Fear factory
Scary films becoming big stars of Hollywood
MOVIES
Horror isn’t just on the menu in Hollywood’s hitmaking — it’s practically the main course. No longer just at Halloween but all year long America’s film factories depend on making scary, disturbing or gory pictures to entice audiences — and these days, the creepier, the sicker, the scarier, the better!
This weekend brings Tyler Perry’s comically violent senior citizen Madea back for a second Halloween outing. A week later, “Jigsaw” arrives, a reboot of the grossly sadistic “Saw” franchise.
It was a lucky Halloween weekend 13 years ago when “Saw” first saw light, and now it returns, directed by the Spierig brothers.
The siblings Peter and Michael aren’t pausing to take a breath — they’re already filming their March horror outing “Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built” with Oscar winner Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester opposite Jason Clarke, who stars in December’s “Chappaquiddick” as Teddy Kennedy.
“Winchester” tells a mostly true story of the gun manufacturing heiress who felt haunted by the souls of
those shot dead by the firearms her family made.
She built a huge mansion designed primarily to confuse those evil spirits. The legendary estate still stands and is now known as the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif.
Nicole Kidman, who starred in “The Others,” a wonderfully atmospheric ghost story with a twist, is back on Nov. 3 opposite Colin Farrell in “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” The horror-thriller casts Farrell as a surgeon, head of a happy family (ominous chord of music here), who becomes involved with an eerie teen boy. Then his family gets very, very sick.
In a year with troubling signs of audience erosion, horror movies continually and unexpectedly topped the charts.
“It,” just the first half of Stephen King’s monumental story of a shape-shifting killer clown and the kids who band together to destroy him, has been a shocking box-office phenomenon, with a $315 million domestic take so far.
“It” propelled September’s grosses to record heights according to boxofficemojo.com. Naturally the sequel is on the way.
This past weekend, it wasn’t the $200 million “Blade Runner” sequel that scored the top spot, but “Happy Death Day,” the latest from the microbudgeted Blumhouse horror factory.
“Happy Death Day,” which comedically echoes the “Scream” series with echoes of “Groundhog Day,” made an estimated $26.5 million — on a budget of just $4.8 million.
“Happy Death Day” won respectable reviews and continues the Blumhouse winning streak, following last spring’s instant horror classic (and an honestto-goodness Oscar contender) “Get Out” and the M. Night Shyamalan film “Split.”
“47 Meters Down,” a shark-cage horror outing initially intended to go straight to DVD, instead opened more than four months ago and has grossed $44 million on a $5.5 million budget, with a sequel in the works.
And though Universal Pictures stumbled badly with Tom Cruise in “The Mummy,” a disaster that dimmed their planned reboots of the studio’s 1930s horror classics reinvented with big names, they are going ahead.
For horror, Hollywood knows well, knows no season.