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Jan 13, 2021 · In a recent study, posted on PsyArXiv, researchers looked at plot keywords from over 800 films and nearly 1 million Facebook likes. 2 They found that fans of horror movies were more likely to be high in neuroticism—a personality trait characterized by high anxiety. Across all movies in the dataset, plot keywords such as “mental illness ...
Aug 1, 2024 · Since 2013, more than 20 of the top-grossing scary movies broke $200 million at the box office. Last year, according to Comscore, horror collectively grossed $962 million domestically and more ...
Feb 20, 2024 · Horror films had a tough few decades. From the 1980s until recently, movies featuring a murderous doll, a ghostly presence, or a creepy neighbor with a taste for revenge had been mostly relegated ...
- Maxine Wally
Aug 29, 2023 · The relaxation of censorship in the 60s and the 70s meant that horror films could feature more violence and salaciousness, and delve deeper into the human psyche. It was the heyday of the Gothic ...
- Mona Bassil
- Journalist
- Horror lies at the foundation of cinema itself, and has always been a hotbed of new ideas, techniques and technology.
- IGN's Festival of Fear
- Part 1: It’s Alive!
- Part 2: Return on the Living Investment
- What's your favorite type of horror movie?
- The 25 Best Monster Movies of All Time
- The Top-Grossing Horror Films of All Time
- Part 3: The New Blood
- Part 4: Universal Horror
By Charlie Lopresto
Updated: Oct 31, 2023 9:12 pm
Posted: Oct 31, 2023 2:30 pm
Hollywood is a pretty scary place right now.
Blockbuster bombs with bloated budgets have put the squeeze on massive megacorps. Streaming sucked the blood out of theatrical revenues, only to be staked by profit-starved investors. New forms of onscreen entertainment are melting the brains of the next generation of mindless consumers. Even the workers are revolting!
The movie business is in the midst of a painful metamorphosis, but even in times of turmoil and change, one genre has quietly kept things alive and thriving.
We're celebrating the spookiest season in style this year with over 20 articles, videos and more. Check out the IGN's Festival of Fear schedule for the full rundown on everything that's going on in the countdown to Halloween!
Horror movies are about as old as cinema itself, and over the last 100 years, they’ve proven to be essential to the art and business of filmmaking in more ways than one.
“[People] ask what I do and I say, ‘I direct horror movies,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t like horror movies,’” director Michael Chaves (The Nun II) recently told us. “I’m like, ‘Give me a break. You just haven’t tried it! It’s like saying you don’t like fish or sushi. You just haven’t tried the right one!”
So can horror save cinema from its decrepit state? It wouldn’t be the first time.
We tend to think of horror as disposable, B-tier cinema, made on the cheap full of cheesy effects and cliches. But the genre lies at the very foundation of cinema itself. And since day one, horror films have always been a hotbed of new ideas, techniques and technology.
Early cinema wasn’t really about storytelling. People paid their hard-earned pennies just to stare at the images dancing in light. These films were more of an experience… an amusement park ride, as Martin Scorsese would say, serving cheap thrills and visceral feelings.
And it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to instill what should be the easiest, most instinctive response of all – fear.
“It's not just about what's onscreen,” Pet Sematary: Bloodlines director Lindsey Anderson Beer tells us. “It's what do you hear? What do you see? What do you not see? How can I do this scare with cinematography? How can I do it with editing?”
1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari stars a sleepwalking psycho who stabs people to death and is foiled by a final girl. There’s even a twist ending! But Caligari’s most important contributions to film are the stylized sets and twisted architecture that inform every frame of the picture. The winding forests and claustrophobic cabins are purposely crafted to place the viewer in the mind frame of a madman. It was the first horror film that looked the way it wanted to make you feel.
Two years later, F.W. Murnau directed Nosferatu, an extremely unlicensed adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and while the visuals are a little more grounded than the nightmare of Caligari, the techniques introduced have become inseparable from the language of cinema. Monsters cast impossible shadows as they slink across sets and scenery. Figures are framed within windows and stone arches to emphasize isolation and power. Brief cuts to unsettling images would become today’s jump scares and subliminal imagery.
Star salaries are skyrocketing in a post-monoculture world. Big films are designed by committee to be broadly appealing, so arrogant execs feel comfortable throwing money away on endless reshoots. Special effects are looking worse and costing more than ever.
Movies have gotten really, really expensive.
Psychological Horror
Supernatural/Paranormal Horror
Slasher Horror
Gothic Horror
Found Footage Horror
Body Horror
Today the bar for entry is even lower. Anyone can make a horror movie. Anyone. Obviously, the vast majority of modern no-budget movies are gonna reach their ceiling streaming on Tubi, but when an inexpensive horror movie hits, it hits big.
It cost The Blair Witch Project $60,000 to tie some sticks together and strand some college kids in the woods with cameras, but they earned $250,000,000 worldwide, 4,000 times what they started with. Paranormal Activity, a film whose special effects include “slamming doors” and “time-lapse photography,” was filmed in seven days for $15,000 and made $194 million, giving birth to the empire known as Blumhouse.
The production company’s M.O. is to offer a diverse lineup of talent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000,000 to create unique films with a lower profit floor and a much, much higher ceiling. Minimal risk, maximum reward is the Blumhouse philosophy, and it’s done them extremely well so far, from The Purge and Happy Death Day to The Black Phone and M3GAN.
Blumhouse definitely had their misses, most recently with The Exorcist: Believer. The disappointing box office certainly had to sting after they made the curious decision to partner with Universal and buy the rights to the series for $400 million dollars
To put that in perspective, $400 million is what Blumhouse spent on all their other films combined, and they’ve made a lot of movies. Disney spent that much making just one Star War, and even though The Force Awakens brought in a cool $2 billion, compare that to the combined $5 billion dollar gross that Blumhouse has accumulated. With that kind of money and those budgets, you can afford a lot of misses.
It’s a winning formula, and not just at the box office. Horror movies keep Hollywood fresh as a beating source of new blood.
1: It – $704 million
2: The Sixth Sense – $673 million
3: I Am Legend – $585 million
4: World War Z – $540 million
5: The Meg – $529 million
6: Jaws - $477 million
Horror’s DIY spirit is a boon to the business side of movies, but it’s about more than just money. It’s about the future. Since money is so tight, there’s not much available to spend on above-the-line costs like A-list talent. But since there’s so little up-front monetary risk, producers can save some scratch by taking chances with untested, inexpensive new talent.
“One of the things that horror's done, I think, is it's attracted so many great young filmmakers,” says Saw franchise producer Oren Koules. “Because it's someone you can shoot. You don't necessarily need Tom Cruise. You don't need Tom Hanks.”
Actors are the most obvious. Pretty much every thespian worth their salt was either murdered in a horror movie or witnessed one on Law & Order. Julia Louis Dreyfuss was in Troll, future Scorcese muse Leo DiCaprio debuted in Critters 3, and Crispin Glover was a tour de force in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, just to name a few.
Hey, a gig is a gig, even if they are just more meat for the grinder, but actors aren’t the only ones making their bones in horror movies. Behind the camera, horror films serve as the training ground for new generations of Hollywood heavyweights.
“King of the B-Movies” Roger Corman brought assembly-line efficiency to film production, and the hundreds of mostly terrible films he produced under intense deadlines and microscopic budgets served as a de facto film school for countless Hollywood icons. Francis Ford Coppola, of The Godfather and fathering Sofia Coppola fame, was a lowly editor of softcore porn until Corman hired him to help make horror flicks. After a film came in under budget, Corman offered Coppola the leftover funds to make a movie of his own: Dementia 13.
James Cameron is another Corman grad, beginning as a special effects model maker and working up the ladder on horror films like Piranha and Galaxy of Terror. When the director of the Piranha sequel bailed, Cameron seized the opportunity.
Have you ever heard anyone arguing about whether “horror fatigue” is real? I doubt it. Horror might be the most flexible genre there is, and its consistency and longevity is directly related to its adaptability, especially how it evolves to reflect the fears of society.
“The best horror, I think you use your horror concept as a metaphor for something, ideally, that's going on in the world that will speak to the audience,” says Don Mancini.
Horror movies in the ’30s were vaguely Christian morality tales warning of an unwelcome “other.” By the ’50s this was replaced by atomic anxiety and Cold War paranoia. The growth of the suburbs and boomer safetyism of the ’70s are reflected in slasher films, and the burgeoning women's liberation movement and Roe v. Wade gave birth to movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. The ’80s were all about excess as studios exploited big franchises while cheap “video nasties” maintained horror’s shocking edge. The ’90s looked back on horror with an end-of-history snarkiness until the post-9/11 new millennium ushered in an age of torture porn that tried to make sense of a senseless “War on Terror.”
As for today, It’s hard to find a single issue that meets our particular messed-up moment. Peele’s Get Out and Nia DaCosta’s Candyman use horror to explore issues of race and identity, while films like Hereditary unpack grief and generational trauma.
Maybe modern horror movies aren’t defined by what they’re saying, but by how they are made. More often than not, horror films are low-status sludge, but every once in a while the genre gets a jolt of prestige.
In the ’70s, Jaws and Alien transformed monster movies into blockbusters. Later, The Silence of the Lambs would prove that horror flicks were worthy of Oscar glory. Today’s “elevated horror” films follow in the same footsteps. While the big studios are blowing billions chasing a cinematic universe, horror has filled the gap for moviegoers looking for something a little more cerebral.
Jul 11, 2018 · It’s kind of amazing.”. Horror films are cheap because they’re generally shot in a single location with few, if any, major stars. Their budgets hover around $5 million, as opposed to the ...
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Nov 16, 2023 · Because horror movies do such a good job of simulating threatening situations, this means our emotional responses to them are similar to those we'd experience if we encountered a real-life threat. Because we don't encounter real-life threats as often as ancient humans, going to horror films can be a novel experience that lets us put our innate ...
