Horror Movies Today and Tomorrow

Everybody’s talking about it. This is like Barbie and Oppenheimer, but on lower budgets and this time it’s horror.

Obsession is, in some ways, a minor movie. I liked it a lot and was completely entertained by the whole thing. A fun movie, well made, effective, funny and horrifying. Most importantly, it was made with a very low budget. Reports are claiming that Obsession earned four-hundred times its budget.

I like Backrooms quite a bit more. It’s strange and enigmatic, and as people love to attach labels to everything, Backrooms is liminal horror. It cost more to make than Obsession but still made around thirty times its budget.

I assume the figures above are referring to production budgets and not promotional expenses. Still, any way you look at it, Obsession and Backrooms are industry-changing hits.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of the independent horror movies I’ve seen in the last year or two. Good Boy, Undertone, Jimmy and Stiggs, Shelby Oaks, Dream Eater. These aren’t all exactly masterpieces, but they are well made, with ingenuity and intelligence rather than mega-millions of dollars.

There’s no doubt that the studio heads are taking notice. Small investment, big payoff, this is the dream. I think we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the coming months.

It’ll be like the independent film revolution of the nineties. If we’re lucky there will be a few years of smart, worthy little productions for us to see. Then it will gradually be assimilated into the system, and we can wait for the next phenomena to occur.

I liked The Mummy and Sinners and a few of the other big horror movies. Sure, I’ll go see the new Evil Dead, with my expectations definitely in check. I am more excited about Ice Cream Man, from Eli Roth’s The Horror Section. I pray that one is a hit, because I am an investor in the company.

I expect the Hollywood studios will be searching YouTube for the next Curry Barker and Kane Parsons. As always, we’ll take the good with the bad. As the big shots take control, quality is likely to go down.

I’m mostly excited about literary adaptations. Pulitzer winner Daniel Kraus is active in bringing a couple projects to theaters. His terrifying Whalefall is coming soon, and there’s word Kraus is adapting Robert McCammon’s Yellowjacket Summer for a feature film. I hear a film of Elizabeth Engstrom’s stunning When Darkness Loves Us is in the works.

I’ve been around longer than most and I’ve never seen horror this popular. A couple years ago I thought it would be dying down, but it seems to be growing bigger all the time. A new horror movie opens damned near every week. Physical media is seeing a huge resurgence in popularity. Horror fiction is blowing up in every conceivable direction.

This is wonderful and exciting. I hope all fans will be actively involved in it. Get out and see the movies. If you don’t love one, well, maybe the next will be better. The important thing is to keep the fire burning. That takes us, the fans, to make it happen. We have to buy the movie tickets. We need to purchase physical releases. We all need to be a part of this unprecedented horror Renaissance. I mean, isn’t this what we’ve always wanted?

Written by Mark Sieber