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The best movie currently in theaters is the Toni Collette-starring family horror movie Hereditary. Critics are all about it (92% on Rotten Tomatoes), and it debuted to a healthy $13 million opening weekend. It also has been pissing off audiences left and right. CinemaScore, which measures audience reaction after they’ve seen the movie, gave Hereditary a D+, a shockingly low grade for such a well-reviewed movie. Or it would be shocking if it wasn’t a horror movie.

In horror, this kind of thing happens a lot.

The year was 2007, I was waiting in a hotel lobby to meet some friends, and I caught a bit of conversation from two people who were checking out. They’d just been to see a movie called Bug, and since I’d recently seen it and loved it myself, my curiosity was piqued. Much to my shock, these two people could not have hated it more. “What WAS that? It wasn’t scary, it was just irritating! Complete waste of money! I can’t believe the crap they make these days.” I was floored and crestfallen in only the way you can be crestfallen when you realize the unimpeachable movie you loved doesn’t do it for everyone. But one thing I overheard stuck with me, when one of them said: “They sold us a horror movie and we got two insane people wearing tin foil!”

Here’s the thing: they weren’t wrong. Bug, based on a play by Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) and directed by the great William Friedkin (The Exorcist), is a movie about a woman (Ashley Judd) living in a shabby motel and hiding out from an abusive ex-boyfriend who meets a man, also living at the motel, played by Michael Shannon. He’s ex-Army and on edge about …something, but he and Judd’s characters are drawn to each other and connect. Soon after their relationship gets physical, Shannon lets Judd in on his belief that the government has performed tests on him, and that his apartment is filled with tiny, microscopic bugs sent by the government sent to further experiment on him. Judd is initially thrown off by this level of paranoia, but he draws her into his world — and everything else in her life is pushing her towards him too — and soon enough, they’re both manically digging into their own skin for bugs and covering their entire rooms with tin foil to block satellite signals. It is psychological horror at its finest, and it’s utterly terrifying, not because the bugs are real, but because the bugs are not. Shannon and Judd are descending into insanity, and we’re left to watch.

But that’s not the movie that was sold to the public. The movie that was sold to the public was about real bugs — aliens bugs? Hey, maybe! — that dig into your body and are rapidly infesting the entire motel/town/world. It was Invasion of the Creepy Crawlies, from the director of The Exorcist, and it was gonna scare you silly with bugs!

And so while this unfortunate eavesdropped-upon couple was missing the boat on a great, terrifying movie in Bug, you also had to sympathize a little bit. They were sold a bill of goods. The real problem is that they couldn’t keep their minds open enough to appreciate the unexpected. And that pivot, from a movie that isn’t scary in the way you want it to be but is scary in a way you weren’t prepared for, is what lies at the heart of what’s happening with Hereditary right now.

It’s impossible to say why a movie would get a bad CinemaScore. An essentialist would say that it means the movie is bad. If a movie isn’t serving its audience, it’s not doing its job. If a horror movie isn’t scaring its audience, it’s not doing its job. And yet that is not always the case. Particularly if it’s not the kind of horror movie that an audience is expecting. American horror cinema has trained audiences to expect certain things from horror: scares (specifically jump scares), death, and a monster. Fail on any of those counts, and you’re asking for trouble.

Which might go a long way towards explaining why the best-reviewed horror movies of the last few years have such dismal CinemaScore numbers.

These are all very different movies, but they tend to circle around the same strategic concept: prioritizing mood (specifically dread) over action (scares). The Witch is plenty scary, but the scariest thing about it is the bone-deep, pit of stomach dread it instills in its audience. A quietly disappeared baby. A young boy violently possessed by a vulgar spirit. A ram bucking up on its hind legs. Up until that film’s brazen finale, the scariest thing about The Witch is its uncertainty. Is this real witchcraft? Or is this how paranoia and misogynist societies turn Godly men to murder?

That uncertainty is at the heart of It Comes At Night as well. Director Trey Edward Shults did such a good job in his debut film, Krisha, of imbuing a Thanksgiving dinner with the same kind of bone-deep dread, but that was still a family drama. When you come out with a horror movie, the audience isn’t going to be so easily satisfied with your triumph of tone. The difference between It Comes At Night‘s D CinemaScore and a movie like A Quiet Place — another movie about a family hiding out from the apocalypse in an isolated country home — earning a B+ is that A Quiet Place identifies its monster early, and lets all further dread emanate from there. It Comes at Night leans on ambiguity and paranoia and isn’t as successful. That doesn’t make horror audiences (or CinemaScore) wrong, either. A Quiet Place IS a better movie than It Comes At Night. But the latter faced a far steeper uphill climb in trying to sell its audience on the horror of human uncertainty.

mother! probably belongs in a category of its own in terms of antagonizing its audience. Darren Aronofsky’s film is an aggressively allegorical tale of a man and a woman in their isolated country home (a theme!) whose peace and quiet is increasingly, terrifyingly violated. While there are horrific elements to mother!, and while Jennifer Lawrence gives a phenomenal horror-movie performance in it, what likely contributed the most to that F CinemaScore was the fact that — once again — it was sold as a horror movie. Do not mislead your audiences this way!

Of course, with Hereditary, the impulse to obfuscate was a noble one. From the moment it debuted at Sundance, earning raves and “you must experience it for yourself!” word-of-mouth, Hereditary was the movie you didn’t want to have ruined for you. And while the marketing certainly gave some things away (too much, if you ask me), audiences still weren’t given all that clear of a road map heading into the movie. It’s a film about … a dollhouse? And a dead grandmother? Who is maybe the monster? And then Toni Collette makes a series of the six or seven most horrified faces ever witnessed on film? The monster in Hereditary, as promised by the marketing, was how scared you were going to feel. The only thing to fear is your own fear. It’s novel and it’s even true, but that D+ score for a movie that so many professionals agree succeeds on its objectives is likely more evidence that horror audiences like to know what to expect before it jump-scares them.

It’s not just horror audiences who like movies that deliver what they expect. The highest CinemaScores among recent movies: Avengers: Infinity War, which is the definition of pre-sold, and Book Club, a movie that knows itself and knows its audience and delivers on each and every expectation it raised. Compare the giddy feeling of walking out of a Book Club screening to walking out of Hereditary not knowing why you just spent two hours feeling the worst you’ve felt in a while. It probably doesn’t put one in the best mood to offer a thumbs up.

It’s that dread-versus-scares thing again. American audiences want a movie that will make them jump, scream, thrill, and squirm. They don’t seem to want a movie that will burrow inside them, underneath their rib cage and around their throat; up inside their bone marrow, inside their blood cells. They don’t want a movie that is quite this successful at transferring that all-consuming dread onto them. Hereditary does that. The Witch does that. Bug did that. And anyone willing to give themselves over to a movie to that degree will find a lot to love and appreciate in all of these movies. Even if they’re left too shaken to give a good CinemaScore grade afterwards.