“It sucks to be afraid of something with real consequences,” Scrivner continues. Scrivner points to movies like Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion, which experienced a viewership resurgence back in 2020, as an example of a horror story that has symbolically helped us work through not only our fears of infectious agents, but also our responses to them. When people are feeling afraid, there’s a good portion of people who seek out scary fictions to kind of work through some of those feelings.” “Whether you're scared of COVID itself or the lockdowns or job security or any other number of scary situations that kind of come along with a global pandemic, there’s a lot of fear in the world. “One reason that horror movies are so popular right now is that the world is going through, and has been going through the last couple years, a lot of drastic changes and scary things,” Coltan Scrivner, the research scientist behind this study, says. Horror films, in turn, seem to provide a kind of catharsis in the wake of psychological burnout and cultural trauma from the pandemic, in a way that other genre movies can’t.Ī recent study from Science Direct supports this idea, suggesting that horror fans and morbidly curious audiences exhibit more resilience and less psychological distress during COVID-19. The pandemic has damaged the infrastructure of the American health-care system, stoked political divisions, and created more suffocating conditions for essential workers. It can be argued that the genre’s financial prosperity stems mainly from the fact that horror movies can be made very cheaply.īut it’s also possible that their increasing popularity within the zeitgeist speaks to how we’ve faced and endured so much horror in our lives on such a massive scale. Horror seized its largest share of the box office in history in 2020, nearly double than normal, then broke its own record in 2021, proving that its hot streak was no fluke.
Jane Schoenbraun’s unsettling Sundance flick We’re All Going to the World’s Fair similarly delved into social alienation through the dark corners of Skype and YouTube, employing a small-scale, atmospheric approach to reflect contemporary fears around vulnerability in virtual spaces. The physical restrictions of the pandemic also created greater opportunities for horror writer-directors looking to make good use of quarantine-induced isolation, especially in capturing our tetheredness to technology.įilmmaker Rob Savage, for instance, developed the supernatural cyber-thriller Host in 2020 from a viral prank skit, using Zoom as a clever narrative device to explore anxieties around social separation and our culture’s increasing loss of connection.
Even Terrifier 2, the sequel to Damien Leone’s 2016 splatter slasher, managed to churn out $5.4 million against a Kickstarter-backed $250,000 budget. Parker Finn’s jumpscare-heavy Smile grossed $167 million on a $17 million budget, with the help of an effective marketing campaign, beating out Billy Eichner and Nicholas Stoller’s hotly anticipated rom-com Bros for the #1 spot. Jordan Peele’s cowboys-vs-aliens horror pic Nope received the best original film opening since his 2019 film Us. Halina Reijn’s Gen-Z slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies raked in a healthy $13.6 million during a barren August weekend. Scott Derrickson’s child abduction/paranormal mashup The Black Phone made a whopping $161 million at the global box office with a $16 million budget. Zach Cregger’s twisted domestic thriller Barbarian became a sleeper hit through strong word-of-mouth, earning $42 million worldwide on a $4 million budget. This year alone has seen the emergence of some extremely profitable and original horror storytelling. However, one arguably good thing to come out of Tinseltown during this still ongoing health crisis is the influx of critically and commercially successful horror films. Delayed releases, shelved projects, shifting business models, massive company layoffs, and a slew of industry-wide scandals have left the entertainment world in a creative and economic limbo. Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, Hollywood has struggled to adjust to our harrowing new reality.
0 kommentar(er)
