Why horror movies are killing it at the box office

Clark Collis
·5 min read
5

If you went to see the most popular film in America at any point during the two months leading up to Halloween this year, there was a roughly 50 percent chance you were watching something terrifying, or disgusting, or, most likely, both.

Horror films have routinely dominated the 2022 box office since the vampire movie The Invitation achieved pole position on the chart when it was released back at the end of August. The Airbnb-goes-awry movie Barbarian also hit the #1 spot as did September's supernatural thriller Smile. That film was the most popular film in America two weeks running until it was replaced by Halloween Ends, which earned $41 million over its first few days on release despite negative reviews and a simultaneous premiere on Peacock.

The most surprising horror hit of the fall is the brutal slasher sequel Terrifier 2. The micro-budgeted movie earned around $1 million over its first weekend of release at the start of October and attracted much media coverage because of reports the film was causing audience members to faint or vomit. When EW spoke with writer-director Damien Leone after the movie's release, he described the reception to his two-and-a-half-hour killer clown film as "wonderful, overwhelming. Every morning I wake up, it's like Christmas morning." Three weeks later, the movie has earned over $5 million, a jaw-dropping return for a film made for less than $250,000.

Smile
Smile

Paramount Smile

So has the time come to dust off that old "HORROR IS BACK" headline? No, but only because the genre never went away. This year was already shaping up to be a landmark one for horror, even before these recent successes: Both the new Scream and Nope hit the #1 spot, and June's The Black Phone earned a more than-healthy $89 million. It wouldn't be a huge stretch to also include Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (in which Evil Dead director Sam Raimi terrified young Marvel fans with a zombiefied Benedict Cumberbatch) and Morbius (about a battle between vampires) as horror-adjacent wins as well.

2021 was a similarly good year for big-screen terror with four movies (A Quiet Place Part II, Halloween Kills, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, Candyman) winding up on the list of top 20 earners at the domestic box office. But the recent success of The Invitation, Barbarian, Smile, and Halloween Ends does serve as a reminder of horror's continued durability at time when so many other kinds of films, from dramas to comedies, have made a smaller cinematic footprint.

BARBARIAN
BARBARIAN

20th Century Studios Georgina Campbell in 'Barbarian'

Many of the reasons for horror's continued success are familiar: Genre films are comparatively cheap to make and often eminently franchisable. This year's Scream was the fifth in the series and will be followed by a sixth in 2022. Halloween Ends is the thirteenth Halloween film and, while David Gordon Green's movie will likely be the last time Jamie Lee Curtis portrays the Michael Myers-battling Laurie Strode, only a fool would bet that we will not be seeing a reboot at some point. As Green recently told EW, "At some point, someone will maybe bring a new Laurie into something, some twist will happen, and the mythology will continue."

Even before Smile was released and became one of this fall's biggest hits, grossing over $80 million in the US and a similar number overseas, writer-director Parker Finn was hinting that we might be seeing more of his grotesquely grinning supernatural entity. "I do think there could be a lot of interesting stuff still to be done with Smile," he told EW.

Horror has also benefited from the growing conservatism among studio executives when it comes to green-lighting anything aside from superhero films or other familiar IP. Writers and directors know that the genre is among the few surviving arenas where they can get financed and enjoy at least a degree of creative leeway. Get Out and Us director Jordan Peele's Nope was his third horror hit and also his third film to ruminate on race and society in a manner he might have struggled to finance outside the genre. When Ti West pitched A24 on shooting two horror films, X and Pearl, back-to-back, the studio was amenable to the plan, even though he planned on the latter being in large part a love letter to Hollywood's Golden Age. Both of West's films attracted rave reviews when they were released earlier in the year and did good enough business for A24 to finance a third movie, the upcoming MaXXXine.

Director Christian Tafdrup's Speak No Evil, Andrew Semans' Rebecca Hall-starring Resurrection, and Halina Reijn's Bodies Bodies Bodies (another A24 production) are three more memorable 2022 films which veer into a variety of cinematic tones and territories but whose passage to the screen was undoubtedly helped by featuring enough horror elements to qualify as genre movies. While production companies like A24 and Blumhouse regard horror as a key part of their business model, the streaming world has similarly come to realize the genre's continuing appeal. This year, Shudder has showcased a staggering array of product, most recently the horror anthology sequel V/H/S/99, and the found footage horror-comedy Deadstream. Hulu's recent Hellraiser reboot put the franchise back on track after years of desperately underfunded entries from Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films.

PEARL
PEARL

Christopher Moss/A24 Mia Goth in Pearl

Above all, fans' love for seeing a horror film in a big dark room remains, happily, undimmed. Almost a century after Universal's gang of classic monsters — Dracula, Frankenstein, et al — terrified '30s-era audiences, there is still a hunger among people to have their spines tingled in a public forum. At a time when the world has no shortage of real-life terrors, the cathartic release of fear-inspiring fictions continues to drive viewers to theaters, profits to film companies, and the occasional person to vomit their popcorn all over the floor. And really, isn't that what the sprit of Halloween is all about?

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