From B movies to mainstream favorites: the revival of horror films and shows

Backed by indie studios and streaming, horror again carries meaning beyond its genre — exactly what audiences living in crisis want

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

Two things happened this October.

On October 12, Netflix released The Haunting of Hill House, a horror series adapted from Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel of the same name. It scored 9 on IMDb and 93% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It looks like genre fare about a haunted house, yet it plays more like This Is Us in gothic dress — a family drama. There are no cheap scares. The show begins with its characters and tells a story about trauma and the ties of blood; the plotting is cunning, the camerawork startling, the aftertaste long. Nearly every outlet called it "possibly Netflix's best original series."

A week later, Halloween opened. It is a direct sequel to the first Halloween, from 1978 — the film that, forty years ago, launched the horror subgenre known as the slasher, still going strong today. Made for $10 million, it took $77.5 million in North America on its opening weekend, second only to Sony's big-budget Venom, which broke the record for an October opening. Amid the praise from mainstream outlets, most of the attention went to "scream queen" Jamie Lee Curtis striking back forty years on, and female power in the new era of horror became the talking point.

Before all that, you had already heard that Luca Guadagnino's remake of Suspiria was winning strong notices in awards season; perhaps The Nun had whetted your appetite early; perhaps you spent the summer with Castle Rock, that grab bag of Stephen King novels, sought out A24's Hereditary and the hit A Quiet Place on their reputations, went back to the book to prepare for It, joined the plot arguments about Get Out after its Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and have watched since 2013 as James Wan's The Conjuring and Insidious series spun off universes of their own under mainstream acclaim…

Look back over the past five years: horror films and series, once the property of one particular crowd, have drawn more and more attention from the mainstream press. Their subjects vary, and pumping adrenaline is no longer the only goal. Next to the comic-book adaptations that take half the box office, they hold their own, slipping into the year's top 10 at remarkably low cost and pulling in a growing audience. This is not an illusion: by Box Office Mojo's count, at least at the box office, and thanks to It and Get Out, 2017 was the strongest year in the history of horror.

Horror has never lost its audience. There is always one film that breaks through in some way and opens a category, or a golden age — Universal's monster universe half a century ago, the zombie picture George Romero started in the 1960s, the slashers of the 1980s led by A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, the fake documentaries the 1990s took from The Blair Witch Project, the elaborate trap-and-torture films of the new century led by Saw… And yet the last time a pure horror film won mainstream recognition and huge box office was 1973: The Exorcist carried the year's horror grosses single-handed and, the year after, became the first horror film to take Best Picture at the Oscars. For decades afterward, most horror sank back into B-movie videotape, embraced only by viewers with a taste for the extreme.

What horror gets today does not look like another subgenre enjoying a brief, shallow spell of heat. It looks more like a revival, one paying homage to the grave Exorcist of the 1970s, to Polanski's loaded Rosemary's Baby of fifty years ago, to the extreme beauty of Suspiria, to the well-judged psychological dread of Alien. And in today's unsettled world it has put on the clothes of real issues.

None of this is a surprise. It was, if anything, bound to happen.

A high return on investment keeps horror evergreen

Horror films are the best way for the poor of the film business to make quick money. Your core audience wants one thing: to be scared. They don't mind unknown actors, so you needn't spend much on stars. The more ordinary the setting, the more it lands, so you shoot in one place or a few, or entirely indoors, with no need to scout locations. You don't need expensive effects: makeup, models and tons of fake blood will do almost everything, and all you have to handle is the cleanup, mopping up the ketchup or the honey dyed red.

A study of the profitability of films released in the United States between 1996 and 2016 found that 53% of horror films made money — the highest share of any category (adventure, romance, musical, action, comedy, suspense, drama, black comedy, western), and far above the industry average of 37%. Figures from The New York Times show that on return on investment (ROI) alone, horror ranks second among all genres, behind documentaries, averaging six times its cost in North America and as much as twelve times worldwide.

The all-time ROI record belongs to a horror film: the box-office legend of The Blair Witch Project still lifts everyone's spirits. Passed off as tape shot by missing students, it cost $35,000, and viral marketing under a "based on true events" label carried it to $250 million — a budget-to-revenue ratio of 1:7094. Its fake-documentary form also opened the found-footage category, which meant that low-resolution images, shaky cameras, plainly everyday settings, actors off the street and very few scares all now had a good reason to exist. The imitators that followed, [REC] and Paranormal Activity, went on earning astonishing returns by the same means.

For independent filmmakers this is the most practical way to do everything yourself, build a following, and finally attract investors. Romero, who raised $110,000 from friends to shoot Night of the Living Dead (it took $30 million worldwide), and Peter Jackson, who made his first feature, Bad Taste, with friends over dozens of weekends (it sold rights to distributors from 12 countries at Cannes in 1987), surely know the feeling.

Nobody dislikes a profitable business. Apart from a few innovators, the film industry mass-produced batch after batch of genre goods; hackneyed, interchangeable and cheap as the plots were, they turned a profit because they cost so little. In the 1980s and 1990s, when slashers ruled, a great many horror films skipped theaters entirely and went straight to home video. With no exhibitor's cut and no strict ratings to obey, loyal horror fans and mainstream viewers after the occasional thrill provided steady income.

In the internet age streaming took the place of the videotape, and the rise of the Netflixes looks a little like a revival of the B-movie labels. Relatively small budgets, no theaters and no censors, room to experiment inside the film — all of it fits the way streaming services have always made original content.

Traditional studios, for their part, see horror as a safe bet. As The New York Times has analyzed, a standard tentpole today costs around $200 million, usually with another $100 million for marketing. That limits how many films a studio can make in a year and leaves it unable to afford a failure — one reason studios keep reaching for sequels and reboots. Horror has almost none of these worries: keep the budget down, draw people with whatever each subgenre does best, aim at a fixed niche, settle if need be for a few hundred screens — and if word of mouth carries the film to a broader audience, the payoff is richer still. Even a well-made horror film need not cost a frightening amount. The Conjuring cost $20 million and took more than $300 million worldwide. And then you can make a sequel.

Either way, the business cannot lose. And once the volume is there, it is all but certain that some of the films will leave the genre behind, test its edges and go after quality.

It is this business that produced today's king of horror, Blumhouse.

Working the horror category like independent film

Jason Blum, 48, is one of the hottest figures in Hollywood. As CEO of Blumhouse — whose title card you probably remember, a little girl in a white dress walking past a dark green corner, giving nervous viewers their first scare before the film has even begun — he has built several box-office legends. Behind nearly every horror hit of the past decade that people can name is Blumhouse money: Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious, Sinister, Happy Death Day, Get Out, and now Halloween…

Low costs, high volume and a focus on genre have kept Blumhouse steadily profitable, and left Blum happy to let filmmakers experiment. Blum, who once worked for the Weinstein brothers and produced independent films for Warner Bros., was not a horror fan when he entered the field, but he came to it with something other than the quick-money mindset.

Asked by THR what drew him to horror, Blum answered: "What attracts me to horror movies is that I really love independent film. Fully independent film is very hard to develop, and the independent business has now largely merged with television. I found the main reason I love horror while producing Sinister — the challenge it sets is the same as making a great independent film. You ask the director: if you cut out all the scary sequences, would this film still get into Sundance? Would it still work? Would the storytelling still hold?"

"The key to a good horror film is not horror, not scares, not gore. It's story. Same as any other good film: story and dramatic conflict… I don't ask, 'Will this make a lot of money?' I ask, 'Does it feel like a good independent film?'"

He used Sinister as his example: the film is really about a man whose career has stalled, a man who puts his work ahead of his family and so puts his family in danger. "I love using the genre to bring some remarkable, particular stories to a bigger audience."

In the same spirit, Netflix let Mike Flanagan make the Haunting of Hill House this article opened with. Take the horror away and it is a fine family drama with the most affecting characters; the long ensemble takes and the flashback stitching in the sixth episode show how hard its makers worked for the effect they wanted. The motive is the same as James Wan's camera showing off in cramped rooms — to escape the constraints of assembly-line horror and make something good.

Blum's eye for an investment decides whether these independent-minded horror films get made at all, and his producer's mind weighs the strategies that help them pay. Every film must be kept under $5 million; a sequel to an existing piece of intellectual property can be given a generous $15 million. He wants to see what happens when the Blumhouse system is applied to IP: "to see whether we can put an innovation system onto a franchise."

The result is that nearly every Blumhouse film you can name has a sequel. It is safe enough, it uses the same independent-film thinking, and its budget is modest next to a tentpole — while Blumhouse's runaway hits, with their extraordinary ROI, long ago secured a healthy flow of cash.

Blumhouse's independent taste set the terms of today's horror mainstream. "It has to say something besides scaring you" is now close to mandatory for any horror film hoping for mainstream recognition, and the films are looking for new tricks and turns against the genre — The Cabin in the Woods, say — or for better ideas, like Don't Breathe and Lights Out. Meanwhile, the hunt for independent filmmakers goes on.

There is another force behind this. Audiences have grown numb to the traditional horror recipe. Every subgenre has matured too far and settled into a fixed pattern; some franchises are past their fifth number, and inside the old boundaries there is little left to excite anyone. As some have pointed out, people are now surrounded by real evil: "We live in an age when actual violence and death play on Facebook and YouTube. Isn't a desensitized audience the more troubling thing?"

Brief, surface-level frights no longer satisfy. People want real fear. They need something that works at a deeper level.

What are you afraid of now?

Creators and audiences have arrived at the same answer about that deeper level. They may never have compared notes, but living through the same violent and uneasy times, they now understand fear from roughly the same ground. The job of a good horror writer, after all, is to reach the dread in the subconscious and probe the questions society will not discuss — and that work usually rests on a shared wound.

Stephen King is a writer who hands out wounds.

A generation of new creators grew up in the shadow of King's books, and they soon found the books had not dated. His conservative small towns, cut off from the modern world, and his childhoods in which children learn too early how cruel the world is, fit today's subjects perfectly well — religion, addiction, abuse, bullying, the cruelty of children; a shut-in town in economic decline, forgotten by America, where the worst thing possible happens, everything turns for the worse, and the protagonist can see no hope at all…

Once these creators realized they had a platform, they folded those shared wounds into their work, and made films with real feeling in them. Andrés Muschietti, who directed It, and Sam Shaw, co-creator of Castle Rock, have read King since they were children and were deeply shaped by him. Their readings of his work found their audience easily, and produced a second Stephen King revival, after The Shining, Carrie and Children of the Corn in the 1970s.

In the Cold War years when King's books first caught on, Americans feared communist infiltration and nuclear war. What frightens them now has changed, but it seems to share something with the old fears. Shaw said: "I think the world really does feel like an unstable, worrying place, so I'm not at all surprised that so many storytellers are drawn to a genre built out of uncertainty, fear and suspense."

Stephen Prince, a professor of film at Virginia Tech, put it this way: "Whether the world has actually become more dangerous than before is open to argument, but people today feel themselves under greater threat than ever. Horror films speak the problems that keep troubling us. They have to do with the frailty of the body, with our fragile hold on our own lives, and with that murky question: what is a person? Why can't you trust another person to stay reliable?"

That suspicion, and that unease about social problems, has worked its way into what filmmakers say, and combined with the studios' independent-film approach it has produced the greatest possible effect. When a film about race, Get Out, gets an Oscar nomination; when American Horror Story, after six years of supernatural curiosities, calls its seventh season Cult and uses the election to describe political disorder; when The Purge moves from the locked-house picture of the first film to the political satire of the three that followed; when Unfriended plays out entirely on a computer screen to make its point about online bullying; and when Halloween takes up the trauma women carry across the generations — you can see plainly how the understanding of horror has changed. The reality you live in is the real source of it, and works of art have begun, almost without meaning to, to take on race, immigration, gender and nation. The exaggerated terrors of fiction have turned into an escape from all that: set beside real events, fake blood and ghosts are nothing, and can even be a pleasure.

A wider range of subjects naturally brings in mainstream viewers. The horror audience is no longer confined to "freaks" with strange tastes. Women are turning up in greater numbers at horror festivals, close to a 4:6 ratio with men, largely because the genre's female characters have grown more varied. They are no longer the "sexy victim" or the "virgin who survives"; they can be the one behind it all, or the avenger, free of the scream-queen title altogether. The press has started urging Hollywood to hire more women to direct horror, and to stop assuming that "women don't want to make this kind of film."

This is a horror market you have not seen before. Carrying meanings the genre once could not express, horror films and series now answer to audiences in crisis, and the seriousness with which their makers speak for themselves has made this once marginal category worth taking seriously. More people are seeing the thing that truly frightens them.

Don't be afraid.

Cover image from The Haunting of Hill House.