Fear-good hit of the summer: how did horror become a year-long box office slayer?
Climate change is affecting everything, even cinema. It used to be that horror movies were for winter, when the nights were drawing in and summer blockbusters were in hibernation. Now the genre is a year-round proposition. It used to be that you released your horror movie in Halloween and called it something like Halloween. Now you can release a horror movie in midsummer, and call it … Midsommar.
In the past few months, we’ve been getting more than a horror movie a week. In UK cinemas you currently have the choice of Midsommar, Child’s Play,In Fabric, Brightburn and – joining them this week – Annabelle Comes Home and The Dead Don’t Die, with Welsh folk-horror tale Gwen coming on Friday. And there is a whole summer of horror yet to come. It’s enough to make you want to stay in and watch Stranger Things.
You could put all this down to global cultural anxiety about the unprecedentedly scary times we live in, but the reason is probably more prosaic than that. Sequels and reboots are crashing and burning this year: Men in Black International, Godzilla, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Lego Movie 2, and many more. Grown-up drama has abandoned the multiplexes for television, and comedies aren’t doing all that well, either. But horror is still something we like to congregate in darkened rooms to watch. Horror movies are now like the undergrowth on the forest floor: when the big trees fall they are always there, ready to move in and take advantage. Not all of them will be hits but, being cheap to make with potentially huge profits, they don’t need to be.
The studios know this. The Conjuring, out of which the Annabelle series was spun, was also a July hit. Annabelle Creation also came out in August. Likewise, Paramount reportedly fast-tracked Crawl, its killer-alli
gator movie, for release this August after seeing the soaraway success of A Quiet Place, which came out in March, the same time of year as Get Out and Us. There’s still an autumn horror season, but now it’s reserved for the really big horrors: in September, we get It: Chapter Two (part one made $700m), followed in October by Zombieland 2 and The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep.
Every genre seems to be getting in touch with its horror side now, too. You have arthouse horror (The Dead Don’t Die, In Fabric, Gwen), action horror (Crawl, Zombieland 2), family horror (Stranger Things, the new Addams Family animation), TV horror (The Terror, The Twilight Zone). You have “straight” horrors, such as the Annabelle franchise, and not-at-all-straight horrors, like Midsommar. The greater worry is that horror becomes so commonplace it loses its originality, exactly like the current reboot/sequel malaise. Let’s hope not. At the moment, horror is what’s holding cinema together.