The lure of the unpretentious: why we love bad movies

These films demand nothing from the viewer, not even their full attention. And yet they offer laughs, drama, stress-free suspense, scares and what is becoming increasingly rare: novelty. They are like a joyride for the mind.

“The worst option has some qualities and advantages that the best option does not have. The worst option is more likely to be funny, absurd and ridiculous,” Amit Bhattacharjee, co-author of the current study, said in a statement.

The study, titled “So Bad It’s Good,” was published in November in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and was based on 12 experiments measuring reactions to various types of “bad” content, including jokes, karaoke performances and auditions for the television show So you think you can dance.

The content was ranked using a star rating system, and participants, without knowing the ratings, consistently preferred the bad content to the mediocre content, provided the bad stuff was neither offensive nor too long.

This kind of harmless horror also finds its own platforms in the real world.

The American streaming service Tubi, which was launched in 2014 and bought by Fox in 2020, is very proud to have put together what is probably the world’s largest free collection of bad films. The selection ranges from the 2005 film starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Mr and Mrs Smith (a choice that speaks for itself) to VelociPastor And The Singing Forest (2003; about a man who discovers that his daughter’s boyfriend is the reincarnation of his own former lover).

A key appeal of such content, researchers have found, is that it is “a way to signal to other people: I know what’s good, because this is the opposite,” Bhattacharjee says in his statement. This seems to be confirmed by a 2016 study titled “Enjoying Trash Films” published in the journal Poetics.

Polling casual viewers of films generally considered so bad they’re good, the newspaper found that the cheesy sets, embarrassing storylines and sloppy performances were seen as a refreshing antidote, especially by those who showed a strong preference for art films.

“We are dealing with an audience with above-average education that could be described as ‘cultural omnivores,'” the researcher behind the paper, Keyvan Sarkhosh, said in a statement.

Among the films that his survey participants rated as bad but definitely worth seeing were Sharknado prominently featured. Is it just us, or does this start to sound like a movie worth watching?