At the Whim of Movie Execs: The Rise and Fall in Horror Movies

The graph below shows the number of horror movies made in the US as a proportion of all movies made worldwide.  The horror movies (blue line) may not be completely accurate because it was just my physical count off of Wikipedia, but it is still useful to measure yearly changes.  After the great surge in all movies made worldwide in 1981-1982, the trend is a slow, steady increase.  Horror movies stay most consistently around the 30 movie mark, even before the 1980's.  The relative proportions show the peak in Horror movies made in the US in 1987 and the much more enormous movie explosion in 2008 - 2009.  Interestingly, the latter happened right during the subprime mortgage crisis, which you can visibly see by the dip in movies made worldwide.  This also shows the rise in the torture porn subgenre of horror movies, initiated by Saw (2004) but kicking off a massive surge in horror movie making.  This surge is the 5-6 times as large as the horror movie average!  Even Scream (1996), the largest grossing slasher film of all time, did not kick off any kind of significant increase in movie production in this genre.  I would guess when one movie is successful enough, it draws attention and they try to pounce on the trend to make more money, but this is not always the case.  So why did Saw cause a renaissance in horror movie making in this instance, but Scream did not? 

Shortly thereafter it looks like this money making could be sustained ( as the market was saturated), audiences tired and moved on.  In 2013 actually the lowest number of horror movies were made in the US since 1979.  Most of those movies are really terrible anyway, but I'd like to think that through sheer numbers the chances of an unintentionally good movie was increased.  In 2008-09 I liked Cloverfield, Pontypool and Drag Me to Hell, and that's about it.

The other spike in 1987 represents the peak and subsequent exhaustion in the popularity of slasher movies.  Another important landmark and also resulting in audience boredom as the movies get worse and worse.  Perhaps Scream was seen as an exception to the slasher genre since they could not return to making more pointless slasher movies, but a one-time (read: 4 movies and counting) self reflective critique and rejuvination of slashers was acceptable, but could not be capitalized on outside of that series.  I wonder if someone will eventually come out with a similar satirical look at torture porn similar to what Scream did with slashers.

Looking at the LOG function of the data looks pretty interesting as well.  For total movies made, it shows a steady rate that movies are generally being made at since 1981-1982.  The log total horror movies made, however, is too complex for me to really comment on.  The spikes in 1987, 2008, 2009 are still obvious, but all I can say at this point is that the rate that the US makes horror movies fluctuates pretty wildly, and I have no idea why.  Obviously budgetary concerns in funding are based on a combination of "good" scripts combined with the greed of the production companies for where they think they can make money.

So let's take a look at some top grossing horror films in the past few years.  We are trying to figure out why the dramatic drop in horror movies in 2013.  That year was actually pretty good for horror movies, with the Conjuring made a ridiculous $318 million dollars.  Contrast this with Scream ($173 million) and Saw ($103 million).  So what prompted the cut in horror movie production?  It doesn't seem immediately obvious by looking at 2012 numbers.  Prometheus made over $400 million dollars, but had a huge production cost ($130 million) and was part of the Alien series, possibly the most profitable of Sci-Fi series'.  Also while it is technically horror, you could argue that the fact that it was horror was not a factor in the draw of audience. 

 

Pair that with the 2nd most profitable horror movie of 2012 (Paranormal activity 4, $142 million) and you could see that may not add up to being useful.  I actually don't fully know the film cycle, and someone in the industry could correct me, but I imagine there is a 1 or 2 year window generally in movie production.  If we look further back to 2011 things start to fit together a bit better.  Paranormal Activity 3 grossed $105 million, but if you discount it due to the fact it is a series, the next movie Insidious (positively reviewed and considered a success, I haven't seen it) grossed $54 million, a huge step down even from 1990's standards.  If movies on average have a 2 year cycle from green light to theatre release, then the numbers seem to fit.