Roger Ebert once wrote, “Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life.” This was a pejorative assessment of most movies posed against the wonder and emotional sprawl of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. It is a typically and admirably Ebertian sentiment, who believed that movies are where dreams can become real, where we can lose ourselves and find salvation. It’s aspirational and hopeful; theatergoing as Elysium. But some of us find that salvation in the cheapening, masturbatory, hammering diminishment of life. We’re called horror movie fans. And lately, we feel like the only fans with access to Ebert’s heavenly promise.
Horror is booming, experiencing a sustained era of growth and diversity that is comparable to only superhero movies and animation. But those two subgenres—story formats, really—are almost always based on previously seen ideas, mythologies, universes. They’re iterative stories. Iron Man 2. Toy Story 3. Minions. Soon, Avengers: Infinity War. We know about the holding pattern in which the industry and its creative participants find themselves. And while horror movies can be frightening, the scariest thing at the movies is sameness.
Here’s a list of the 2017 movies with $50 million-plus opening weekends not based on a preexisting property: Coco ($50.8 million) and Dunkirk ($50.5 million). An animated feature from Disney and a Christopher Nolan war epic. That’s it.
Here’s a list of 2018 movies, through more than three months, that fit the same criteria: A Quiet Place. John Krasinski’s muzzled little horror-thriller that earned $50.8 million this past weekend, well on its way to $100 million this month. After the overwhelming triumph of Black Panther, A Quiet Place is definitively the movie success story of 2018. Most analysts didn’t see it coming, projecting the movie as much as $20 million below its box-office take. But to anyone who saw the film at its premiere at the SXSW Film Festival last month, it isn’t difficult to see what transpired. A Quiet Place is an expertly marketed piece of entertainment that also happens to be a word-of-mouth movie in the truest sense. It features all the hallmarks: a high-concept story (family cannot make a noise for fear of monster death), a riveting star turn from Emily Blunt, and a whiplash ending that leaves viewers wanting to yell, cheer, or scream for a sequel. It is, in a word, fun. It’s scary, too. It’s not quite a classical horror film—it’s never quite clear why the sound monsters (aliens?) are stalking the Abbott family—but it had the same effect. The hush that fell over theaters this weekend amplified every piece of popcorn crunched, every Milk Dud gnoshed on, and every 7-Up slurped. A Quiet Place is novel, and it begs to be seen in a movie theater. It’s better that way. That’s a value proposition. Like A Quiet Place itself, seeing the movie in a theater is a collective, quiet act, without distraction.
The last You’ve gotta see it! movie that few saw coming was It, the long-gestating, thought-to-be-troubled Stephen King adaptation that eventually became the biggest horror movie of all time. It made a stunning $700 million worldwide, putting it in league with Twilight and Transformers movies, at a fraction of the price. With a reported $35 million budget, It reeled in something close to a 2,000 percent return on investment. Not even the biggest superhero movie can claim that. Also: It was rated R. It may be the massive anomaly that explains the simpler trend. Horror movies are cheap to make, easy to sell, galvanizing social experiences, and fun to talk about. They make people feel. Last year the genre represented nearly 9 percent of all movie tickets sold, an all-time high. Hard-core fans of superhero movies wait to see whether the Hollywood machine has been faithful to its origins; hard-core horror fans wait to get traumatized. Think of the emotional scale—one requires a checklist, the other demands vulnerability.
The genre evolves constantly, too. In this century, its centrality has moved from adaptations of Japanese ghost stories (The Grudge, The Ring) to found-footage stunt flicks (Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity) to a recent turn toward the awful possibilities of the internet (Unfriended, this weekend’s Truth or Dare). But inside the trends, the genre is wider and deeper than it appears. Last year Get Out, Split, Happy Death Day, and Annabelle: Creation joined It among the biggest grossers, four different approaches to the genre—a satirical Oscar winner, a crypto-sequel to a superhero movie, a lighthearted Groundhog’s Day slasher update, and a spinoff prequel that is the fourth installment in the Conjuring franchise. Are all of these movies classically good? No. Some are profound, some evaporate upon impact. But they also don’t feel like the tiny, interconnected links in the ever-tightening chain mail of content. They stand alone.
As other genres have fallen into disfavor by producers and studio chiefs—adult drama, teen comedy, heist movies—horror continues apace, not only growing in scope, but volume. A Quiet Place is a fierce testimony to the power of the in-theater experience and one of the only original stories to hypnotize audiences in recent times. But the genre thrives in all venues. Netflix has once again rustled the embers of the smoldering “But is it really a movie if it’s streaming?” debate by pulling its entries from next month’s Cannes Film Festival, a decision that will affect the rollout of several films with hopes of prestige, awards consideration, and glamour. Mike Flanagan’s last two films, Gerald’s Game and 2016’s Hush, as well as the recent Verónica, from the Spanish filmmaker Paco Plaza (REC), are not a part of this conversation. All three made their American debuts on Netflix, and all three are among the most recommended movies to me by horror fans (read: movie obsessives) in recent years. Flanagan and Plaza don’t have the cachet of Noah Baumbach, Bong Joon-ho, or Alfonso Cuarón, to name a few recent filmmakers bankrolled by the tha-thunking streamer. But the Flanagans and Plazas of the world—with their roots in international and independent cinema—are as vital to the future of horror as the forthcoming It sequel.
No company knows this better than Blumhouse, which famously financed and produced Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but also Happy Death Day, Split, the Purge franchise, the Ouija films, the Sinister films, Unfriended and its forthcoming sequel, Insidious: The Last Key, and Friday’s Truth or Dare. The production house has built a brand so routine and powerful to consumers of the genre, that Truth or Dare’s complete title is Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare. Producer Jason Blum’s thrifty style—rare is the budget that exceeds $5 million—hasn’t stopped his company from pursuing a Marvelesque branding campaign. A Quiet Place bears a resemblance to Blumhouse’s movies—the clever concept, the seductive campaign—with one significant difference: movie stars.
A Quiet Place was delivered by a studio, Paramount, that has struggled recently. It sold off the rights to two recent sci-fi films financed by a previous administration—the maligned The Cloverfield Paradox and the praised Annihilation—to Netflix, for a cost. Among the major studios, Paramount had a particularly difficult 2017, with only two $100 million earners. (Transformers: The Last Knight and Daddy’s Home 2, not exactly Ebert dream weavers.) But maybe that’s starting to change. A Quiet Place didn’t just outperform its projections, it may set a new course for the studio.
This is the first true-blue horror movie that the studio has released since 2014’s Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. The genre just hasn’t been a part of its portfolio. Since Jim Gianopulos took over Paramount one year ago, he’s slowly begun to remake the studio. A Quiet Place was one of his first green lights. Notably, the last time Paramount led the studio business in market share, 2011, it had a stake in the superhero world, codistributing two Marvel movies (Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger), three animated films (Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots, Rango), and a $104 million horror movie (Paranormal Activity 3). The studio could lay claim to over 19 percent of the domestic movie business revenue that year. In 2018, that figure has dipped to 4 percent.
A Quiet Place is a classic studio product that also looks and sounds like some of its forbearers. But there is a key difference, and I’ve been curious about its ramifications: Emily Blunt is a movie star. The Girl on the Train, Sicario, Edge of Tomorrow—in many ways, these movies were built around her gifts and grit. This Christmas, she’ll be Mary Poppins. She’s a name people are willing to come out for. There’s a case to be made that she’s the biggest star to appear in a horror movie at this stage of her career in the history of movies. (Nicole Kidman in The Others?) Certainly her husband, Krasinski, being the filmmaker is a factor in her involvement. He was a horror novice and self-described “scaredy cat” who brought few preconceived notions to the genre. But Blunt’s role may also signal to a certain class of actor that this is a viable path to exposure without donning a cape or cowl. In the past, the horror movie that followed the big prestige push—say, Jennifer Lawrence’s long-shelved House at the End of the Street hitting theaters one week after the premiere of Silver Linings Playbook in 2012—was considered a modest embarrassment. But the complexities of the industry, and its trouble drawing audiences, are vanquishing the idea of down-market genres. Now, I predict we’ll see more stars at Blunt’s level lean into horror.
Tom Cruise, ever hunting for relevance, was to star in Guillermo del Toro’s scrapped At the Mountains of Madness and then chose woeful The Mummy years later in what felt like the execution of a backup plan. But there is something about the zippy originality of A Quiet Place’s premise—and success—that should feel attractive to bigger names. Even a fairly well-known actor like Ethan Hawke was able to lift the credibility of the Sinister and Purge films, only to set up a series of sequels in which he was no longer necessary. Imagine Brad Pitt in a found-footage movie, Rihanna in a ghost story, or the Rock battling an evil clown. Ask Jessica Chastain, and possibly James McAvoy and Bill Hader. It’s not as scary as it sounds.
This year will bring more of the same: The Nun, another Conjuring spinoff; Slender Man, another internet-derived story; and the granddaddy of the genre, Halloween, returns in sequelized form, with the action taking place forty years after the events of the original film. Halloween comes with the blessing of the original film’s director, John Carpenter, features Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role as Laurie Strode, will be directed by another horror first-timer, David Gordon Green, and is produced by (who else?) Blumhouse. It is among the production house’s biggest swings yet. It arrives at the end of October, naturally, and, after a superhero-laced summer, it will stand out in an unsettled fall. If It and Get Out raised the ceiling on what a horror movie can be in 2017, imagine what a revivified Michael Myers can do.
