A sure sign that a horror movie made a great impact on popular culture is when it successfully turns something innocent into the stuff of nightmares. For example, Friday The 13th ruined summer camps forever.
Jason Voorhees' legend isn't the only horror movie or franchise that turned something ordinary into a fear-inducing sight. In fact, some movies did their job so well that their mundane focus became a horror genre staple.
10 Summer Camps Are Now Synonymous With Mass Murder
A long time ago, summer camps were seen as the perfect vacation getaway for kids and teenagers. This idyllic perception came to a bloody end when Friday The 13th became mainstream, as both Pamela and Jason Voorhees brutally murdered summer camps' innocence when they killed countless teenagers at the infamous Camp Crystal Lake.
While the ever-evolving Friday The 13th movies are the guiltiest of this, they're far from the only offender. Case in point, Cheerleader Camp and the Sleepaway Camp series. Today, summer camps are so inseparable from massacres that they've become a morbid punchline, as seen in the parodic The Final Girls or even the spooky cartoon Gravity Falls.
9 The Great Outdoors Are No Longer Peaceful Escapes From Civilization
An extension of summer camps are the great outdoors, which is another great place to escape to when everyday life gets too tiring. Horror movies have gone out of their way to make popular destinations like the forest or the desert unattractive at best and dangerous at worst, and they succeeded for the most part.
The Blair Witch Project, The Evil Dead and its loose remake/sequels, The Witch, and others showed the forest as the domains of ancient evils that should never be trespassed upon. Meanwhile, films like The Hills Have Eyes, The Hitcher, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre depicted the outback as territories of crazed killers and monsters, not quiet backroads.
8 Small Towns & The Suburbs Are No Longer The Safe Havens They Once Seemed
For the longest time, small towns were seen as peaceful villages where boredom was the worst that could happen. Thanks to almost every story that horror icon Stephen King wrote (see: IT and the nihilistically shocking The Mist) or inspired (see: Midnight Mass), small towns are now seen as insidious communes where the townsfolk keep dark secrets.
The same fate happened to the similarly quaint suburbs, which went from nice places to start a family to glorified prisons. Thanks to the likes of Haddonfield from Halloween, Springwood County from A Nightmare On Elm Street, Stepford from The Stepford Wives and more, moving to a new neighborhood is more dreaded than envied.
7 Hotels Are Now Haunted Rest Stops Or The Sites Of Grisly Murders
Hotels are some of the classiest places where travelers and vacationers can feel at home away from home. As far as horror movies are concerned, fancy hotel rooms are not safe from murder sprees or terrors beyond human understanding. Cases in point, the Dolphin Hotel's evil room in 1408 and the Bates Motel from the Psycho series.
Without a doubt, the most iconic haunted hotel is the Overlook from The Shining and its sequel Doctor Sleep. The Overlook being a nightmarish bridge between the living world and the afterlife remains the most influential horror movie hotel ever seen, and it unsurprisingly inspired many films to imitate and homage its example.
6 Hospitals Are Now Known For Ending Lives Instead Of Saving Them
Hospitals are a popular horror location for many reasons, mostly because of the irony behind people being killed and tortured in places meant to cure or heal. That, and hospitals tap into viewers' repressed fears of doctors and operations. Every horror series has at least one hospital scene, while stand-alone movies can never go wrong with cursed medical institutions.
Examples of the latter include the misleadingly peaceful wellness center in A Cure For Wellness, the derelict asylum in Session 9, and the titular location of The Ward. The only real difference between these movies' chosen locations is whether or not the hospital or asylum they're set in is abandoned.
5 High School Campuses & Events Are Now Feeding Grounds For Evil
Horror movies have a reputation for starring and/or killing teenagers en masse, and nowhere is this better exemplified than a high school horror movie. High school nostalgia may be a polarizing topic to people, but in the world of horror movies, they're unanimously evil. In fact, some student populations are arguably worse than the central killer.
Almost every horror movie starring teenagers has at least one kill in school or during a campus event, while those like The Faculty, Prom Night, and the non-supernaturally-charged horror Tragedy Girls maximize schools as their setting. That said, the unquestionable queen of high school horror is the original Carrie, which closed its prom night with an unforgettable rain of blood and gore.
4 Cameras Are The Last Records Of People's Horrifying Deaths
When commercial-grade cameras were first introduced, they were seen as the perfect tool anyone could use to either preserve beloved memories or make their own movies. Horror movies, in particular, saw a new avenue in which they could get under viewers' skins. In fact, some went as far as dropping viewers into the horror itself.
People's newfound interest in snapping pictures or filming anything helped the found footage horror trend explode, especially thanks to The Blair Witch Project and the low-budget smash hit Paranormal Activity. More traditional horror movies, meanwhile, still found ways to use old and new cameras for terrifying stories, like Polaroid, Shutter, or Sinister.
3 Cellphones & Telephones Are Hotlines To The Afterlife Or Worse
Telephones and their more modern digital counterparts allow people to keep in touch with friends and family any time, anywhere. In horror movies, they're often the harbingers of false hope or direct lines of communication between the living and the dead. Now every time a phone rings, some viewers are gripped by fear rather than excitement.
Movies like The Ring and Scream had their respective killers taunt their victims by calling them up before starting the murders, giving them the empty promise of a chance at survival. Meanwhile, the likes of The Black Phone, the otherwise dragged out Cell, When A Stranger Calls, and more all focus on a haunted landline that's only a prelude to something worse.
2 Halloween & Other Holidays Are Known More For Murder Sprees Than Anything Else
When they're not viewed as a special day for children to have fun, holidays like Halloween and Christmas are the breaks from reality that adults deserve. Because of this, holidays are the perfect fodder for the horror genre's penchant for twisting the mundane into the horrifying. It's easier to count the holidays that don't have a murderous mascot yet.
The most obvious ruined holiday is Halloween, which went from kid-friendly scares and candy to an annual bloodbath as seen in Halloween or Trick' R Treat. Other holidays that got the morbid treatment include Christmas (see: Black Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night), and Valentine's Day (see: My Bloody Valentine).
1 Campfire Tales & Urban Legends Are No Longer Innocent Rumors Or Stories
While urban legends were almost always crafted to spook others, they're little more than harmless forms of entertainment or even tradition in some cultures. Meanwhile in horror movies, they're the real deal. If these stories can creep someone for a bit in the real world, they make nightmares frighteningly tangible in horror movies.
Almost every horror movie starts with an old rumor no one believes. That said, there are those like I Know What You Did Last Summer or Urban Legend where the campfire tale itself is the premise. The best example of this is the recently updated 90s classic Candyman, where the titular entity is an old legend who kills people to keep his myth alive.