Horror film is rife with 'so bad it's good' slop, but what about those films that are misplaced into that category, on account of actually being good or interesting, writes Derek McArthur.

There is an innate charm to the proudly imperfect, witnessing failure through a mission as needlessly difficult as simply making a good film.

It feels like the ‘so bad it’s good’ phenomenon is a whole arm of the film industry at this point. Be wary of any screening of the Tommy Wiseau drama The Room that hasn’t sold out all its seats.

‘So bad it’s good’ has even become a style unto its own, purposefully contrived to replicate that feeling of the absurdly amateur. Witness the proliferation of intentionally ridiculous, designed-for-social-media fare that followed Sharknado’s time in the viral spotlight. No one walks in expecting pure cinema, and everyone is happier for it.

But there are films thrown into this category that belong at first glance, their quality disguised by shoddy special effects, poor acting, or silly premises, but really have something more interesting going on at their core.

The low budgets and over-the-top ambition of the horror film make it fruitful grounds for this type. Don’t just start laughing at the obvious cheap prosthetics and drama school rejection letter acting; the following films are good. Really good.

Director Herschell Gordon Lewis was a bit of a forward thinker. He realised audiences would not be so gripped by the ghosts and ghouls of traditional horror for much longer. The route to terror, he settled on, was a disturbance closer to home, the........

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