The Five 'Best' Horror Films That Flopped
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I put “best” in quotations, because obviously what scares me is
heavily subjective and may not do a thing for you. Having said that,
there is a strange dichotomy in regards to the horror genre and the fans
that flock to the cinemas. Up until recently, many of the best or the
scariest American horror films that were lucky enough to receive a
mainstream theatrical release ended up tanking or somewhat
under-performing at the box office, while the latest allegedly
un-requested 80′s/90′s horror remake rocked the cash registers again and
again.
It’s hard to argue against the notion that many of the best and/or imaginative horror titles of the last several years skipped theaters all-together, but that’s a conversation for another day. For the moment, let us remember five genuine American theatrical horror classics that won the war for art but lost the battle for commerce. And for the record, Cabin In the Woods is not on this list because it earned $66 million worldwide.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
New Line Cinema’s seventh Nightmare On Elm Street is a strange example of a studio looking at financial success and then darting in the complete opposite direction. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, was a fantastical, and borderline campy romp. Its finale was even in 3D, back when they didn’t charge extra for that kind of thing. The promise of killing off Fred Krueger was enough to garner a $12.9 million opening (the highest of the series at that time) and $34m off an $11m budget. New Line decided to continue the franchise post-death, and their idea was downright inspired.
The result was Wes Craven’s masterpiece, bar none, and the best of the Nightmare On Elm Streets series. The movie simply unleashes horror icon Freddy Kruger into the real world, where he terrorizes the real actors (Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Robert Englund) and filmmakers (Wes Craven, Robert Shaye) who brought him to life. In a deeper sense, this film operates as Freddy Kruger’s The Cable Guy or In A Lonely Place.
Wes Craven took an iconic and beloved anti-hero and placed him in a more real-world environment, where we are forced to face just how unpleasant he really is. Freddy Kruger isn’t the least bit funny this time around, and he’s not dispatching half-naked teenagers for our blameless entertainment. Kruger’s murders here have devastating consequences that will ripple throughout the lives of our lead characters long after the credits role. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare does something astonishing: it makes us fear and hate Fred Kruger for perhaps the first time.
But absolutely no one cared. Released on the same weekend in October 1994 as Pulp Fiction, the well-reviewed picture opened with just $6.6 million, the lowest wide-release debut of the entire series. It ended its brief theatrical run with a mere $18 million in the domestic till, making the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise an oddity in that its best entry is its lowest-grossing. Nineteen years later, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare still works as a deconstruction of the slasher genre, an emotionally wrenching portrait of grief, and a genuinely terrifying piece of horror of its own right.
Event Horizon (1997)
This entry is one of the reasons I put “best” in quotes in the headline. You won’t find me calling this a great movie. It was infamously cut by about thirty minutes prior to release and the final cut doesn’t quite make it to the last reel without nearly self-destructing. But Paul W.S. Anderson’s haunted-house remake of Solaris remains one of the out-and-out scariest theatrical experiences that I can remember. Its reputation has grown over the last sixteen years, and judging by my near-empty theater on opening night, most of that viewership came via DVD and the like.
The cast (Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Jason Isaacs, Joely Richardson, and Richard T. Jones) is uncommonly top-notch for this kind of material, and they bring a genuine conviction and believability to the opening expository sections. Once they are sent to retrieve the mythical Event Horizon, a ship that disappeared into deep space seven years ago, Anderson quickly establishes an anything-can-happen ethos which leaves the viewer as uneasy and confused as our heroes.
In Pictures: The Top-Grossing Scary Movies Of All Time
The horrifying imagery, meant to antagonize the boarders with their darkest fears and most guilt-ridden moments, creates a genuine sense of discomforting dread. It’s basically a slickly-made b-movie sci-fi horror picture, but it’s well acted, gorgeous to look at, and remarkably effective in its primary goal. It also lost tens-of-millions of dollars for Paramount.
The film cost $60 million to produce yet brought in just $26m in August of 1997. Today it’s somewhat astonishing that Paramount spent what was then top-dollar on an R-rated science-fiction horror film with no box office draws. The only remotely close example of recent years was Prometheus, a glorified Alien prequel with a mere $130m budget, a lot of money but half of the going rate for a Spider-Man or a Transformers. Paramount may have been foolish to spend $60m on a film that had zero chance of making that back, but the horror nerd inside of all us are grateful they did.
Frailty (2002)
If backed into a corner, I’d probably name this one as the scariest (and best) horror film of the last 15 years. It’s box office failure gives lie to the idea that general audiences really, truly, want to be scared to the bone in a horror film, versus the kind of (perfectly enjoyable) popcorn-flying horror found in most multiplexes. Not even raves from Stephen King and James Cameron could buy it a halfway decent opening weekend. Oh well, it will have to settle for merely being one, in my humble opinion, of the very finest American horror films in cinematic history.
This emotionally-wrenching and uncommonly disturbing chiller comes from director Bill Paxton, who stars as a normal single father of two young boys. Everything is fine and dandy until he sees a vision of a religious nature and wakes up his children to inform them that God has chosen him to be a slayer of demons. Told mostly from the point of view of the oldest son (a devastatingly-good Matt O’Leary), this modern-day fable brings about timely issues of the nature and limits of religious devotion, and how our standards for sanity have changed over the centuries. It’s also disturbing and scary as hell. It will leave you feeling thoroughly creeped out and not a little sad.
But as we all know, most moviegoers don’t want to go out to the movies on a Saturday night to be thoroughly disturbed and/or depressed. So in retrospect its $4.2 million opening weekend isn’t too much of a surprise. The good news is that it was cheap enough ($11m) that its $18m gross put it on the path to eventual profitability through various DVD and Blu-Ray reissues. The bad news is that Bill Paxton directed just one more feature, The Greatest Game Ever Played in 2005. It’s a genuine American masterpiece and belongs on the shelf (or hard drive I suppose) of every horror junkie on the planet.
The Mist (2007)
This may be the most out-and-out frightening Stephen King adaptation ever released into theaters, in the same year that also saw the wonderfully scary/funny 1408. Directed by Frank Darabont, this weirdly plausible horror show concerns a couple dozen small-town folk trapped in a grocery store as the town (and the world?) is besieged by horrifying creatures of all shapes and sizes that just show up and start devouring those in their path.
The actors (Thomas Jane, Andre Braugher, Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Jones, William Sadler) keep the material grounded as the film eventually becomes a meditation on how fear leads to religious extremism. Toss in some truly spine-tingling, horrifying imagery (the monsters are really scary folks), plus one of the most obscenely-grim endings in cinema history, and you have the makings of a genuine horror classic.
But Thanksgiving isn’t exactly the time to release an insanely grim spine-tingler that explicitly condemns human paranoia and religious-fueled mania, so it didn’t exactly light the box office world on fire. The Mist opened with $8 million over Thanksgiving weekend 2007, ending up with just $25m. Thanks to a surprisingly robust $31m overseas take, the $18m horror tale eventually turned a profit, and the multiple DVD/Blu-Ray releases helped too, including one that included the film as Darabont intended, in black-and-white. No matter in color or black-and-white, the film is genuinely terrifying, and it’s a shame it hasn’t developed more than a passing cult following.
Saw VI (2009)
In the kind of irony Jigsaw himself would appreciate, the sixth Saw film inexplicably turned out to be the best entry in the long-running series, but it ended up as the lowest-grossing film in the seven-film franchise. For five straight Halloweens, John Kramer and his Rube Goldberg traps ruled the scary movie season, with a new entry dropping like clockwork every October and the first four sequels earning over/under $30 million over each opening weekend. But the insanely complicated continuity, which magically kept the franchise going after the death of its primary villain in Saw III, made it harder for new audience members to join in the fun.
Viewer discontent with the half-assed Saw V and a new kid on the block were Jigsaw’s undoing. In one of the great “Holy crap!” box office stories of the last several years (and the last three months of 2009 were filled with such stories, but that’s for another day), Paramount took a glorified home movie and marketed it as the great new horror find, with word-of-mouth screenings sending buzz soaring and staggering per-screen averages setting the stage for a battle royal. The weekend of October 23 was when it all came to a head, with Paranormal Activity going semi-wide on 1,900 screens and topping the box office with $21m in its fifth weekend. Poor Saw VI, despite being a genuine artistic comeback, earned just $14m for the weekend.
In Pictures: The Top-Grossing Scary Movies Of All Time
The Saw films had infamously short legs, and Saw VI was no exception, ending with just $27 million, or less than the last four entries had earned on opening weekend. Lionsgate scrapped plans for a two-part series finale, instead opting for one last Saw film, shot in 3D, and featuring the return of Cary Elwes years after suing the producers of the first Saw for unpaid back-end profits. The post-Avatar appeal of 3D and the promise of a definite end to the franchise powered Saw VII to a mediocre $22m weekend, the second-lowest debut for a Saw sequel and ended with $45m, or the second-lowest domestic total. It’s been three years since the series ended with no signs of a sequel or reboot on the horizon.
The irony in all of this is that Saw VI was the best film in the series, giving ample screen time to franchise MVP Tobin Bell and using the topical health insurance debate as the template for Jigsaw’s latest reign of terror. With sympathetic victims, the actual possibility of survivors (with resulting genuine suspense), and an equally compelling “B’ story line with Jigsaw’s accomplice trying to escape detection, this was probably the best part 6 of any franchise outside of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country or Return of the Jedi. But the heat wore off and the terrible Saw V turned many fans off the Jigsaw habit just as it was hitting an artistic peak.
And that’s a wrap for this shorter, but certainly not sweeter, detour into the box office history of horror films for the month of October. It’s now your turn to share your favorite horror films that didn’t light up the box office like they arguably should have.
Related on Forbes: Stephen King Movies With Less Bloodshed Make More Money. But ‘Carrie’ May Be The Exception
It’s hard to argue against the notion that many of the best and/or imaginative horror titles of the last several years skipped theaters all-together, but that’s a conversation for another day. For the moment, let us remember five genuine American theatrical horror classics that won the war for art but lost the battle for commerce. And for the record, Cabin In the Woods is not on this list because it earned $66 million worldwide.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
New Line Cinema’s seventh Nightmare On Elm Street is a strange example of a studio looking at financial success and then darting in the complete opposite direction. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, was a fantastical, and borderline campy romp. Its finale was even in 3D, back when they didn’t charge extra for that kind of thing. The promise of killing off Fred Krueger was enough to garner a $12.9 million opening (the highest of the series at that time) and $34m off an $11m budget. New Line decided to continue the franchise post-death, and their idea was downright inspired.
The result was Wes Craven’s masterpiece, bar none, and the best of the Nightmare On Elm Streets series. The movie simply unleashes horror icon Freddy Kruger into the real world, where he terrorizes the real actors (Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Robert Englund) and filmmakers (Wes Craven, Robert Shaye) who brought him to life. In a deeper sense, this film operates as Freddy Kruger’s The Cable Guy or In A Lonely Place.
Wes Craven took an iconic and beloved anti-hero and placed him in a more real-world environment, where we are forced to face just how unpleasant he really is. Freddy Kruger isn’t the least bit funny this time around, and he’s not dispatching half-naked teenagers for our blameless entertainment. Kruger’s murders here have devastating consequences that will ripple throughout the lives of our lead characters long after the credits role. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare does something astonishing: it makes us fear and hate Fred Kruger for perhaps the first time.
But absolutely no one cared. Released on the same weekend in October 1994 as Pulp Fiction, the well-reviewed picture opened with just $6.6 million, the lowest wide-release debut of the entire series. It ended its brief theatrical run with a mere $18 million in the domestic till, making the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise an oddity in that its best entry is its lowest-grossing. Nineteen years later, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare still works as a deconstruction of the slasher genre, an emotionally wrenching portrait of grief, and a genuinely terrifying piece of horror of its own right.
Event Horizon (1997)
This entry is one of the reasons I put “best” in quotes in the headline. You won’t find me calling this a great movie. It was infamously cut by about thirty minutes prior to release and the final cut doesn’t quite make it to the last reel without nearly self-destructing. But Paul W.S. Anderson’s haunted-house remake of Solaris remains one of the out-and-out scariest theatrical experiences that I can remember. Its reputation has grown over the last sixteen years, and judging by my near-empty theater on opening night, most of that viewership came via DVD and the like.
The cast (Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Jason Isaacs, Joely Richardson, and Richard T. Jones) is uncommonly top-notch for this kind of material, and they bring a genuine conviction and believability to the opening expository sections. Once they are sent to retrieve the mythical Event Horizon, a ship that disappeared into deep space seven years ago, Anderson quickly establishes an anything-can-happen ethos which leaves the viewer as uneasy and confused as our heroes.
In Pictures: The Top-Grossing Scary Movies Of All Time
The horrifying imagery, meant to antagonize the boarders with their darkest fears and most guilt-ridden moments, creates a genuine sense of discomforting dread. It’s basically a slickly-made b-movie sci-fi horror picture, but it’s well acted, gorgeous to look at, and remarkably effective in its primary goal. It also lost tens-of-millions of dollars for Paramount.
The film cost $60 million to produce yet brought in just $26m in August of 1997. Today it’s somewhat astonishing that Paramount spent what was then top-dollar on an R-rated science-fiction horror film with no box office draws. The only remotely close example of recent years was Prometheus, a glorified Alien prequel with a mere $130m budget, a lot of money but half of the going rate for a Spider-Man or a Transformers. Paramount may have been foolish to spend $60m on a film that had zero chance of making that back, but the horror nerd inside of all us are grateful they did.
Frailty (2002)
If backed into a corner, I’d probably name this one as the scariest (and best) horror film of the last 15 years. It’s box office failure gives lie to the idea that general audiences really, truly, want to be scared to the bone in a horror film, versus the kind of (perfectly enjoyable) popcorn-flying horror found in most multiplexes. Not even raves from Stephen King and James Cameron could buy it a halfway decent opening weekend. Oh well, it will have to settle for merely being one, in my humble opinion, of the very finest American horror films in cinematic history.
This emotionally-wrenching and uncommonly disturbing chiller comes from director Bill Paxton, who stars as a normal single father of two young boys. Everything is fine and dandy until he sees a vision of a religious nature and wakes up his children to inform them that God has chosen him to be a slayer of demons. Told mostly from the point of view of the oldest son (a devastatingly-good Matt O’Leary), this modern-day fable brings about timely issues of the nature and limits of religious devotion, and how our standards for sanity have changed over the centuries. It’s also disturbing and scary as hell. It will leave you feeling thoroughly creeped out and not a little sad.
But as we all know, most moviegoers don’t want to go out to the movies on a Saturday night to be thoroughly disturbed and/or depressed. So in retrospect its $4.2 million opening weekend isn’t too much of a surprise. The good news is that it was cheap enough ($11m) that its $18m gross put it on the path to eventual profitability through various DVD and Blu-Ray reissues. The bad news is that Bill Paxton directed just one more feature, The Greatest Game Ever Played in 2005. It’s a genuine American masterpiece and belongs on the shelf (or hard drive I suppose) of every horror junkie on the planet.
The Mist (2007)
This may be the most out-and-out frightening Stephen King adaptation ever released into theaters, in the same year that also saw the wonderfully scary/funny 1408. Directed by Frank Darabont, this weirdly plausible horror show concerns a couple dozen small-town folk trapped in a grocery store as the town (and the world?) is besieged by horrifying creatures of all shapes and sizes that just show up and start devouring those in their path.
The actors (Thomas Jane, Andre Braugher, Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Jones, William Sadler) keep the material grounded as the film eventually becomes a meditation on how fear leads to religious extremism. Toss in some truly spine-tingling, horrifying imagery (the monsters are really scary folks), plus one of the most obscenely-grim endings in cinema history, and you have the makings of a genuine horror classic.
But Thanksgiving isn’t exactly the time to release an insanely grim spine-tingler that explicitly condemns human paranoia and religious-fueled mania, so it didn’t exactly light the box office world on fire. The Mist opened with $8 million over Thanksgiving weekend 2007, ending up with just $25m. Thanks to a surprisingly robust $31m overseas take, the $18m horror tale eventually turned a profit, and the multiple DVD/Blu-Ray releases helped too, including one that included the film as Darabont intended, in black-and-white. No matter in color or black-and-white, the film is genuinely terrifying, and it’s a shame it hasn’t developed more than a passing cult following.
Saw VI (2009)In the kind of irony Jigsaw himself would appreciate, the sixth Saw film inexplicably turned out to be the best entry in the long-running series, but it ended up as the lowest-grossing film in the seven-film franchise. For five straight Halloweens, John Kramer and his Rube Goldberg traps ruled the scary movie season, with a new entry dropping like clockwork every October and the first four sequels earning over/under $30 million over each opening weekend. But the insanely complicated continuity, which magically kept the franchise going after the death of its primary villain in Saw III, made it harder for new audience members to join in the fun.
Viewer discontent with the half-assed Saw V and a new kid on the block were Jigsaw’s undoing. In one of the great “Holy crap!” box office stories of the last several years (and the last three months of 2009 were filled with such stories, but that’s for another day), Paramount took a glorified home movie and marketed it as the great new horror find, with word-of-mouth screenings sending buzz soaring and staggering per-screen averages setting the stage for a battle royal. The weekend of October 23 was when it all came to a head, with Paranormal Activity going semi-wide on 1,900 screens and topping the box office with $21m in its fifth weekend. Poor Saw VI, despite being a genuine artistic comeback, earned just $14m for the weekend.
In Pictures: The Top-Grossing Scary Movies Of All Time
The Saw films had infamously short legs, and Saw VI was no exception, ending with just $27 million, or less than the last four entries had earned on opening weekend. Lionsgate scrapped plans for a two-part series finale, instead opting for one last Saw film, shot in 3D, and featuring the return of Cary Elwes years after suing the producers of the first Saw for unpaid back-end profits. The post-Avatar appeal of 3D and the promise of a definite end to the franchise powered Saw VII to a mediocre $22m weekend, the second-lowest debut for a Saw sequel and ended with $45m, or the second-lowest domestic total. It’s been three years since the series ended with no signs of a sequel or reboot on the horizon.
The irony in all of this is that Saw VI was the best film in the series, giving ample screen time to franchise MVP Tobin Bell and using the topical health insurance debate as the template for Jigsaw’s latest reign of terror. With sympathetic victims, the actual possibility of survivors (with resulting genuine suspense), and an equally compelling “B’ story line with Jigsaw’s accomplice trying to escape detection, this was probably the best part 6 of any franchise outside of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country or Return of the Jedi. But the heat wore off and the terrible Saw V turned many fans off the Jigsaw habit just as it was hitting an artistic peak.
And that’s a wrap for this shorter, but certainly not sweeter, detour into the box office history of horror films for the month of October. It’s now your turn to share your favorite horror films that didn’t light up the box office like they arguably should have.
Related on Forbes: Stephen King Movies With Less Bloodshed Make More Money. But ‘Carrie’ May Be The Exception
