and all the
bridges leading to the island were destroyed. As a result, there is no way that Anna could
have just driven to Manhattan to find Neville. While it's cleared up in the film's alternate
version that not every bridge was destroyed, the theatrical cut still leaves us with questions.
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