Sequels already have a reputation for creative bankruptcy. They continue the stories purely for profit, often leading to uninspired plotting and character assassination. That’s what happens when you create something out of obligation instead of passion. However, some examples reach new heights of laziness.

Certain sequels are shameless retreads of their predecessors. Sure, they might swap the names or upscale the set pieces, but the narratives are eerily familiar. Such recycled structures usually result in diminishing returns, sending a clear message that the filmmakers are bereft of ideas. This, in turn, prevents the series from growing. Granted, a few examples admittedly turn out well, but they pale in comparison to the disappointments. Originality is just too much to ask.

Related: 10 Things Famous Filmmakers Regret About Their Classic Movies

10 Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990)

Fans lament the Die Hard series for turning a normal protagonist into a glorified superhero. The original 1988 film sees disgruntled cop John McClane (Bruse Willis) visit his wife during Christmas. Unbeknownst to either of them, a band of terrorists seizes their building and takes hostages. McClane must then sneak through the complex, fighting off crippling injuries to stop the bad guys and save the day. Little did he know that this would become a regular occurrence.

Die Hard 2 once again takes place during the holidays. While trying to pick up his traveling wife, McClane witnesses the airport being taken over by another gang of thugs. The hero narrowly avoids the villains and begins gradually picking them off. Like last time, he uses stealthy ingenuity to overcome impossible odds. The ordeal cements the series’ Christmas reputation, but it also makes McClane less relatable, which completely misses the point.^[1]

9 The Hangover Part II (2011)

The appeal of The Hangover (2009) is how unexpected it is, but that novelty wears off on repeat. The movie centers on three guys who come together for their friend’s wedding. After drinking a little too much at the bachelor party, they wake up with no memory of the previous night and no idea where the groom is. They frantically retrace their steps to find him, but they also learn just how insane they were while under the influence. You’d think they’d learn their lesson, but no.

The Hangover Part II takes the three idiots to another crazy bachelor party. They inexplicably black out for a second time and wake up in Bangkok. Only by piecing together the preceding evening can they hope to find their missing friend and make it to the wedding. The journey either recycles the same gags or replaces them with more outrageous ones. Suffice it to say, this series should sober up.^[2]

8 Home Alone 2: Lost In New York (1992)

Christmas seems to be a common factor in recycled sequels. Home Alone (1990) centers on young Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin). Angry with his huge family, he gets his wish when they accidentally leave him behind during a vacation. He now has the whole house to himself. Although that’s fun for a while, he soon grows to miss his annoying family. Amid that loneliness, he must thwart a pair of bumbling bandits trying to plunder his home. The resulting film is a bizarre mix of wholesome joy and brutal slapstick. The same goes for the follow-up.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York looks different on the surface, but it’s just a new paint job. Although this oversized family embarks on a Christmas vacation together, Kevin boards the wrong flight and winds up in New York City. His dad’s credit card provides some temporary enjoyment at a ritzy hotel, but it’s not enough to stave off the inevitable sense of isolation. Compounding the problems are the same two crooks whom Kevin must outwit with another house of pranks. Given these incidents, the parents need to keep this kid on a leash.^[3]

7 The Incredibles 2 (2018)

People laud The Incredibles (2004) for its unique take on superheroes. The film presents a world where these powerful do-gooders are outlawed due to their immense damage. Mr. Incredible, now a disillusioned family man, stumbles on a chance to recapture his former glory when a mysterious organization requests his help. He embarks on several secret missions for these shadowy individuals, unaware that their true goal is to eliminate supers entirely. They’re not the last ones to attempt such a purge.

The Incredibles 2 opens by reinforcing the superhero ban, leaving the family without purpose. One day, a mysterious company contacts them with a proposal: send one of them out as an active agent and use the positive PR to make supers legal again. This time, though, the one in the field is Mr. Incredible’s wife, Elastigirl. She also loves reliving past thrills, but that fun is cut short when the company reveals its true colors. The CEO’s sister wants to forever tarnish superheroes’ image so that they’ll be permanently outlawed. Illogic aside, the plot is just a gender-flipped version of its predecessor.^[4]

6 Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

Mary Poppins (1964) introduces a magical nanny in charge of two neglected children. With the help of a chipper chimney sweep, she takes them on a whimsical journey of discovery. The party traverses both 1910s London and a fabulous wonderland of 2D animation, complementing the quirky scenarios with a slew of songs. Along the way, Mary (Julie Andrews) brings the children closer to their parents with the calm confidence of an old hat.

The belated sequel, Mary Poppins Returns, makes her miracles a regular occurrence. This follow-up sees the kids from the first film have children of their own. The mystic nanny reappears to heal their strife through song. As expected, the process involves exploring the period setting through both live-action dance numbers and animated romps. The group even has a cockney escort, albeit a lamplighter instead of a chimney sweep. The creators go through all the familiar beats, musical or otherwise. Think of a popular song getting an inferior cover, and you have this film.^[5]

5 Escape from L.A. (1996)

Way to ruin a good idea! Escape from New York (1981) is a dystopian tale where the major city stands abandoned, at least by the law-abiding populace. The sprawling metropolis now functions as an oversized prison for the world’s worst criminals. That becomes a problem when an abduction strands the U.S. president in this dangerous den. The rescue operation falls to a convicted soldier named Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell). If he saves the president from the hellish jail and the psychos within, then he receives a pardon. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, but the sequel nixes that notion.

Escape from L.A. separates Los Angeles from the rest of the country. After a series of tyrannical laws by the president, the place becomes a convenient storage area for crooks and anyone unwilling to support the new regime. Snake Plissken is back on the unlawful roster, but he gets another chance for freedom by infiltrating the city and retrieving a stolen piece of tech. As if the premise wasn’t predictable enough, this tool is in the hands of the president’s daughter. Although the specifics are sillier, both the job and the reward are the same.^[6]

4 Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

In trying to revitalize Star Wars, Disney hearkens back to what fans love. The 1977 classic—retroactively titled Star Wars: A New Hope—introduces a vast galaxy oppressed by an evil Empire. Plucky farm boy Luke Skywalker stumbles into the conflict when he receives a mysterious droid with plans to the villains’ devastating new weapon. Luke must get this bot to the Rebels so that they can destroy their enemies’ terrible tool. Along the way, an aged mentor teaches Skywalker his lineage as a peacekeeping Jedi. The whole ordeal is the classic hero’s journey, but that doesn’t mean Disney has to copy it.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens takes the galaxy forward in time. Despite the Rebels’ victory in the original trilogy, the Imperial remnants regain control thanks to a planet-sized weapon capable of destroying solar systems. An unassuming scavenger named Rey proves to be the heroes’ best hope for success, as she rescues the very droid with the weapon’s schematics. With those plans in tow, the Rebels can scrap the bad guys’ new toy. All the while, Rey gets her own mentor, who opens her eyes to the wider world of the Jedi and the Force. The creators clearly respect the source material, but maybe a little too much.^[7]

3 Desperado (1995)

Humble beginnings breed a bombastic follow-up. El Mariachi (1992) is a low-budget gem about an unlucky guitar player. A misunderstanding makes this musician a target for drug dealers. Inadvertently armed with a guitar case full of guns, the hero must quickly learn to kill or be killed. He finds unlikely love along the way, but both she and his livelihood fall victim to his pursuers. The conflict culminates in an explosive shootout at the villains’ fancy villa. Writer-director Robert Rodriguez pulls off the action flick with a shoestring budget, and its success put him on the map.

He later used that stardom to craft Desperado. This sequel continues the guitarist’s crusade as he pursues the man in charge of the criminal enterprise. While the crooks try to kill the singer, he swiftly mows them down with his newly acquired arsenal. His private war eventually lets him find love again, soothing his pain. However, that doesn’t stop him from confronting his quarry at another high-end villa. The entire scenario is familiar yet fresh, thanks to Rodriguez upping the blockbuster ante and refining his skills. Plenty of directors remake their own work, but rarely as a sequel.^[8]

2 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

How ironic that a time-traveling franchise recycles its storylines. James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) is a tense chase revolving around Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Her son, John, will eventually lead humanity to victory in a cataclysmic war with intelligent machines. To avert their loss, the malevolent mechs send a cyborg assassin back in time to wipe Sarah from history. Countering that threat is a human soldier sent to protect the unsuspecting woman. The premise paves the way for a harrowing action flick where the human heroes outrun an unstoppable adversary. Sadly, good ideas breed copycats, and many examples are close to home.

Most of the Terminator series reuses the first film’s setup. It starts when Cameron essentially remakes his classic as Terminator 2: Judgment Day. True, the killer is a more advanced machine, and the protector is a reprogrammed robot. However, the plot itself proceeds in much the same manner, complete with both futuristic visitors dying at the end. The other sequels also fit that mold, tweaking certain aspects while maintaining the narrative foundation. The only exceptions are Terminator Salvation and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The rest might as well be part of a time loop. Speaking of James Cameron…^[9]

1 Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Avatar (2009) is an alien story with earthly themes. As humanity scours the universe for resources, the explorers come upon Pandora, a planet rich in precious minerals. Of course, the forest-dwelling natives don’t want their sacred environment pillaged for profit. Enter Jake Sully, a soldier recruited to occupy his brother’s alien avatar and convince the inhabitants to stand down. The plan has the opposite effect, though, as Jake soon feels more at home with these extraterrestrial felines, ultimately aiding them against the human invaders. The experience is essentially an overproduced knockoff of Dances with Wolves, but the sequel is somehow more blatant with its copycat antics.

Avatar: The Way of Water shifts its setting while keeping the plot. The humans return to Pandora in a second attempt to exploit its resources. They repeat their prior strategy to undermine the natives through avatar infiltrators. However, Jake and his family head them off yet again, leading to another destructive battle between the natural world and the imperialistic colonizers. Aside from the larger cast, the only major difference is the focus on underwater natives rather than woodland ones. If this movie proves anything, it’s that James Cameron loves repackaging his work as sequels.^[10]

Ships are a major component of fiction, be it in myth, epic poetry, legends, or simply entertainment. Handed down in oral traditions and songs, later transcribed on stone and parchment, ships of the ancients include the fishing vessels of the Twelve Apostles, the Ark described in Genesis, the twelve ships of Odysseus lost during his journey home, Charon’s boat used to transport lost souls to the Gates of Hades, and others. King Arthur is usually associated with his Round Table, but according to the legends he also had a ship at his disposal, of numerous names, Prydwen and Britain among them.

In more recent times, writers have created fictional ships sometimes based loosely on historical vessels as settings for their stories. They have served as refuges and as sites of conflict. Others have been born out of the superstitions of sailors, nautical versions of tales told around the campfire to entertain listeners. Here are ten fictional ships, most as famous as any real vessel known to have sailed the seas.

10. Argo

Argo is the mythical ship which carried Jason and his crew of adventurers, known as the Argonauts, on their quest to find the Golden Fleece in ancient Greek mythology. Most versions of the tale, of which there are several variations, claim Argo was built by Argus, the source of its name. Its construction was sanctioned by Hera, Queen of the Olympians. Amongst its mythical powers was the ability of its oaken timbers to speak to the crew in a human voice, foretelling their future in the form of oracles. The communicative prow of the vessel took the appearance of actress Honor Blackman in the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, rendering it a handsome vessel indeed.

According to the myths surrounding the vessel, Argo eventually killed the heroic Jason, by dropping a heavy spar on him as he slept beneath the mast. In most versions of the myth, the ship which helped find the Golden Fleece is visible today. It was mutated into the stars by the gods, becoming the constellation Argo Navis, visible below the southern tropics as it sails the Milky Way. Only a few of the more than 160 stars which comprise Argo Navis are visible in the Mediterranean, where Argo gained its fame. Astronomers no longer count it as a separate constellation, despite the enduring fame of the ship for which it was named. Eventually broken up into multiple constellations, it is no longer considered a constellation at all.

9. SS Poseidon

Disaster movies were a popular form of cinematic entertainment during the 1970s and have remained so ever since, at least among producers. Their success at the box office has been unsteady. SS Poseidon was a fictional ship created for an early disaster extravaganza, the 1972 film, The Poseidon Adventure. The ship was struck and capsized by a tsunami on New Year’s Eve in that film, which follows a small group of intrepid survivors as they struggle through the vessel in their attempt to escape. Since the ship is inverted on the surface of the water, the survivors must go upwards as they travel downwards into the hull, deep into the hold, seeking the thinnest part of the hull and rescue at its bottom.

There is no known real-life inspiration for SS Poseidon (RMS Queen Mary provided a stand-in for the film). The writer of the novel (Paul Gallico) upon which the film was based was aboard Queen Mary when the liner was hit with a wave which caused a severe roll. Though the ship was never in danger of capsizing, it may have caught his attention sufficiently to inspire the story. Poseidon appeared in additional films, as a continuation of the story and a target for salvagers (Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, 1979); as a target for terrorists (The Poseidon Adventure, 2005 TV film); and once more as the victim of a large wave (Poseidon, 2006). All the films offer the same basic story, with a small party of survivors, drawn from an ensemble cast, struggling to reach a point where rescuers may offer safety.

8. HMS Surprise

Cecil Scott (CS) Forester created the genre of the British naval officer in a nearly personal battle against Napoleon with his fictional Horatio Hornblower in 1937. Eventually, Hornblower became a character of such renown he featured in novels and short stories, film, radio, and television. He, like Sherlock Holmes, became so well-known that some came to believe he was a real person, and the noted historian C. Northcote Parkinson even published a biography of the character, which included a “family tree” of his descendants to the current (1970) day. Hornblower and his adventures became the prototype of other heroes of the Napoleonic era, including Richard Bolitho, Lord Ramage, Richard Sharpe, and Jack Aubrey.

It was Jack Aubrey who gained fame in HMS Surprise, a fictional frigate and later a hydrography research vessel. Aubrey served in the ship as a young midshipman, a captain, and flew his flag in it as an admiral. The small frigate was entirely fictional, though some of its exploits were loosely based on the adventures of real ships of the period. USS Essex had a memorable voyage to the Pacific during the War of 1812, during which it conducted its own refit on little known islands. Aubrey’s version of Surprise had similar adventures in the Galapagos Archipelago, though the circumstances of its voyage were considerably different.

Patrick O’Brian, who authored the Jack Aubrey series, based his fictional HMS Surprise on a real British frigate of the same era, though its adventures under Aubrey were entirely created in the author’s mind. Some placed the fictional ship in the center of historical events, thus altering the past for the entertainment of his fans, The fate of both the real HMS Surprise and that of Jack Aubrey’s favorite command are unknown, though the replica used to film the Aubrey adventure Master and Commander is a tourist attraction today.

7. The Flying Dutchman

The ship known to posterity as the Flying Dutchman is both fictional and legendary. It represents both an unknown Dutch captain and the ship he sailed, at least in one version of the legend. It has been traced to the heyday of the Dutch East India Company of the late 17th century, when the region now known as Netherlands was a major maritime power. Its legend claims that it sails eternally, sometimes attempting to signal other ships or facilities ashore, often with messages addressed to the dead. It is thus known to mariners as a symbol of impending death. Sailors often repeated tales of the ship appearing during dangerously foul weather, usually in regions known for shipwrecks and stormy seas.

It has been claimed in legends, poems, songs, and short stories the Dutchman is crewed by the doomed souls of miscreants consigned to eternal damnation. It sails in search of those destined to join its crew. The origin of the myth is unknown. No less a personage as George, Prince of Wales, later King George V, reported sighting the vessel at sea in 1881. His sighting was reported in the log of HMS Bacchante written either by himself or his brother, Prince Albert Victor (the log was later transcribed by a functionary, and is in neither prince’s hand).  According to the log entry the seaman who had first spotted the Flying Dutchman and called it to the attention of the future King fell from the mast to his death after reporting his observation. The weather was clear, though in repetitions of the story the Dutchman is usually depicted as emerging from storms and fog.

One of the oldest and most well-known myths of the sea, the Flying Dutchman has been the subject of opera, film, plays, novels, and even appears in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, commanded by Davy Jones himself. The ghostly ship and its equally ghostly crew is fictional, except among those who believe the earth and its seas are prowled by evil spirits, eternally doing their master’s bidding while shrouded by storms and darkness.

6. USS Caine

Prolific American author Herman Wouk enjoyed his greatest literary success with the novels The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, both of which were made into major miniseries in the 1980s. The novels tell the global story of the Second World War, largely through the eyes of the fictional Henry family and their friends and relatives. By the time of their appearance, Wouk was an internationally renowned author. His first major success came with his publication of the novel The Caine Mutiny, followed by the play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. The two works described life aboard a fictional American destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific War, and a mutiny among its officers. Wouk had served as a junior officer on similar ships during the war, and knew life aboard quite well.

The fictional USS Caine represented one of 42 World War I era destroyers converted by the US Navy to serve as high-speed minesweepers during the Second World War. Most of the ships served primarily as convoy escorts, training vessels, and cargo ships. Not until late in the war did they actually operate as minesweepers, with a few exceptions. Such was the fate of the fictional Caine, which Wouk crewed with an incompetent Captain, Philip Francis Queeg, and a wardroom of officers which lacked experience and a grounding in naval tradition. Eventually they relieved their captain in a lapse of naval discipline which became the titular Caine mutiny.

USS Caine was entirely fictional, as the author notes in a foreword to the novel, as was the personage of Captain Queeg and the rest of the characters in the story. Interestingly, the author served in destroyer-minesweepers during the war, USS Zane and later as executive officer of USS Southard. One of his major characters in the novel occupies his spare time writing a novel about life in the Navy, as he did during his service. The author also noted there had never been a mutiny aboard an American ship of war, ignoring the three men hanged for planning a mutiny aboard USS Somers in 1842. How much reality Wouk exposed in the fictional USS Caine was known only to him, and those who served with him.

5. Whaling Ship Pequod

The whaling ship which carried Ahab, Starbuck, Ishmael, and Queequeg on their fateful pursuit of the Great White Whale was fictional, though so like the average whaler of the day it could have been any of them. The whale itself, Moby Dick, was likewise fictional, though based on the legend of an albino sperm whale known to whalermen as Mocha Dick. So named because he was frequently encountered near Mocha Island, Mocha Dick proved inordinately difficult to kill and developed the reputation of attacking the whaling boats which exhibited the impertinence of striking at him with harpoons. Herman Melville, a veteran of the whaler Acushnet, borrowed some of the attributes exhibited by Mocha Dick to create his fictional white whale Moby Dick.

Pequod was typical of the whaling ships of the day, self-contained factories for the transformation of freely swimming mammals into barrels of fine sperm oil, suitable for lighting the lamps of Bedford and other American towns. So, Melville incorporated two areas with which he was intimately familiar, using often florid language and Shakespearean drama, to create the novel Moby Dick. The destruction of Pequod was a fictionalized version of the loss of the whaler Essex, sunk following the attack of a sperm whale in 1820. Melville did not include the episodes of cannibalism which occurred among the survivors of that sea saga, perhaps the reason he allowed for only one survivor from Pequod.

Moby Dick did not appear until 1851, near the end of the heyday of whaling as the primary source of oil for lighting. Within a decade, kerosene derived from petroleum became the preferred source of illumination, followed by natural gas in the succeeding decades. Pequod remains a famous ship, its decks trod by the stumping Ahab, the pragmatic Starbuck, and the cannibal Queequeg, in the tale told by the equally fictional whaler known only as Ishmael.

4. Nautilus

Nautilus was the name of a submarine long before Jules Verne borrowed it for the fabulous undersea vessel he created for his adventure novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, published in 1870. Robert Fulton had used the name for his submarine, first operationally tested in 1801. Nor did Verne’s Nautilus predict the submarine; the French Navy demonstrated a test submarine named Plongeur (Plunger) nearly ten years earlier. Many of the technologies described in the novel were in fact of their time, rather than predictions of the future. Some were already functionally obsolete, having been replaced by newer technologies, including the deep diving suits used by some of the characters.

But Nautilus did introduce a technology unknown at the time of the novel’s publication. The submersible used electricity to operate. As such it became emblematic of the future. The United States Navy operated a submarine named Nautilus during World War II, named for the shellfish as well as Fulton’s earlier vessel. When the US Navy launched the world’s first atomic powered vessel, USS Nautilus, in the 1950s, its being an entirely new technology, as was Verne’s fictional submarine, was stressed in the press.

Nautilus has thus been both a fictional ship as well as historical vessels, making it somewhat unique among ocean-going ships. Today, Verne’s Nautilus can be visited in the pages of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, in the film recreations of the novel, and in graphic novels and comic books. The US Navy’s most recent version of a ship under the fabled name can be visited at the Submarine Force Museum in Groton, Connecticut.

3. The African Queen

As previously noted, CS Forester created the character Horatio Hornblower and the genre of the Napoleonic naval hero in the 1930s. He also created one of the more famous fictional vessels of all time, though it never went to sea. Instead, it plied the rivers and lakes of equatorial Africa, under the command of Charlie Allnutt, who also comprised its entire crew. A dilapidated vessel with a motor of questionable reliability, it delivered supplies and mail to outposts along a river in German East Africa just before World War I. Allnutt called his vessel the African Queen, a grandiose appellation given its dubious reliability and seaworthiness.

Circumstances left Allnutt saddled with a passenger, an English spinster, who criticized his boat and person, disposed of his liquor (to his outrage), and convinced him to use his boat in a nearly suicidal attack on a German vessel operating on a lake downriver. As they cruised downriver, enduring brutal heat and humidity, lousy food, getting lost, both rapids and shallows, leeches, and worst of all, each other’s company, they fell in love. By the end of the story they are married, the African Queen victorious, though sunk through its own actions.

For the film version of the story Humphrey Bogart (Allnut) won the Academy Award for Best Actor while Katherine Hepburn (the spinster, whose name was Rose Sayer), was nominated for Best Actress, though she did not win. The ship which portrayed the fictional African Queen in the film was restored and as of 2012 offered tourists and film buffs cruises in the Florida Keys.

2. Pirate Ship Black Pearl

The Golden Age of Piracy is loosely defined as the eight decades beginning in 1650. During that time pirates roamed the Spanish Main, the Indian Ocean, the coast of West Africa, and the waters off the English North American colonies. The names of some pirates remain legendary, Blackbeard (Edward Teach), Bartholomew Roberts, Captain William Kidd, Stede Bonnet, and many others. Some of their ships are legendary as well, Queen Anne’s Revenge (Teach, better known as Blackbeard), Whydah (Black Sam Bellamy), Adventure Galley (Captain Kidd), and Fancy (Henry Every, famed for having never been caught). But possibly the most famed pirate ship of all in the 21st century is an entirely fictional vessel, the Black Pearl.

Black Pearl was originally part of a Disney attraction, known as the pirate ship Wicked Wench in the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland in Anaheim. When Pirates of the Caribbean went to film, Wicked Wench went too, renamed Black Pearl, with a suitable back story to explain how it came into the hands of Captain Jack Sparrow. Black Pearl changed hands several times, did battle against Blackbeard and Queen Anne’s Revenge, and proved itself capable of outsailing the Flying Dutchman, supposedly the fastest ship on the oceans. At the end of its most recent appearance in film (Dead Men Tell No Tales, 2017) it remained under the command of Captain Jack Sparrow.

The fictional Black Pearl is relatively lightly armed, since it was intended to attack merchant ships rather than battle men of war. It also uses black sails, rendering it difficult to see at night. Both of those attributes were shared with several real pirate ships, whose masters preferred stealth to combat. Its more supernatural capabilities are shared with several legends of the pirates of the Golden Age, as they were handed down by sailors and storytellers. Most, such as burying treasure, wearing bandannas and walking the plank, are untrue. Although there are claims the legendary privateer/pirate/politician Henry Morgan once sailed a ship named Black Pearl, there is little in the way of historical evidence to support them. More likely it is one more fictional creation out of the minds of the entertainers of the Disney empire.

1. MV Disco Volante

Disco Volante, Italian for Flying Saucer, first appeared in the 1951 novel Thunderball by Ian Fleming, the ninth book of his series of novels and short story collections featuring British agent James Bond. The book was unusual in that it was based on a then unfilmed screen treatment, rather than being a complete novel written by Fleming. As such it was the only of the Bond novels published by Fleming in which authorship was shared, though it required extensive legal action before the credits were finalized. Disco Volante appears as a luxury yacht owned by Emilio Largo, second in command of SPECTRE. The yacht serves to recover stolen atomic bombs as well as providing the means of transporting them to their planned place of detonation. It later appeared in the films Thunderball (1965) and Never Say Never Again (1983), both starring Sean Connery as James Bond.

Besides being a luxury vessel of impressive appointments and power, Disco Volante held a secret weapon. At least the film version did. The yacht could, and did, split into two sections, allowing the forward section containing the bad guys to flee at far greater speeds than the after section containing the stolen bombs. In the novel, Disco Volante was attacked and destroyed by a US nuclear submarine, USS Manta. In the film Thunderball it wrecked on rocks after Bond dispatched Largo in the climactic scene. In Never Say Never Again the US Navy again supported Bond by destroying the villain’s yacht using missiles.

Three vessels were used to portray the Thunderball version of the yacht, one of which was later used as a houseboat in Florida. In Never Say Never Again the vessel was portrayed by the superyacht Nabila, owned at the time by Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. A line in the film’s credits reads “Thanks A. K.”. It was purchased in the late 1980s by Donald Trump ($29 million), who renamed it Trump Princess and later sold it at a loss of $9 million to another Saudi, who renamed it Kingdom 5KR. As of 2022 it is still owned by Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, and is 96th on the list of the largest yachts in the world.

Isn’t it always enjoyable to watch actors fighting with bad guys on screen to rescue their girlfriends or daughters or for any good reason? But, what if they fight in real life, and that too, on film set itself, with co-actors or crew-members? We all enjoy the videos or news of the paparazzi getting beaten by some actors or actresses and making a sensation on Twitter or any other social media.

But that’s not all; some actors are famous more for their controversies than their acting skills. This time the countdown will be for the on film-set rivalries between actors and other members of the film’s team. Some nasty but epic moments below will definitely make you think twice before you want to have a date with them in your dreams again, like you always think of going to the Hawaii Islands with your favorite star.

Yes, they can also creep you out instead of making your “once in a lifetime evening” wonderful if they carry the same mood they pursue on sets. So have a glass of your favorite cola with some cheese popcorn to enjoy reading the way some actors behave on the set. And here is the list of actors who are outrageously infamous because of their bizarre behavior on film set.

The 10 Bizarre Behaved Celebrities On Film Set:

10. Steven Seagal

True Godfather of mixed martial arts, Sensei Steven Seagal, is famous for treating co-stars and stuntmen like a bully. Kicking stuntmen in between thighs is a normal thing for him, just to see if they’re wearing cups or not. On the set of Executive Decision, 1996, he attacked John Leguizamo, who is just a tom thumb with 5′ 8″ 70 kg in front of the Himalayan build of Seagal, just to prove who the real lion on the set was.

When everyone was rehearsing for the film where John Leguizamo was playing role of Seagal’s Master Sergeant, Seagal suddenly appeared and declared making some new laws on set, according to his wish, just to prove that he’s in command. Knowing about his characteristic behavior, no one objected other than John. When Leguizamo laughed at him for the absurd attitude Seagal had shown a minute ago, the Sensei Seagal Taekwondo’ed John’s bum against the brick and hit him hard with his elbow.

9. George Clooney

The salt and pepper guy from “Ocean’s 13”, George Clooney, got into a royal rumble with director David O. Russell during a shoot for “Three Kings”, 1999. American film director, screenwriter, and producer, David Owen Russell is pretty well-known for his back to back three-time academy nomination and also for his bad behavior with stars like Lily Tomlin.

Five years before Russell fought a heavy fight with Lily Tomlin, he inaugurated his ‘fight with stars’ syndrome with Clooney. When the “Three Kings” shooting was going on a meagre budget, Russell reportedly took his frustration out on crew-members. The silent fight between Clooney and Russell saw an outburst on the last day of filming after Russell grabbed his walkie-talkie and threw it on the ground to show his anger at Clooney.

According to Sharon Waxman, the fight was so intense that the second assistant director quit right there. Russell started banging Clooney with his head and invited Clooney for a hand on fight encounter. Experienced Clooney then replied by grabbing his throat and made him choke like hell till other crew-members had to drag him the other way.

See also: The 20 most handsome men in the world.

8. Faye Dunaway

The drop-dead beauty Dunaway did something hilarious on the set of Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece, Chinatown, in which Faye Dunaway acted great against Jack Nicholson. During shooting, when stray hairs of the actress threatened to disturb a shot, Polanski solved it quickly by plucking away the offending strands from Dunaway’s head without even calling the make-up guys.

Moreover, Dunaway lost her calm when her director refused to let her go to the toilet. With so much disgrace, and shivering with humiliation, she urinated in a coffee cup and threw it at the Director’s face. Polanski’s later memorized her by calling her “a gigantic pain in the ass” for the awful behavior he receives from Dunaway.

See also: 20 sexiest women alive.

7. Gene Hackman

While shooting “The Royal Tenenbaums”, 2001, Oscar winning American actor and novelist, Gene Hackman, was not so easy to deal with. In his five-decade career, he had proven himself as a pretty much high-maintenance actor. in a heated moment on the set, Gene endowed upon screenwriter Noah Baumbach a very colourful profanity, and shouted at director, Wes Anderson, to ‘pull up his pants and act like a man’.

During a chat session after the 10th anniversary screening in New York, cast and crew members recalled their memories about how Hackman was pretty hard talent to handle. His colleagues in that movie, Anderson and Gwyneth Paltrow, both admitted, they were pretty scared to work with Hackman.

In that session, Anjelica Huston also admitted that even she was extremely scared as a co-star. She also expressed she was more concerned with protecting Wes, and said that no one involved with that film had again ever heard or seen of Gene since that movie.

6. Marlon Brando

“The Score”, 2001, was one of the best from Frank Oz. The god of gripping realism, Marlon Brando, got offended by Frank Oz’s direction because his performance as a homosexual crime master was too effeminate in that film. He refused to wear pants on the set and forced the crew to shoot him only above the waist in all the scenes.

Also, he addressed the director as “Miss Piggy” with his childish counter on the set. He even brought a note from his medical assistant doctor, claiming Brando was too allergic to Oz. Oz, just to continue the shooting peacefully, sat in a different room and gave direction through co-star Robert De Niro in an ear piece.

In 1996′s “The Island of Dr. Moreau”, Brando refused to remove an ice bucket hat from his head. He had also put on an earpiece for crew-members to feed him lines and queues while shooting.

5. Julia Roberts

Directed by procreator of dinosaurs, The Steven Spielberg, “Hook” of 1991 was a huge success in box office and also acclaimed by critics. Gorgeous Julia Roberts messed up on set with Mr. Spielberg when she was aged just 23.

According to the New York Times, she fought a heavy battle on the set with Steven, which many people believe was her emotional outburst for a cocktail of drugs, followed by repeated nervous breakdowns after her heart-breaking separation with Kiefer Sutherland.

At that time People Magazine suggested that all the celebrity to visit the set of “Hook” which included Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Prince, just to check if Julia was seriously as emaciated and emotionally fragile as she was rumored to be. The crew-members of that film gave her the nickname of “Tinkerhell” during shooting.

See also: 20 hottest women in the world.

4. Jennifer Lopez

“What to Expect When You’re Expecting”, 2012 is a fun-to-watch flick for couples, directed by English film director and screenwriter, Kirk Jones. Our favorite Jennifer Lopez did a splendid job as Holly at the age of 42 years. While shooting that movie, she, without any good reason, refused to speak to anyone while filming, which spread rumors and anxiety in the entire movie-making process.

After the ‘couple a while ago’ break-up with his boyfriend, Marc Anthony, she was her best to make herself out of reach of the paparazzi attention by adopting the mysterious no-talking-to-anyone way, as she told to media later on. But, just to continue the shooting and her career, she brought “personal handler” so that the crew could communicate with her.

So, if you wanted to speak to J-Lo wearing an unwritten tag of “I don’t talk to anyone on this freaking earth” on the set of that movie, then you just had to talk to her personal handler.

3. Christian Bale

The Dark Knight, Christian Bale, is known as a method actor. While shooting for “Terminator Salvation” in 2009, directed by Michigan-born Joseph McGinty Nichol aka McG, he made Shane Hurlbut famous by behaving very rudely with him.

Everyone got to know about the heated verbal exchange on the set of that movie, thanks to some of the sneaky paparazzi. But, here is the catch: Hurlbut is the man he was assaulting with profanities. Bale later talked about the director of photography, Hurlbut, of how he broke Bale’s yogi-like concentration twice by walking on set during a scene.

Bale shouted and threatened everyone to quit the movie if Hurlbut repeated the offense. Later, Warner Brothers’ executives sent the entire videotape to the film insurer. But, now we get countless parodies of the song “R U Professional” by The Mae Shi just for that scenario.

See also: The 10 highest ranked movies of all time.

2. Bruce Willis

“Cop Out”, 2010, which portrayed a marvellous acting partnership between the Diehard dude, Bruce Willis, and Tracy Morgan, which is directed by popular comic book writer, Kevin Smith. After releasing the movie, on 2011 “WTF” podcast show by Marc Maron, Kevin expressed the way he felt while directing Bruce.

In his words, it was truly soul-crushing. Bruce was famous for the huge amount of time he always allotted after any film for promotion to the reporters and journalists. But, this time was an exception, and he did not even bother to pose next to the “Cop Out” poster for a single photo at any Cop Out related marketing or promotional events.

Other cast and crew members witnessed some verbal fights at the release party where Kevin thanked everyone other than Bruce Willis. Not only that, Bruce was also called a prick by Kevin for his rude and extraterrestrial behavior on the set and during promotions.

1. Lindsay Lohan

When there is a controversy, there is Lindsey Lohan, for sure. No one is as (in)famous as Lohan and Hilton for their bizarre attitude. On the set of “Anger Management”, created by Bruce Helford bearing the same name of a 2003 Adam Sandler film, a 2012 TV Series on FX, Lohan showed how much out of the world she actually is.

When she was cast for “Charlie Gets Lindsay Lohan in Trouble” on Season 2, Episode 12, according to one E! News source, Lohan was a colossal pain for everyone on the set to deal with. From the very second day, when she arrived on the set for shooting, she just did nothing other than holding up the production. The entire shooting stopped because Lilo sat in her trailer and dozed: dozed stalled, and stalled heavily.

See also: The 20 hottest Hollywood actresses.

She stalled and delayed the production every day intentionally, until she’s up and leave for her boyfriend’s concert. Holding everyone hostage for no good reason is the “Lindsay Lohan Way”. She topes the list of 10  Bizarre Behaved Celebrities.

Stars don’t depend on the planets, but the planets depend on them is the universal truth. So, however much capricious they are on the sets, they are always good to look on screen. We have to deal with the stars and their many ways of showing bizarreness, as long as they are good to our eyes and ears. So, go to the theater and enjoy them on screen….Only!!

It’s pretty common for Hollywood to get the rights for books to then adapt them into what they hope to be hit films. With the likes of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games becoming worldwide box office successes, it’s understandable that more book series have been adapted in the hope of being the next big hit. If Twilight and The Hunger Games have shown us anything, it’s that Young Adult (YA) novels can build a dedicated fanbase, meaning that if the first film is done right, a strong case can be made that the rest of the franchise will do well. But what about the first instalments that flopped? Below we’ve got 10 popular YA series that never made it passed the first film. Whether it was bad writing, poor acting or staying too far from the beloved books, these series deserved better.

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10 Beautiful Creatures (2013)

Hot on the heels of the Twilight frenzy, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s Caster Chronicles seemed like the perfect “next big thing.” A similar central plotline to Twilight, you’ve got a human whose romantically involved with a supernatural creature, in this case a “Caster” who will be claimed by either the Light or Dark by her 16th birthday. One review of the 1st book of the series said ‘there’s plenty teens will like: romance, magic, hauntings, and the promise of more to come’ and Publishers Weekly stated that it had a ‘compelling and dimensional mythology.’

Unfortunately, this didn’t translate onto the big screen. Grossing at only $60.1mill on a budget of $60mill, the film bombed. It was even listed in Variety Magazine as ‘one of Hollywood’s biggest box office bombs of 2013’. Sadly, Garcia & Stohl’s work falls victim to Hollywood trying to replicate another film’s success rather than explore and celebrate the unique aspects of the Caster Chronicles that separate it from others in the overpopulated genre.

9 Inkheart (2008)

Beloved German author Cornelia Funke is ‘called the German answer to J.K. Rowling’ with both creating magical worlds an audience can’t help but fall in love with. With a book that sold 3 million copies worldwide, the 2008 film is simply a disappointment. Barely a financial success (a budget of $60mill only grossed $62mill), the main issue with this adaptation is the cutting of a lot of backstory. Naturally, there’s always going to be cuts in book-to-movie adaptation, but the choice of cuts here makes it a confusing film. For an audience who have read the books and familiar with the backstory, the film makes sense. But for anyone who watches the film without this knowledge, it just misses the mark.

The magic that is translated so well in the Harry Potter franchise is not mirrored here. The general consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that the film is ‘heavy on clichés and light on charm’ and ‘this kid lit fantasy adventure doesn’t quite get off the ground.’ Sadly, author Cornelia Funke has the same thought on the adaptation, saying on reflection that ‘a book is like a flying carpet, you give it to the movies and they hand you a napkin and say, “this is the same thing, Cornelia!” but it’s not!’

8 The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013)

In the overpopulated world of YA fantasy, it is crucial for a film to find its own unique take when using a popular trope. Unfortunately, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones doesn’t quite manage to find its place. Referred to by The Telegraph as ‘one of the most disastrous page-to-screen adaptations in memory’, the film was panned by critics despite its box office success. Critics generally agreed that there was no originality to the film. Rotten Tomatoes states that it ‘borrows ingredients from seemingly every fantasy franchise of the last 30 years- but can’t seem to figure out what to do with them’ whilst The Hollywood Reporter states it ‘seldom feels like anything more than a shameless, soulless knockoff.’

A sequel never happened, but clearly the strong potential of The Mortal Instruments series was too good of an opportunity to waste. It was announced in 2014 that the books would be made into a TV series. Shadowhunters premiered in 2016 and ran for 3 series until its cancellation in 2019.

7 Cirque de Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009)

A key problem with making the first film of a franchise is the balance between the ability for it to work as a standalone film and setting it up for a sequel. If you look at Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone or Twilight, if for some reason the production of their follow up films were discontinued, they would still work (and make sense) on their own. Where Cirque de Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant fails is the introduction of several characters that have no purpose in the film except to set it up for a sequel- a sequel that never happened because the film made a financial loss (grossing at $39.2mill on a $40mill budget).

Cirque de Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant combined all 3 books of Darren Shan’s Vampire Blood Trilogy (of the wider series The Saga of Darren Shan) into one film. This has been proven to work with the likes of A Series of Unfortunate Events which was a box office hit. Unfortunately, in this case they focussed too much on the potential future films than the one facing them. As The Hollywood Reporter summarises perfectly ‘one of the film’s biggest burdens is to establish characters and subplots for potential sequels […] the trouble is, too many characters must be introduced in the interest of future episodes without having much to do with this one.’

6 Fallen (2016)

With a devoted fanbase behind the 6-book series, the film adaptation of Lauren Kate’s first instalment made every mistake we’ve mentioned so far. Considering Fallen reached #3 on The New York Times’ Best Seller List of Children’s Books in Jan 2010 (and remained there until April 2011), there was a lot of great source material to work with. Yet it was barely a box office success. Whatever was popular in the book did not translate to the film, with critics labelling it ‘an eye-rollingly predictable romance’ and ‘nothing but a weaker version of everything that came before it.’

Not only did it come across as unoriginal, but it also fell into the trap of focussing too heavily on the set up for future films over the content of the film at hand. Unsurprisingly, no sequel has been confirmed, although there are still some rumours floating about that one may be in the works.

5 Eragon (2006)

Box office success does not guarantee a hit franchise, and nothing proves that more than Eragon. Grossing at $250.4mill, Eragon was the 31st highest grossing film of 2006. On the flip side, it was the 10th worst reviewed film of 2006 by Rotten Tomatoes. There was a worldwide consensus that the film was bad across the board- acting, visuals, writing and faithfulness to the book. Considering the first two books of The Inheritance Cycle were New York Times Best Sellers, there was a wealth of source material to work with. Yet instead reviews labelled it as ‘amateur writing and borrowing from Lord of the Rings’ and the world of Eragon as ‘without much texture or depth’.

Originally, Eragon was supposed to be the first of three films, with the next two to be filmed back to back, but because of negative reviews the rest of the series was cancelled.

4 I Am Number Four (2011)

As the first novel of the Lorien Legacies, I Am Number Four reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List in Children’s Chapter Books and stayed there for 7 consecutive weeks. Despite the 7-book series having a loyal following, the sci fi film adaptation was written off as unoriginal, with ‘bland archetypes and listless recycling of elements from countless other YA titles.’

Although it’s not necessarily considered a box off flop (it grossed at $150mill on a budget of $50mill), any sort of sequel was cancelled. There was clearly hope for a sequel, with reviews stating that the first instalment was ‘loaded with plot devices […] that aren’t fully explained or were seemingly included so they could play a more important role in the followups.’ Despite this, screenwriter Noxon said in 2011 that plans for a sequel were cancelled because of how poorly I Am Number Four was received.

3 Vampire Academy (2014)

Proof that you can’t just stick vampires in a film and expect success, Vampire Academy is nothing short of a flop. With a $30mill budget, the film only grossed $15.4mill and Rolling Stones gave it brutally said the film ‘needs a stake in the heart’. Although many of the adaptations on the list include supernatural creatures, most of them- including this one- fail in their originality. It’s easy for critics and viewers to spot not only similarities but replications of successful series, which is never going to guarantee success. The beauty of series like Harry Potter and Twilight is that they are the first of their kind in a generation.

Whilst the book was voted #4 in ALA’s Teens Top 10, the film only has a 16% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with the general consensus being that it ‘borrows lazily from its predecessors and offers few laughs or thrills to complement its overstuffed backstory’.

2 City of Ember (2008)

The biggest financial flop on the list, City of Ember had a budget of $55mill and only grossed $17.9mill. The saving grace of City of Ember was Saoirse Ronan in the main, heroine role. Critics praised the young actress but found little else about the film to compliment. New York Times writer Stephen Holden said that the ‘talents of Saoirse Ronan […] wasted in the science-fiction juvenilia of City of Ember’ whilst Katey Rich from Cinema Blend said that ‘Saoirse Ronan is a fantastic heroine, but the story and the rest of the cast can’t keep up with her lively pace.’

You only have to compare the book reviews to reviews of the film to see just how much the films lacked the excitement of Jeanne DuPrau’s series. Where the book was described as having ‘full-blooded characters as every bit as good as the plot which would hook readers until the end,’ the film was labelled as a ‘simple minded exercise in juvenile dystopia’ that ‘had been shredded in the editing room.’

1 The Golden Compass (2007)

The #1 spot could only go to the 2007 film adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights, The Golden Compass. Pullman’s series tackles themes of religion and control in a world that is overpowered by The Magisterium (also referred to as ‘The Church’). Although there was some critical debate regarding Pullman’s criticism of Christianity, notable figures such as Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) support the novel and recommended the series for discussion in R.E lessons.

The powerful themes and statements were diluted and redirected the corrupted power away from any religious connotations. The film was a hugely edited down version of the book with ‘focus upon the bare bones’ and ‘removes the very purpose and soul of Pullman’s books.’ Despite moving away from the corrupted Church, the Catholic League called for a boycott of the film, as watching the film would lead to reading the books, which promote atheism. The film was not successful, and star Sam Elliot blamed the discontinued trilogy on censorship and the Catholic Church. All is not lost for adapting Pullman’s trilogy. In November 2019, His Dark Materials TV series was released, which is much more loyal to the trilogy and doesn’t hide the connection between the Magisterium and the Church. Season 3 is currently in the works and the series has an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

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Film trilogies are nothing new. They have certain appeal as far as the film buffs are concerned. Many filmmakers, including legendary ones, have come up with movie trilogies. There are also films that became unintentional trilogies due to coincidental connection in theme or form. Here is the list of top 10 Great Film Trilogies.

10 Greatest Film Trilogies of All Time

10. Dr. Mabuse trilogy

A trilogy born in a span of almost four decades, the Dr. Mabuse trilogy by German director Fritz Lang introduced one of the most known criminals in cinema. The trilogy is constituted by Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) and The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960).

The concluding film of the trilogy was also the final one in Lang’s career. They were mirrors to the social milieu of Germany of their times.

9. Samurai trilogy

Based on the novel by Eiji Yoshikawa, Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Inagaki made a trilogy of films narrating the life of one of the most renowned samurai warriors in Japanese history, Musashi Miyamoto. The films, Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto(1954), Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple(1955) and Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island(1956), document the evolution of Miyamoto from an ordinary man to a legendary warrior.

Featuring the famous Toshiro Mifune in titular role, the movies are known for the swordplay including Miyamoto’s fight with eighty men in the climax of second film.

8. Trilogy of Silence

Greek director Theo Angelopoulos is known for his affinity towards trilogies. Choosing one among them is hard, given their quality. His trilogy of silence included the films Voyage to Cythera(1984), The Beekeeper(1986) and Landscape in the Mist(1988).

They are road movies, more personal and less historical than his earlier films. The silence mentioned in the title is that of history, according to Angelopoulos.

7. Taiwan Trilogy

One of the greatest directors to come out of Asia, Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien cemented his place in the world cinema with a thematically connected trilogy.

The films, A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995) were depictions of the history of Taiwan, which struggled to preserve its identity amidst the successive invasions by Japan and China. Each film portrays a unique period. A City of Sadness won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival.

6. Three Colors Trilogy

One of the most popular film trilogies, the amazing Three Colors trilogy by Krzysztof Kieslowski consists of Three Colors: Blue (1993), Three Colors: White (1994) and Three Colors: Red (1994). These are in fact the last three films by the Polish director.

The films are examination of the French ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The names of the films are themselves an allusion to the French flag. The movies are known for their cinematography and strong acting performances as well.

5. The Godfather Trilogy

Released in 1972, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather redefined the gangster genre. He followed it up with the equally amazing The Godfather II in 1974 and the weakest installment, The Godfather III, in 1990. Documenting the organized crime world in America, focusing on the Corleone family, the three films formed a landmark series in the history of world cinema.

Apart from the directorial brilliance of Coppola, the acting prowess of legends like Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Roberto de Niro and Robert Duvall could be seen in the movies.

4. Koker Trilogy

The Koker trilogy by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is composed of films Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994). The films are centered on the village of Koker, which suffered a massive earthquake in 1990.

If the first film portrays the life in Koker before the tragedy, the next films deal with the aftermaths of the earthquake. Kiorastami focus on the mundane things in the lives to speak about universal truths.

3. Apu Trilogy

One of the most renowned trilogies in world cinema, the Apu trilogy by Indian auteur Satyajit Ray is known for the humanism and empathy it contains. The Bengali films, Pather Panchali (Song of the Road- 1955), Aparajito (Unvanquished- 1957) and Apur Sansar (World of Apu- 1959) focus on the life of Apu, from his childhood to fatherhood.

The basis of the films was a novel by Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. The films featured mostly amateur actors and were made on low budgets but went on to win appreciation from all corners.

2. Trilogy of Faith

Every film buff would have heard about the legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmer Bergman and his Trilogy of Faith. The trilogy comprises of the movies Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963).

These films were not meant to be a trilogy, but the thematical connection, of faith and spiritual crisis, made them one. The cinematography by Sven Nykvist is a particular highlight of the movies. Through a Glass Darkly won the 1962 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

1. Noriko Trilogy

Although a contemporary of Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu didn’t become famous outside Japan until very later. Now he is considered by many filmmakers and scholars as the greatest filmmaker ever and his film Tokyo Story (1953), the third installment of Noriko trilogy, the greatest movie ever. The Noriko trilogy comprises of Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951) in addition to the aforementioned one.

The three films are loosely connected by the character named Noriko, a Japanese young woman played by Setsuko Hara in all three films. The trilogy is the epitome of Ozu’s style, which is an acquired taste.

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Movie buffs know the names behind the music in their favorite films. Hollywood composers usually rise in fame when they get the chance to write music for blockbuster hits, often becoming as recognizable of a name as a movie’s director or lead actor. For example, think about composer Danny Elfman’s long-lasting partnership with director Tim Burton or John Williams’s extensive collaborations with filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Composers are often remembered for their most famous scores, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a vast portfolio of great musical works. This list shines attention on well-known composers who wrote film music that can be often overlooked and underrated. If you don’t know their names, you definitely will know the movies they’re most well-known for working on. These accomplished crafters of sound can deliver quality music for films that do not end up being box office successes, or they can frequently overshadow their own work with another more high-profile Hollywood gig. This list highlights ten underrated film scores by famous composers.

Related: 10 Things Movies Always Get Wrong

10 James Horner—The Pagemaster (1994)

James Horner sadly died in 2015, but he left behind a legacy of immensely successful and popular film scores. He is most famous for his music for two of the highest-grossing movies of all time: Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009). In fact, Titanic had the best-selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time, leading to Horner becoming Hollywood music royalty. Additionally, his popularity branches from his scores for the hit movies Aliens, Apollo 13, and Braveheart, all of which earned the composer prestigious award wins and nominations.

Unfortunately, not every film that Horner wrote music for was successful. The 1994 fantasy movie The Pagemaster, which is about a boy who journeys through the pages of literary classics, was a box office disappointment despite its star-studded cast and colorful blend of live-action and animation. Horner’s score is one of the movie’s biggest strengths. The fantasy aspect of the story allows the composer to shift tones and emotions throughout each scene. He molds his large orchestra to tackle all of the classic cinema genres: grand adventure, thrilling action, unsettling horror, whimsical fantasy, and heroic fanfare. It’s a musical treat for audiences with playful imaginations.

9 Shirley Walker—Final Destination (2000)

Batman fans should know the name Shirley Walker (who unfortunately passed away in 2006). She is best known and beloved for her music for the 1990s award-winning television show Batman: The Animated Series. She also scored several other superhero projects such as the 1993 movie Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and the 1990s-2000s shows Superman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, and Batman Beyond. Walker was a trailblazer for female composers in Hollywood; she earned prestigious awards and held the record for scoring more major-studio movies than any other American woman.

Although Walker is most famous for her work in superhero worlds, she also wrote music for numerous other genre films, including the 2000 supernatural movie Final Destination. Walker’s score elevates the stereotypical teen horror genre with intelligent writing. The composer’s command of the orchestra is on full display with her abilities to establish melodic themes that develop throughout the story (an approach she continued in the following two sequels before her death). The music is perfectly controlled and patient as it establishes slow-building tension and eeriness. It’s some of the best orchestral writing heard in contemporary scary movies.

8 Marc Shaiman—Simon Birch (1998)

March Shaiman is a prolific Hollywood composer who has been creating music for film, television, and theatre since he was 16 years old. He wrote music for dozens of hit movies, especially ones during the 1990s and early 2000s. His most well-known works include the popular films When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers, The Addams Family, Sister Act, Sleepless in Seattle, The First Wives Club, and The Wedding Planner.

Shaiman is known for his ability to write sweeping orchestra music with emotional warmth, a strength that is evident in the 1998 drama Simon Birch about a boy born with dwarfism. The movie was a box office bomb and earned criticism for its overly sappy tone. Despite the movie’s flaws, Shaiman’s score is its brightest highlight. The music ebbs and flows between an intimate solo piano and a sweeping orchestra. The well-crafted melodies and lush harmonies create a score that is full of emotional drama and power. The music is quite simply beautiful in every sense of the word.

7 Danny Elfman – Darkman (1990)

Danny Elfman is one of the most recognizable names in Hollywood today. He has scored over 100 films, as well as signature themes for television and video games. He is best known for his long-lasting collaboration with director Tim Burton, a partnership solidified during the 1980s and 1990s with a slew of popular films like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Sleepy Hollow. Elfman is known for his ability to write music that blurs the lines of quirky, eerie, and fantasy.

Although Elfman’s iconic Batman theme is undoubtedly his most famous composition, he wrote similar-sounding music for another dark superhero around the same time as his Batman movies: the lesser-known 1990 film Darkman. Darkman tells the story of a scientist who becomes disfigured after a brutal attack, develops super-human abilities, and seeks vengeance against his attackers (leading the character to become more of an antihero than a traditional superhero). Elfman’s score explores the same darker sounds the composer uses in his famous Batman music: low droning tones, pulsating drums, energetic strings, swelling brass, and dramatic dynamic levels. Darkman’s score may not be as catchy and memorable as Batman’s music, but both highlight Elfman’s flair for darker epic themes.

6 Alan Silvestri – Contact (1997)

Yes, another 1990s score on the list. Film music reached new levels of grandiose orchestras blasting out memorable melodies during the 1980s and 1990s. Composers like Alan Silvestri became known for strong melodic themes that are instantly recognizable. Silvestri is best known for scoring the Back to the Future trilogy, most of the Avengers movies, and the Oscar-winning film Forrest Gump.

Surprisingly, one of Silvestri’s most intimate scores is for the 1997 science fiction film Contact. The movie is based on a novel by legendary scientist astronomer Carl Sagan and tells the story of a scientist who discovers evidence of intelligent life outside of planet Earth. The film is a large-scale movie that travels audiences around the globe and deep into space. Yet, despite the film’s emphasis on high-tech science fiction adventure, Silvestri’s music is incredibly human. At the center of the score is a lullaby-like piano theme that smoothly rises and falls over top gentle strings. At times, that melody swells to a more majestic version of itself played by the full orchestra before ultimately returning to its softer home. The music grounds the story in the emotional investment of the human characters and not in the potential otherworldliness of aliens (as so many science fiction scores often do). At the center of a bigger-than-life outer space odyssey is a simplistic gentle melody that beautifully reminds the audience they are all human.

5 Howard Shore—The Cell (2000)

Howard Shore is a multi-Oscar-winning composer who has been working in the entertainment business since the 1970s. He famously scored the entire film franchise based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit trilogy. He also scored numerous successful movies in various genres, including The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Panic Room.

Shore’s ability to span genres and moods is evident in the particularly polarizing science fiction horror film The Cell. The movie tells the story of a psychologist who enters the horrific mind of a serial killer through experimental technology. The film’s heavy emphasis on gruesome imagery and unsettling surrealism made the project both praised and condemned by critics. Shore’s music does not shy away from the movie’s dark edge; it embraces it. He incorporates many unique instruments and intricate moving musical parts to shift between seductive exoticism and terrifying tension. Shore’s surprising score elevates typical horror music to new levels of sophistication. The music is beautifully dark and intense, and it is deserving of a brighter spotlight.

4 Hans Zimmer—A League of Their Own (1992)

Hans Zimmer is one of the most famous composers on the planet. He has scored more than 200 projects that have collectively grossed more than 28 billion dollars at the box office. He has written music for some of the biggest blockbusters in recent decades, including The Lion King, Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, Inception, The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, and multiple installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Despite Hans Zimmer’s reputation for epic action music in big-budget movies, one of his most warm and emotional scores is for the 1992 drama A League of Their Own. The film is about an all-female professional baseball league during World War II. A League of Their Own was a success, but it is not typically what comes to mind when one thinks of Zimmer. The music is a traditional Hollywood-style orchestra, which is important to point out when considering Zimmer often experiments with innovative hybrids of orchestra and technology. The score is beautifully melodic and heartwarming. Zimmer masterfully captures the essence of 1940s American radio, the excitement of sporting events, and the dramatic emotions of heartache and survival. The music is celebratory at its heart and remains some of Zimmer’s most endearing melodies.

3 Elliot Goldenthal – Sphere (1998)

Elliot Goldenthal is an Oscar-winning composer who writes music for film, orchestra, opera, ballet, and theatre. His best-known works include popular movies such as Demolition Man, Interview with the Vampire, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill, Frida, and Public Enemies. He is also famous for his personal and professional relationship with Julie Taymor (a prolific film and theatre director).

Goldenthal has scored multiple films that were released with high expectations but ultimately seen as disappointments (Batman & Robin is a prime example). His score for the 1998 science fiction thriller Sphere deserves more attention. The movie, which is about a team sent into the ocean to explore a crashed alien spaceship, should have been a massive hit with its famous cast and novel origins by the same writer of Jurassic Park (one of the most successful blockbusters of all time). Unfortunately, the movie flopped with critics and audiences, meaning Goldenthal’s score went largely unnoticed. The composer uses a creative balance of traditional orchestra (frequently led by a stately trumpet fanfare) and more experimental tones. The result is an excellent juxtaposition of cinematic melodies and eerie otherworldly sounds, seemingly representing both our planet and the mysterious unknown of outer space. Goldenthal’s effective score is intriguing and deserves praise apart from the failures of the movie.

2 Hildur Guðnadóttir—Mary Magdalene (2018)

Hildur Guðnadóttir has earned an abundance of well-deserved attention in recent years. She is viewed as an essential trailblazer for several achievements, including being the first Icelander to win an Oscar, the first solo female composer to win a Golden Globe, and the first woman in over two decades to win the Oscar for Best Original Score. She is best known for her music on the 2019 live-action film Joker and the 2019 television miniseries Chernobyl.

Before Guðnadóttir earned international fame with her 2019 successes, she wrote music for the lesser-known 2018 biblical film Mary Magdalene. The movie tells the story of the titular character and her journey of becoming a follower of Jesus Christ. Guðnadóttir, alongside her frequent collaborator Jóhann Jóhannsson, composed a powerful score for the movie. The music consistently hovers in ambiguous tension in the most beautiful ways. The lingering strings, haunting vocals, and breathy woodwinds create a somber mood that feels simultaneously still and moving. The score never ceases to present itself as a prophetic sound for something tragic and profound. Guðnadóttir’s sensibilities for crafting mature music that possesses both darkness and light are at peak levels in this complex score.

1 John Williams—Artificial Intelligence (2001)

No list of famous film composers can exclude John Williams. His decades-long career of writing iconic scores led to him becoming the most successful film composer in history. Some of his most beloved and legendary music are the scores to Jaws, the Star Wars films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and the Harry Potter films. If someone hums a famous music theme from a movie, there’s a good chance John Williams wrote it.

For all of the prominent scores that Williams is known for, there are just as many lesser-known works that deserve highlight, and the 2001 science fiction film A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a great example. The movie, directed by legendary director Steven Spielberg (a long-time collaborator with Williams), tells the story of a robotic boy who is the prototype of an artificial intelligence being programmed to love. The movie earned box office success and Oscar nominations, but its music is not typically one of the prolific scores associated with Williams. However, it is nonetheless just as beautiful as anything he’s composed. Williams writes a score that contains some of the most gorgeous musical segments of his career. For a composer who is famous for several explosive fanfare themes, his music for A.I. Artificial Intelligence is equally powerful in its restraint. Much of the movie’s pivotal scenes involve intimate moments of the young boy robot experiencing the complex emotions associated with love. Thus, William’s central music theme is a bittersweet melody played gracefully on a piano supported by an expressive orchestra and sometimes an angelic female voice. The theme is tremendously moving, romantic, heartbreaking, and ultimately peaceful. William’s score is exquisite and is a testament to the composer’s mastery of music.

It’s not called “show fun”; it’s called “show business.” Movies are made to make money. It doesn’t matter if you’re Michael Bay, churning out explosion porn year after year, or Charlie Kaufman, making convoluted meta-narratives about yourself making movies; every director has to eat.

Producers find ways to cut costs that help to increase the bottom line. A big part of that is recycling props, and if you look closely enough, you’ll see that almost every film and show in history borrows and lends its props over and over again. Some are placed in movies intentionally by directors as easter eggs or hints at shared universes, while some are put on screen out of sheer laziness. Either way, there are a lot of props that have made the rounds through cinema history, and here are ten of the most fun and interesting examples.

Related: 10 Famous Props And The Actors Who Stole Them

10 Robby the Robot

To truly understand the unique story of Robby the Robot, let’s compare his story to another famous big-screen bot: R2-D2. Like Artoo, Robby was introduced as a unique character in his own movie; instead of Star Wars, it was the ground-breaking 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. Like Artoo, Robby was a real character with a name, dialogue, and personality. But unlike Artoo, Robby’s creators weren’t Lucas-level litigious, so Robby outlived his original franchise by decades.

After Forbidden Planet, the Robby the Robot suit was left in the props department at MGM Studios, and dozens of other shows and movies took advantage of the free droid. Robby, usually credited as some variation of “The Robot,” was in multiple Twilight Zones. He battled the family robot on Lost in Space. He befriended Mork from Ork on Mork and Mindy. He was in Wonder Woman, Gremlins, and even the Addams Family. Now try and imagine Artoo freely given to all those projects instead.

9 Mr. Fusion

The Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor first appeared in Back to the Future. It replaced plutonium as the DeLorean’s main power source, as it was better for the environment and attracted fewer Libyan terrorists. Using ordinary household garbage, the marvelous Mr. Fusion could generate cold fusion energy, a full 1.21 gigawatts worth. Its usefulness didn’t stop at flying cars, though; it also helped power the spaceship Nostromo from Alien.

In several scenes in Alien, the Mr. Fusion can be seen hanging on the wall in the crew’s mess hall right above the coffee maker. While Ripley and the company fuel themselves, Doc Brown’s garbage machine fuels their ship. That, or the prop team from Back to the Future just picked the first sci-fi-looking thing they could find from a Hollywood warehouse.

8 Those Glowy Sci-Fi Tubes

Chances are, if you’ve seen a single major sci-fi film, you’ve seen this prop. It goes by many names, such as “blinking tubes without function” and “dual generators with rotating neon lights inside an acrylic tube,” but you’ll know it best by its appearance: a pair of glowing red future tubes. It is absolutely everywhere. Its earliest known appearance is in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, and from there, it proceeded to…do whatever it does…on nearly every ship in the multiverse.

It’s been in The Last Starfighter, Star Crystal, nearly every incarnation of Star Trek, and even superhero works like The Flash, Lois & Clark, and The Incredible Hulk Returns. It’s no surprise, then, that the online community has taken to calling it “The Most Important Device in the Universe.”

7 Okay, Actually All the Sci-Fi Equipment

The Most Important Device may have competition. Have you ever noticed that the background of every spaceship, research lab, and secret government base is always filled with wall-to-wall giant computers with big, blinking lights? It’s hard to conjure up an image of any famous sci-fi facility without them. They’re actually all a real, or at least replicating a real, computer: the AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central, nicknamed the Q7.

Developed by IBM for the military in the 1950s, the Q7 was at the time the largest standalone computer ever built, spanning entire rooms and weighing a whopping 250 tons. But mainly, it looked cool—specifically its maintenance console. The consoles, or reproductions, have become the default sci-fi and espionage computers in cinema for sixty years, in films and television as diverse as Independence Day, Lost, Gremlins II, Goldmember, Logan’s Run, and WarGames. Google “AN/FSQ-7 maintenance console,” and the search results page will look like the bridge of a Star Destroyer.

6 Let’s/Heisler/Morley

You probably ignore the generic brand labels on the food and drink that movie and TV characters eat. That’s good; producers don’t want you to. Instead of creating new props for every film, producers love reaching into the same standby bag of tricks and pulling out the same few brands movie after movie. That’s why Let’s Chips, Heisler Beer, and Morley Cigarettes each have filmographies that would make Sam Jackson blush.

There is a specific wiki for fictional businesses, and a visit to the page for any of these faux products will elicit a gasp. They’ve been everywhere. Heisler edges out the others in the sheer number of appearances; after all, you’ll find more scenes are built around characters having a beer than splitting a cig these days. Let’s, however, have to be the most famous. Community, in its typical meta style, made Let’s Chips a running gag on the show, often comparing them to “that other greasy brand,” Splingles.

5 Red Apple Cigarettes

Speaking of cigarettes, one of the most famously reused props in cinema history has to be Red Apple Cigarettes, the brand featured in almost every movie Tarantino has released. Unlike most of the entries on this list that were reused to save money, Red Apples are deliberately placed by Tarantino in his movies, denying Morley a handful of precious film credits.

There are a few theories as to why these cigarettes appear so frequently. Many cite Tarantino’s desire to place all of his movies in the same universe; it is true that many already are. Another theory is based on the director’s love for symbolism, positing that the logo of a hideous worm emerging from an otherwise pristine apple is meant to hint at the ugliness within even the most beautiful things. It is also possible that Tarantino’s just having fun.

4 The Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers produced a lot of iconic imagery, including the classic slate grey space-marine armor worn by the titular soldiers. Nearly every main character wears the armor in the film, and most do so for the majority of their screen time. It’s even featured prominently on the home media covers. That’s why it’s weird that dozens of the suits would show up, barely modified at all, in the completely unconnected show Firefly.

The main antagonist of the Firefly series (rest in peace) was the galactic government known as the Alliance. Throughout the show, we see Alliance soldiers more than most characters, and they’re always clad in Starship Trooper armor, just default-issue Mobile Infantry armor from head to toe. It’s unmistakable and a bit jarring for fans of both franchises.

3 That Same Dang Newspaper

There are few props more inconspicuous than a simple newspaper. Who would pay attention to filler text in the background of a routine breakfast scene? Yet one newspaper has appeared in such an insane amount of movies; it’s starting to draw focus.

This prop paper has been around since the ’60s, with a blank front that allows for custom headlines but always the same two middle pages; it’s always open to the middle pages. Photos of a dark-haired woman, a man in a top hat, and warehouse burning jump out at you, as seemingly every character in every show and movie in history is always reading about them. Once you first spot this paper, usually the woman’s headshot, you’ll notice it for the rest of your life; it doesn’t make much sense to engineer an entirely new paper, after all.

2 The P.K.E. Meter

This entry ranks higher than most because the P.K.E. meter from Ghostbusters is a pretty central piece of hardware to the movie. In both films, the ‘Busters use it to detect the presence of ghosts. For a Ghostbuster, that’s kind of a big deal. Its appearance also demands attention, with extendable wings and rows of blinking lights. It’s odd, then, that John Carpenter decided to reuse the meter as an alien-detector in They Live.

Such a specific and literally flashy prop is hard to miss, which is why it’s even odder that it makes another appearance in the tragic accident that was Suburban Commando. Imagine, for example, if the proton packs had appeared in Twins or the ghost trap showed up in The ’Burbs.

1 Gwyneth Paltrow’s Head

It’d be a safe bet to say that the most famous movie prop in history that we never actually see is the contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. If there’s a clear runner-up, I’d argue that it’s the contents of the box from Seven. Spoiler: the box contains the severed head of Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, though we never get to see it. A prop head was made for the scene, however. An eerily lifelike reproduction of Paltrow’s head was made but cut from the ending of the movie. Then the bespoke severed head sat in a storage vault for 16 years until it finally found use.

In Contagion, Paltrow’s character again dies, this time from a deadly virus. When it came time to film the autopsy of her body, producers were able to save a few tens of thousands of dollars and give Paltrow the day off. Instead, they dusted off the old severed head from Seven and placed it atop a dummy. That makes the head somewhat unique in that it only makes one film appearance and yet is absolutely a major reused prop.

“This film is so…” Fill in the blank with directors whose signature techniques have not only encaptivated moviegoers but also left an indelible mark on the art of filmmaking itself.

It’s one thing to make a great movie. It’s quite another to make one in a way instantly identifiable for its directorial calling cards. Here are ten directors whose distinctive styles helped make them legends.

Related: 10 Brilliant Directors Who Were Notoriously Cruel

10 Wes Anderson

The director of such classics as The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is modern filmmaking’s most effectively weird filmmaker. With few exceptions, Wes Anderson movies are more live-action storybooks than conventional films, with relatively simple plots serving as vehicles for ornate typography, elaborately embellished set designs, and quirky characters toggling between outcasts, antiheroes, and flat-out oddballs.

One telltale sign of an Anderson film is that flourish is at the forefront. Characters like Royal Tenenbaum, Steve Zissou, and Rushmore’s Max Fischer are exaggerated caricatures of themselves, faux elitist Anglo-Saxons in exclusive settings. Artistic angles, stop-motion techniques, and color schemes varyingly muted or extreme help add to the eccentricity.

Throughout most of Anderson’s films, one common thread is symmetry, which he tends to incorporate in angles ranging from bird-eye panoramas to single-character closeups. The device serves to make shots simultaneously aesthetically pleasing and somewhat disorienting, as many scenes often seem too picture-perfect to be realistic. Again, with Anderson, it’s typically art first, storytelling second.

Through the years, Anderson’s success has snowballed upon itself in one important way: terrific actors eager to work with him again and again. Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, Adrian Brody, and Jason Schwartzman have all graced multiple Anderson films, with B-level actors like Owen Wilson made more effective by the star-studded cast around them.^[1]

9 Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone is an incredible filmmaker who may also be incredibly insane. But nuts or not, his strategic sensationalism has yielded some exceptionally memorable movies.

Stone’s at his best when using innuendo to leave audiences suspicious of conventional wisdom or convinced of official malfeasance. Any Given Sunday is a strong example. At its surface, the film follows the successes and setbacks of a pro (American) football team. But bubbling barely underneath is the grotesque gladiatorialism that, in an inherently violent society, passes for family-oriented entertainment.

Stone’s bomb-throwing doesn’t always land. Alexander, which chronicled the exploits of Alexander the Great, was a 3-hour, 27-minute snooze, and 2006’s World Trade Center somehow managed to make 9/11 tedious. Likewise, seemingly compelling flicks like 1995’s Nixon and 2008’s W.—released while its subject, George W. Bush, was still the sitting president—simply weren’t very good.

But two films cement Stone’s legacy. The first is 1991’s JFK, which employed Stone’s fanaticism by lending credibility to eccentric New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and, in doing so, helped birth a new generation of assassination conspiracy theorists.

The other is his masterpiece, 1994’s Natural Born Killers, which dramatically showcases the glorification of violence in the then-blooming age of sensationalist magazine TV “journalism.” Here, Stone shifts between gory murder, trippy illustration, and mockumentary to shine a mirror back on the audience. In the end, Mickey and Mallory are as American as apple pie, making us responsible for their Bonnie and Clyde-esque killing spree.^[2]

8 Spike Lee

The industry’s most famous African-American director has lent more than social justice and Black cultural celebration to filmmaking. Spike Lee is also the inventor of a particular type of scene called the double dolly shot.

A dolly is a camera mounted on a cart that travels along tracks, which allows a scene to move without unsteadying the camera. In use since 1907, dolly shots are nearly as old as moviemaking itself.

It was Lee, however, who introduced the double dolly, in which not only the camera but also the actor is dollied. The result is a motionless central character seeming to float as the background glides past.

Lee employs the double dolly quite frequently and for various reasons. Often, the shot is used to take a narrative timeout that allows a character to provide added commentary. At other times, the effect provides a trippy disorientation, signifying that the character doesn’t quite have a grasp on the situation. Invariably, the double dolly disrupts the audience’s conventional viewing rhythm, lending the shots extra emphasis.

Another Lee trait is leaning into controversy. With 1992’s Malcolm X, Lee came under fire for pinning the civil rights leader’s assassination on the Nation of Islam (though this was likely accurate). Most recently, he filmed and ultimately cut scenes showcasing 9/11 “Truthers”—conspiracy theorists who falsely believe the World Trade Center attacks were perpetrated by the U.S. government—from an HBO documentary chronicling NYC from 2001 through COVID-19.^[3]

7 Ken Burns

While other documentarians explore singular events or themes—9/11, the 2008 fiscal crisis, the opioid epidemic—Burns wrangles the Civil War, American westward expansion (The West), World War II, and jazz. These feats, often at least nine multi-hour episodes apiece, are akin to teaching a college course on the subjects.

Period music, grainy black and white photos, war plan maps, mini-personal histories. Add in a narrator and intersperse with subject matter experts, and Burns manages to condense something as complex as the Civil War into 11 hours and 30 minutes of brilliance.

But even Burns has his limits—and his talents extend to recognizing this. For his WWII doc The War, Burns circumvents the impossibility of comprehensively tackling humankind’s broadest, deadliest armed conflict by instead following the true stories of four Americans who, between them, seemed to pop up in nearly every major American battle.

Burns is also cognizant that, sometimes, a topic is not only exceptionally broad but living and breathing. For example, his comprehensive history of baseball, laid out in nine multi-hour “innings,” was released in 1994. Shortly thereafter, the game saw several landmark events, including a World Series-cancelling strike, the introduction of Wild Card playoff spots, and a sweeping steroids scandal that Burns knew required revisiting. So in 2010, his “10th Inning” covered all that plus the late-1990s Yankees dynasty, the introduction of advanced analytics into decision-making, and the end of Boston’s 86-year championship drought.^[4]

6 David Zucker

While David Zucker hasn’t elicited so much as a chuckle in over a quarter-century, he makes this list for two reasons. First, the comedy director has a decidedly distinctive style. Second, he has written and directed two of the 10 funniest films ever made. We’re talking, of course, about 1980’s Airplane! and 1988’s Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

The style is, simply, rapid-fire jokes that hardly let audiences catch their breath between laughs. Zucker is the master of throwing random, spaghetti-at-the-wall one-liners and slapstick and having an outsized portion of them stick. He throws jokes like a flyweight throws boxes—lots of quick jabs, followed up with the occasional haymaker that leaves audiences floored with laughter.

The highlights from his dueling masterpieces alone are Hall of Fame-worthy. An old white woman who speaks jive. An undercover cop posing as an umpire breakdances after a called third strike. An air traffic controller who, as the movie progresses, picked a bad week to quit smoking, drinking, and sniffing glue, respectively.

Zucker is also almost single-handedly responsible for transitioning Leslie Nielsen from an accomplished “serious movie” actor into one of the funniest film comedians of all time, despite often sharing the screen with terrible actor and double-murder enthusiast O.J. Simpson. Here’s O.J. nearly dying.^[5]

5 Quentin Tarantino

Casual, superfluous violence, anyone?

It’s tempting to see blood-spatter aficionado Quentin Tarantino as a one-trick pony—a director whose signature ultra-violent scenes are an attempt to distract from shortcomings elsewhere. But what’s exceptional about Tarantino is that, despite being most associated with bloodbaths, his filmography would be stellar even without them.

This was true right from his directorial debut, 1992’s Reservoir Dogs. Easily overlooked among the bank robbery-turned-mass murder, hostage torture, and undercover cop slowly bleeding to death is a true act of filmmaking mastery: Tarantino manages to develop a cast of anonymous criminals so guarded they eschew names for colors (Steve Buscemi: “Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?”). While Michael Madsen chopping off a cop’s ear to the upbeat rhythm of “Stuck in the Middle with You” may be the film’s marquee moment, the movie’s genius is borne of dialogue, pacing, and suspense.

Tarantino is at his best when protagonists have a clear, evil foil and a mission to accomplish, as such plotlines allow the audience to enjoy extreme violence guiltlessly. In 2009’s Inglorious Bastards, we revel in the scalping of Nazis during France’s occupation as we follow a team led by Brad Pitt at his smug, cocksure best. Three years later, Django Unchained flipped the script on the casual violence exacted against slaves as Jamie Foxx shoots his way through a notorious plantation to rescue his long-lost wife. ^[6]

4 Akira Kurosawa

Over a nearly 60-year career, Akira Kurosawa earned a reputation for being Japan’s greatest filmmaker—and one of the top few directors, period.

Kurosawa left an indelible mark on filmmaking at large, but his working methods were perhaps his most noteworthy legacy. Simply put, he was difficult to work with, from a film’s inception to its finished, theater-ready product. A true moving-picture perfectionist, Kurosawa took command of scripts and lorded over writers and, once in production, had a vision that often took both actors and cameramen dozens of takes to meet. In post-production, he was his own meanest editor, chopping and rearranging until his own lofty expectations were met.

Over time, Kurosawa’s perfectionism became Darwinian: as his fame and reputation grew, his filmmaking teams were drawn from an ever-winnowing pool loosely called “Kurosawa-gumi,” or “Kurosawa group.” It was an A-list director demanding an A-list moviemaking unit.

As a dictatorial director, Kurosawa had carte blanche to create and innovate as he saw fit. In the 1940s and 50s, his groundbreaking uses of axial cuts—a type of jump cut where the camera suddenly moves closer or further away—and screen wipes became part of filmmaking’s device repertoire in subsequent years.

Among Kurosawa’s finest and most influential works is 1954’s Seven Samurai, whose montage-esque build-up, ambitious action scenes, riveting underdog story, and seemingly inescapable situations have inspired (largely inferior) action films for nearly seven decades.^[7]

3 Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese thrives on violent subcultures. He’s a master at deep dives into seedy underworlds that protagonists and antiheroes must deftly navigate to thrive or survive.

The mafia (Goodfellas). Porn and prostitution (Taxi Driver). The mafia again (Casino). Boxing (Raging Bull). The mafia again (The Departed). Mid-19th Century slum gangs (Gangs of New York). The mafia yet again (The Irishman). Scorsese’s stories immerse audiences in an underbelly society—narrowing their focus before expanding upon it extensively.

Extensively, indeed. Scorsese makes some of the longest feature films in show business. Most eclipse two hours, and many approach three. Notably, his frequent use of protagonist voiceovers for context—typically at the beginning of a new scene—is a device to speed things up; without them, communicating that information visually may have made some Scorsese films too long for movie theaters, which have a monetary interest in maximizing showtimes.

In 2019, Scorsese was freed from the bondage of brevity with The Irishman, which was exclusively distributed by Netflix. The result was a three-and-a-half-hour gem chronicling the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.

Finally, like many filmmakers, Scorsese has certain actors he favors. One is Robert De Niro, the other Leonardo DiCaprio, who has starred in five Scorsese films, including The Departed, which brought Scorsese a long-deserved Oscar for Best Director.^[8]

2 Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock is the only director on this list who stands as the undisputed greatest in his genre. Buttressed by Hitchcock’s five Academy Award nominations for Best Director, every other horror filmmaker is competing for the silver.

Hitchcock’s most notable moniker, “Master of Suspense,” is as well-deserved as a superlative can be. His innovative pacing brought unprecedented levels of build-up not only into horror films but other genres. Moreover, Hitchcock inherently understood that fright was more psychological than physical—that the anticipation of something terrible was more terrifying than the terrible thing itself.

Ironically, it’s what Hitchcock didn’t have at his disposal during his filmmaking career—elaborate special effects—that helped cement his legacy. Necessity is often the mother of invention, and Hitchcock—already an exceptionally inventive director—had to find ways to enthrall and frighten moviegoers without repulsive monsters killing in superhuman ways. It’s also worth noting that Hitchcock managed to mortify at a time when abundant goriness simply wouldn’t fly and, even if it did, blood isn’t as scary in black-and-white.

A sterling example of Hitchcock’s ahead-of-its-time brilliance is Miriam’s death scene from 1951’s Strangers on a Train. Her demise has several eminently recognizable signs of modern horror-movie deaths: the “audience fake-out” as she screams in the Tunnel of Love, yet emerges unharmed; the stalker waiting for her to momentarily straggle away from her friends; the hushed deathblow seen through a warped lens—in this case, Miriam’s glasses, which fall to the ground as her killer strangles her.^[9]

1 Stanley Kubrick

Many (including me) consider Stanley Kubrick the greatest filmmaker of all time. Pigeon-holing Kubrick into a distinctive style would be unworthy of his genius, so instead, let’s focus on a common theme. Here, among Kubrick’s most effective directorial devices is his lack of faith in humanity. Many of his films serve as a blunt yet artistic warning that mankind is its own hubris-driven worst enemy.

Take, for example, arguably his masterpiece (“arguably” only because he has several masterpieces), 2001: A Space Odyssey. Released in 1968 at the height of the U.S.-Soviet space race, the film showcases the downsides of technological competition: a lack of checks and balances fueled by one-upmanship resulting in AI too smart for mankind to control.

Not surprisingly, Kubrick doesn’t trust humanity with nukes, either, as seen in 1964’s Dr. Strangleove. All it takes, he surmises, is one paranoid rogue general—mockingly named Jack D. Ripper—to usher in a snowball effect that leads to the obliteration of civilization as we know it. Patterned after a protégé of insanely hawkish general Curtis LeMay—who nearly led the U.S. to nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis—Ripper is Exhibit A that many not only don’t fear nuclear war but, per Slim Pickens’s epic bomb-bucking descent into doom, would openly embrace it.

A Clockwork Orange. Full Metal Jacket. The Shining. A strong argument can be made that Kubrick claims five or more of the best 20 or 25 films ever.^[10]

Our first films were silent, making that era in filmmaking an artistic wild west. Many rules and regulations had yet to be created, mainly because a lot of the accidents that prompted them were still occurring.

In many silent films, lead actors performed their own stunts. Also, in these films, the stunts performed were batsh*t crazy. When you combine that with the stars’ personal lives, which seemed to be an epic mishmash of drama and scandal, you get an era full of stories that just get crazier and crazier.

That’s where this list comes in: bringing together ten stories about silent film stars that nonetheless scream crazy.

Related: 10 Shocking Facts About Silent-Era Hollywood

10 Stunt Pilot Ormer Locklear

Green screens, mechanical rigs, and special effects help actors and actresses with absolutely zero qualifications drift through high-speed chases, fly TIE fighters, and even battle the odd dragon or two. But back when movies were still new, and people’s imaginations were wild, you would just have to do it all yourself.

That brings us to Ormer Locklear—one of the most famous stunt pilots of his day and inventor of such feats as the “wing walk” (which is exactly what it sounds like and obviously absurdly dangerous). After achieving mainstay success as a daredevil superstar in The Great Air Robbery in 1919, Locklear’s hubris would catch up to him when he unsuccessfully pulled out of a nighttime dive for the 1920 film The Skywayman during its final day of shooting, killing both himself and his co-pilot. Sadly, neither of these films has survived to this day, although his legacy would remain.

9 The Falling House—Buster Keaton

Today, stunt doubles are a mainstay in the film industry. Buster Keaton is one of the prime examples of why stunt doubles are a necessity…and also why even stunt doubles have their limits.

Buster “The Great Stone Face” Keaton was known for some of the greatest acting chops in history; he would also become unparalleled in his physical prowess. Not only would he perform dangerous stunts, including car crashes, explosions, and fight scenes without doubles, he would actually double for other actors and do their crazy stunts too.

There weren’t any rules—this is art we’re talking about here! This would come to a head in 1928’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. when an actual freaking house was dropped on him, and he thankfully was placed in the exact spot to pass through a window instead of being, you know, crushed to death. Move over, Wicked Witch of the East, he made this look like child’s play.

8 Jean Harlow in “Kill and Be Killed”

In the 1930s, few silent film star actresses were better-known than Jean “Baby” Harlow. She would explode into stardom as a rich L.A. socialite after an unintentional meeting with Fox executives—while driving her friend to auditions, no less. This “Blonde Bombshell” found further success in “Platinum Blonde,” a 1931 hit that inspired women worldwide to bleach their hair to match…with weekly applications of harsh chemicals such as ammonia, Clorox bleach, and soap flakes. And that’s just the beginning of where things seem to take a dark turn.

Baby was said to have mob connections, had nude photos taken of her at age 17, and her second husband was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head shortly after their wedding. She was also plagued with severe illnesses throughout her short life and continued to film through hypothesized kidney failure in 1937.

Baby died only a week later after being sent home. Rumors about her death would circulate for years afterward and captivate the country just like Baby did. However, it’s not so unbelievable that someone who once claimed to be a descendent of Edgar Allen Poe (or, at least, MGM marketed her as such to distinguish her from her peers) would die such a young, tragic death.

7 The Latin Lover Lied

Rudolph Valentino was huge in his time. The Italian actor developed a tremendous following, primarily female, by being one of the film industry’s earliest sex symbols. In fact, the popular nickname “Latin Lover” was coined specifically for Valentino. Alongside his other nom de sex, “The Great Lover,” it is clear that Valentino was the absolute epitome of masculine appeal. While that was true for his professional career, in his personal life, Valentino had little use for his way with women. Only decades after his death did people en masse begin realizing: Valentino was gay.

On the rare occasions in which Valentino’s sexuality was questioned during his life, the actor reacted like a raw nerve, quickly and instinctually. When one Chicago Tribune reporter labeled him a “Pink Powder Puff,” Valentino responded by challenging the writer to a boxing match. More than just being culturally taboo, admitting he was gay would have been career suicide for the Latin Lover.

6 Thelma Todd’s Impossible Suicide

The “Ice Cream Blonde” Thelma Todd was a comedy superstar in the ’20s and ’30s. Until, that is, her premature death in 1935 when she was only 29. After Todd was found dead inside her car, an autopsy and several investigations ruled her death as a suicide, which still stands today. That hasn’t stopped the speculation that foul play was involved, and some evidence at the scene supports that idea.

As the Chicago Tribune writes: “While a grand jury ruled that Todd committed suicide, it was unable to explain her broken nose, the bruises around her throat, and two cracked ribs. Apparently, the grand jury thought Todd also beat herself to death.” That, combined with unofficial claims that her blood-alcohol level was unnaturally high and her immaculate shoes (which would have been impossible to be clean if she had walked the 500 feet through the mud to get to the garage where her car was parked) leave questions in the minds of many.

5 Enemy of the State—Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin was one of the biggest stars of the silent film era. He was a wildly talented actor, comedian, and dancer, and—according to the United States government—a no-good, dirty commie. In fact, Chaplin was one of the earliest stars ever “blacklisted,” as the term grew out of McCarthyist hearings attempting to shun Un-American individuals and destroy their influence.

Due to his simple refusal to answer any questions about his political views, he was officially labeled a security risk and a communist (or, in their words, a Bolshevik). While overseas promoting his film Limelight, Chaplin was informed that the U.S. Attorney General had made it official: Chaplin was no longer allowed to re-enter the United States.

He spent the rest of his days living in Switzerland, his film career never at its pre-accusal peak. Finally, in the last years before his death, the political atmosphere shifted enough that he began to be celebrated stateside once more.

4 Weekend at Barrymore’s

Celebrated dramatic actor John Barrymore, known for both stage and screen, died in 1942 from a combination of ailments, all brought on by decades of alcohol abuse. He was 60 at the time, and his career had been long and lauded, so it wasn’t quite the untimely tragedy common to so many Hollywood actors. Instead, what makes Barrymore’s death so interesting is what his friend then did with his body.

A group of Barrymore’s friends, including legendary director Raoul Walsh, actually stole the late actor’s body from the morgue and brought it to the home of also-legendary actor Errol Flynn. They then propped it up and left it for Flynn to discover when he arrived home as a macabre prank. Though some sources have denied the prank ever occurred, Barrymore’s granddaughter Drew Barrymore (yes, that one) confirmed that the story was indeed true during her appearance on Hot Ones.

3 Fatty Arbuckle: Murderer?

Depending on who you ask, Roscoe Arbuckle, better known as Fatty, was either a violent murderer or a tragic patsy for a troubled woman. Either way, the actor/writer/director’s career has long since been overshadowed by one scandal: his alleged rape and manslaughter of actress Virginia Rappe.

While attending a party hosted by Arbuckle, Rappe was found ill and taken to a hospital. There, she accused Arbuckle of raping her and, three days later, died from a ruptured bladder. This ignited a media frenzy and perhaps the trial of the century. And a second trial. And a third trial. Though Arbuckle was eventually acquitted of all charges and even issued a formal apology by one of his juries, the black spot on his image was too dark, and his career in Hollywood rapidly faded away.

2 The Cold Case of William Desmond Taylor

We still don’t know how William Desmond Taylor died. We likely never will. That’s because almost every detail of the case is crazy. Let me explain.

Despite Taylor having an apparent bullet hole in his back, a fake daughter announces his death to be a natural one via stomach hemorrhage. The lack of a break-in and money on Taylor’s person—but not in his bank account—was all still accounted for. There are delusional statements Taylor made in the days leading up to his death. There is a report by local authorities that someone had told them to ease off their investigation. AND there are also the literal hundreds of confessions made by several acquaintances and strangers alike.

Watch the attached video for a start—the Ghoul Boys will get you hooked on this true murder mystery.

1 Most Expensive Scene Ever—Buster Keaton

Adjusted for inflation, it is likely that the single most expensive scene in movie history: the train crash from Buster Keaton’s The General. Keaton, who starred in and directed the film, received a $750,000 budget, equivalent to around $12 million today. Keaton chose to spend an undisclosed large fraction of that money on one scene.

The scene shows a two-car train attempting to cross a burning bridge, failing, and collapsing into a river. In typical silent film-era fashion, all of it was real. The train, the bridge, the fire, the river, the crash. Keaton actually bought the train and demolished it. Because of this, he only had one possible take, so he set up six cameras at once to ensure the stunt wasn’t wasted.

When we think of kids, it often brings to mind images of laughter, playgrounds, and first days of school…not graphic scenes of murder. However, there are always exceptions, particularly in the realm of fiction. Whether they fight for the side of good or evil, these ten kids prove you don’t have to be an adult to leave a trail of bloody carnage.

Here are ten killer kids from film and TV who definitely deserve a time out or two or three…hundred!

CAUTION: Spoilers ahead!

Related: Top 10 Things Children Do That Are Considered Insane In Adults

10 Brandon Breyer (Brightburn)

Brightburn (2019) is a Superman-style horror film that follows the story of young Brandon Breyer and his parents. Brandon is like any other kid his age, except his parents found him in a small alien ship that crashed on their farm late one night. Besides that, he’s a totally average, well-adjusted preteen. That is until puberty hits, and everything falls apart. (A common experience for many adolescents.)

As Brandon’s birthday approaches, he begins to develop other-worldly powers, such as super-strength, flight, super-speed, and, yes, laser vision. These new powers also bring some major attitude changes and a taste for gore and violence. Oh yeah, and demon-like voices that whisper to him in an unknown language while he sleeps. No biggie.

As the film progresses, Brandon grows increasingly hostile and uncontrollable. He stalks, kills, maims, and tortures the residents of his hometown. In one particularly gory scene, Brandon even terrorizes his own uncle before graphically murdering him. A definite departure from the usual superhero flick we’ve been inundated with in recent years.^[1]

9 Charlotte (The 100)

Charlotte was a minor character who appeared early in the first season of the sci-fi drama series, The 100 (2014–2020). The show’s first season primarily focused on a group of delinquent young adults who are forced to become the first humans to return to Earth in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.

Charlotte was among the 100 juveniles sent down to Earth from the Ark (an orbiting space station that contains the last survivors of humanity). Haunted by nightmares of her parent’s execution by the Ark’s Chancellor, Charlotte initially appears as a scared and frail little girl. However, her story quickly takes a dark turn when she misinterprets advice that another character named Bellamy tries to give her. Bellamy tells her to “slay [her] demons” while she is awake so that they can’t get her in her sleep.

Charlotte takes this advice literally and fatally stabs the Chancellor’s delinquent son in the throat, hoping it will end her bad dreams.^[2]

8 Hit-Girl (Kick-Ass)

Mindy McCready, aka Hit-Girl, is the secondary main character in the comedy superhero flick Kick-Ass (2010). With her father being framed for a drug deal he didn’t take part in and her mother later committing suicide, Mindy’s early life was a rocky one. Upon his release from prison, Mindy’s father trains her from a young age in martial arts and weaponry skills. Together the two become a crime-fighting duo known as Big-Daddy and Hit-Girl.

Hit-Girl is a brutally efficient fighter and an expert in weapons like firearms, knives, spears, and explosives. Her fighting abilities are showcased in a partially first-person point-of-view scene where Hit-Girl single-handedly takes out an entire room of armed men attempting to light her father on fire. ^[3]

7 Ashley Oswalt (Sinister)

This 2012 horror film follows a true-crime writer named Ellison Oswalt, who moves into the house of a mysteriously murdered family with his wife, son, and daughter Ashley. Ashley starts as a sweet and creative little girl who is scared by the ghost children that begin to appear in the house shortly after Ellison finds reels of footage in the attic.

The footage depicts not only the murders of the family that once lived in his current house but also the murders of other unnamed families. Ellison begins to investigate the murders, finding drawings on the inside of each box of reels. The illustrations are in crayon and appear to be recreations of each murder, with an ominous figure named Mr. Boogie always standing close by.

At the film’s climax, it’s revealed that each family has been murdered by one of their own children. The children carry out the bloody act while under the influence of an ancient pagan deity named Baguul, who seeks to consume their souls. Ellison reaches this conclusion a little too late and soon realizes he’s been drugged by his daughter. Ashley then films herself murdering her entire family with an ax and proceeds to paint the walls with their blood.^[4]

6 Number Five Hargreeves (The Umbrella Academy)

Five Hargreeves is one of the main protagonists of the Netflix comic book-inspired series, The Umbrella Academy. The series follows a group of estranged super-powered siblings who are reunited after the death of their abusive adoptive father.

Five, though 13 years old on the outside, is actually a ruthless 58-year-old assassin on the inside. As a child, Five’s botched attempt at time travel stranded him for decades in a futuristic apocalypse. He was later recruited by a mysterious organization that governs the flow of time and then shaped into a lethal assassin who quickly rose to fame among his peers. Five eventually defected and again attempted time travel in order to stop the oncoming apocalypse. Unfortunately for him, he made a vital miscalculation and accidentally landed himself back in his 13-year-old body.

However, that doesn’t stop the now-pint-sized killer from being one of the most brutal characters in the show. Throughout the series, he kills many of his opponents with his bare hands, gouging out eyes and snapping necks with relative ease. He even has a habit of going on killing sprees when the occasion calls for it, the most graphic of which occurred in the second season where Five gleefully slaughtered a room of time-traveling executives with an ax.^[5]

5 Lilith (Supernatural)

During the third season of the CW drama Supernatural, the demon Lilith (a recurring character in the show) briefly possessed a little girl and held her entire family captive. During that time, the girl (portrayed by Sierra McCormick) forced her mother, father, and grandpa all to celebrate her birthday every day and eat cake for dinner every night. She also killed the family pet, murdered a babysitter, and later snapped her grandfather’s neck.

Her tiny reign of terror eventually came to an end when she deserted the young vessel for a different one. However, that version of the character appeared again a season later as a hallucination. She terrorized and taunted one of the main characters of the show as he had a paranormal-induced heart attack.^[6]

4 Eleven (Stranger Things)

Another number-themed murder child from Netflix’s lineup is Eleven from the streaming service’s hit series, Stranger Things (2016 – ). Eleven (El for short) was locked away by a mysterious figure referred to as “Papa” and experimented on as a child. As a result of Papa’s tampering, Eleven was endowed with telekinetic and telepathic powers, which often make her nose (and sometimes her ears) bleed when she uses them.

Despite being a mostly kind girl and avid lover of waffles, Eleven and her psionic abilities have racked up quite the body count. She has killed guards attempting to lock her in a dark room and even was responsible for destroying the titular monster of the first season, the Demogorgon. One of the most notable incidents occurred when Eleven caused an entire room of government agents (“bad men”) to hemorrhage to death using only her mind. She has also used her powers to flip a moving van several feet in the air while she and her friends were attempting to escape capture.^[7]

3 Janice (Annabelle: Creation)

Janice is one of the main characters in the second installment of the Annabelle trilogy from 2017. Having to use a wheelchair after a bad case of polio, Janice begins the movie as a kind girl who cares deeply for her best friend, Linda. Janice and Linda are a part of an orphanage run by Sister Charlotte. After their old orphanage closed, Sister Charlotte and her six young girls are welcomed into the home of a doll maker named Mr. Mullins.

However, it quickly becomes apparent that the house and Mr. Mullins himself harbor dark and deadly secrets. Soon after moving in, Janice is targeted and later possessed by a demon attached to the doll Annabelle. Janice’s entire personality soon changes, and she even regains her ability to walk. The demon that is now attached to her then goes on to murder Mr. Mullins and later crucify and mutilate his bedridden wife.

As the movie comes to a close, we see that Janice’s atrocities aren’t just confined to her adolescence. As a teenager, Janice (now Annabelle Higgins) joins a satanic cult and then later returns home to murder her parents, who had adopted her years before, unaware of her dark and gruesome past.^[8]

2 Village of the Damned (1960)

Next on our list of prepubescent terrors is not just one child but a whole brood. Though, due to their telepathically connected nature, they could easily be considered a unit. This ’60s black-and-white film is based on an earlier book called The Midwich Cuckoos, which tells the tale of a group of eerie alien children conceived under inexplicable circumstances.

The children, born with strange eyes and platinum-blonde hair, quickly begin to grow at an unnatural rate and exhibit telepathic powers. By the age of three, their appearance is that of a nine or ten-year-old. They are also abnormally intelligent and have a cold and unkind nature, causing many of the townspeople to resent them.

It also doesn’t help that the children are responsible for many vicious acts, such as forcing one of their mothers to stick her hand in boiling water as a form of punishment. They also kill a man by making him crash his car and then later force his brother to shoot himself in the head.^[9]

1 Lizzie Samuels (The Walking Dead)

Appearing in the fourth season of the AMC series The Walking Dead (2010–2022), Lizzie was a disturbed young girl who could not come to grips with the reality of zombies or “walkers.” She often did not see the flesh-eating walkers as threats and had a habit of naming them and referring to them as her “friends.” She even tried to play games with them and would get upset when they had to be killed.

Lizzie’s flawed perception ultimately came to a head when she tried to prove once and for all that walkers weren’t dangerous. She did this by stabbing her younger sister Mika to death and attempting to make others wait for her to reanimate, claiming that she wouldn’t hurt anybody. Lizzie would have done the same to another infant named Judith had two other adults not intervened.^[10]