The scare had set in across Hollywood like some terrible zombie plague: Horror, as a genre, was losing its bite at the box office. By spring 2024, the Blumhouse terror titles Imaginary and AfrAId had finished at the lower end of prerelease financial expectations, respectively earning a so-so $44 million and lackluster $12 million in worldwide grosses. Ticket sales for The First Omen portended financial gloom for its distributor, Disney, pulling in $33 million domestically on a $30 million budget. And Universal’s comedic vampire gorefest, Abigail, failed to show its fangs, unable to recoup its production costs at the North American box office to qualify as a flop.
By the middle of summer, however, the genre had demonstrated a Voorhees-like ability to resurrect itself from the cinematic graveyard, delivering a run of surprising hits. Yes, it took some punches: M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap either broke even or ensnared a tiny profit, depending on whose accounting you trust, coming to rank as one of the director’s lowest-grossing movies to date. But in July, the occultist serial-killer whodunit Longlegs surpassed Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite to become Neon’s top-grossing film of all time as well as this year’s most successful indie release (its global cumulative tally stands at $108.5 million). August saw Alien: Romulus earn $350.7 million globally, more than quadruple what it reportedly cost to produce. And the September Cannes-anointed, art-house body-horror entry The Substance has taken in a robust $38.5 million globally (and counting) on a $17.5 million budget.
Then there is the twin shotgun blast of this month’s Terrifier 3 and Smile 2. The $2 million third installment of Cineverse’s sadistic killer-clown franchise scared more butts into seats than even the most optimistic prerelease box-office expectations — opening at No. 1, the unrated slasher flick outearned the megabudget Joker: Folie à Deux and has torn more than $55 million worth of tickets. Hitting theaters just one week later, Smile 2 managed to earn slightly more than its 2022 original (about a therapist who is haunted by a terrifying, smiling presence), slicing the jugular of an abiding horror trend: Around 80 percent of sequels in the genre earn less during their opening days in theaters than first films.
“There’s this ongoing joke on Twitter — X, whatever you want to call it — and it’s a joke because it never goes away,†says Brad Miska, co-founder of the horror-centric multi-media company Bloody Disgusting, who is also VP of business development for its parent company Cineverse and a producer of Terrifier 3. “Anytime there’s one or two releases that do okay or subpar, everyone’s quick to be dismissive of the genre and be like, Oh, I guess everyone’s sick of horror. Horror is dead. Then one movie blows up and it’s ‘back’ again.â€
The genre remains one of theatrical moviedom’s most dependable financial drivers, delivering relatively gigantic returns on films made for minuscule budgets, often with marginal marketing efforts and boasting no bankable stars. Yet precisely because of the genre’s typically bargain-basement production costs, its ultrazealous fandom, and a powerful word-of-mouth pass-along arguably unmatched throughout cinema, horror can seem at risk of becoming a victim of its own success. Of the 28 wide-release horror movies this year — by far the largest annual count to date — Paramount is on track to score the two most successful with A Quiet Place: Day One ($261.7 million) and Smile 2 (which has already taken in over 40 percent more than the original Smile internationally). “They’re wildly different movies, so that’s exciting,†says Paramount’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution, Marc Weinstock. “But horror’s had a tough time. There’s one of these movies coming out every other week. There’s just so much horror out there that audiences are feeling sated by the sheer volume of it.â€
On a dollar-spent-versus-dollar-earned basis, Blumhouse could arguably rank as Hollywood’s moneymaking-est production entity. While 2022 stands as its most successful year (The Black Phone and Halloween Ends each posted nine-figure returns), 2024 has shaped up to be a wobbly span of months for the company. Speak No Evil, a James McAvoy–starring remake of a 2022 Danish-Dutch psycho-thriller of the same name, delivered respectable returns for Blumhouse ($76.2 million on a $15 million budget). But as head horror-meister Jason Blum tells it, supply-chain disruptions due to the Hollywood strikes dealt the company unexpected problems. And more crucially, Blumhouse’s choice to theatrically roll out four original films — the modest financial success Night Swim and Amazon Prime Video release House of Spoils were its others — on top of precisely zero franchise follow-ups negatively impacted its bottom line. Which highlights what Blum characterizes as a weird paradox of the genre.
“Everyone around the movie business, fans, and film Twitter demand originals. But the audience does not want originals. They want horror movies that they know,†Blum tells Vulture. “Without originals, you don’t get franchises; I’m very aware of that. But the audience is really tough to get out to see originals. And it breaks my heart. We had no sequels this year. We had all originals. And I think that hurt us.â€
That being said, horror sequelization hardly stands on existing protocol. A Quiet Place: Day One broke through in part as an origin story set amid the rubble of dystopian New York (in contrast to the 2018 A Quiet Place’s panoply of terrors amid rural idyll) focused around a character portrayed by Oscar winner and genuine movie star Lupita Nyong’o. Terrifier 3 firmly establishes its thrill-kill mime protagonist Art the Clown as a top-tier horror icon alongside Freddy Krueger, Pennywise, and Jigsaw, even if the film arrives within a wacky franchise-release scheme: Terrifier 2 hit multiplexes in 2022, but the first Terrifier was made in 2016 and only became a small-screen sensation after making a negligible splash in theaters in July 2023. Terrifier 3 grew its own renown after being banned for minors in France and triggering fainting in Australia and vomiting in the U.K., en route to having theaters picketed by religious groups in the U.S. that objected to the film’s positioning of Art the Clown as a “satanic Santa.â€
Other horror franchise installments have not had as much luck and tended to suffer from, as one executive at a rival studio put it, Oh, I’ve seen this syndrome among its audiences: “Happy Death Day 2U was another helping of the same movie. Same thing for Escape Room 2: Oh right, same concept. It’s very difficult to get people excited about a concept for a second time.†This summer, producer Roy Lee’s ecstatically reviewed, Pulp Fiction–esque horror-thriller Strange Darling benefited from resembling nothing else at the cineplex — causing fans to return for repeat viewings with friends. Lee, behind such megahorror hits as It, It Chapter Two, Barbarian, and 2004’s The Grudge, predicts the current vogue for Art the Clown–inspired torture porn will engender many cheaply made slasher-horror facsimiles that may in all likelihood water down the market for future films in the subgenre. “There’s going to be a lot of copycat Terrifier movies next year that will do terribly,†the producer says. “It’s going to be perceived as a dead genre. If it’s just people going in to follow a trend, those cookie-cutter movies will fail. You have to innovate.â€
Lee elucidates the flip side of that equation, underscoring precisely why the genre remains so bankable: “If you make a great horror movie, it’s going to be seen by everybody. It will reach the target audience of all horror fans eventually. Because everyone wants to be the one to discover a movie and tell others.â€
In March, Neon logged a respectable horror hit with the Sydney Sweeney–starring and –produced nunsploitation mutilation-mystery Immaculate, which took in $28.4 million on a $9 million budget. But its next release stunned Hollywood. Almost every studio executive interviewed for this article hailed the upstart indie studio’s marketing efforts for the Nicolas Cage–starring serial-killer creep-out Longlegs as “genius†and “groundbreaking†— referring to the film’s cryptic campaign that began early in the year and kept up through the movie’s July release with a steady drip of viral trailers. “We wanted to create an experience for the audience that was world first, marketing second,†says Neon’s co-founder and chief executive, Tom Quinn. “Pulling back, not giving you the title. Creating a sense of mystery. Essentially giving the entire set of clues unattached into the marketplace. At which point you saw the movie, and when you went back to the campaign, you would realize that you could have actually uncovered who the killer is.â€
“It was a very intentional, but also, I think, quite a contrarian approach to marketing,†he continues. “I’ve heard from other studios their idea for a campaign would have had Nic Cage front and center. We said no.â€
Longlegs’ breakthrough conjures the hotness du jour of another horror subgenre: so-called elevated horror (a.k.a. art-house horror or, even more generously, thinking person’s horror), exemplified in years past by the work of directors including Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, and Julia Ducournau and such A24 releases as The Witch and It Comes at Night. While one of Q4 2024’s most eagerly anticipated titles — director Robert Eggers’s vampire passion project Nosferatu — would seem to fit into this category, the term elevated horror makes most people in the actual scary-movie business reach for a barf bag. No matter how volatile of a year horror is experiencing, they don’t see the term resurfacing.
“People who think horror is beneath them use the term elevated horror,†says Blum. “Horror is fucking tough. And it’s for a wide audience. It’s the exact opposite of elevated. So, if you hear someone say elevated horror, it means they’re not a real horror fan and they feel a little embarrassed about liking horror.â€