There is always money in the horror stand

One of my favorite lines from the cult Fox TV show Captured development is: “There’s always money in the banana stand,” uttered by light traitor George Bluth Sr. His children understand this to mean that the family can always make money by running a frozen banana stand on the boardwalk; he means that there is literally money in the walls of the banana stand, hidden from authorities and enemies. Attacks occur.

That’s how I think about horror films: There’s always money at the horror stand. Historically, cheap horror films that reach a mass audience have always produced the best return on investment The Chainsaw Massacre in Texas To Halloween To The Blair Witch Project To Paranormal activity on Blumhouse’s entire business model: If you make a horror film at a low price, it’s hard to lose money, and the chance of making a huge amount of money is high. This tradition has continued in recent years with films like… Smile And Talk to me Generate huge revenue from relatively modest budgets.

There have been rumors this year that horror is in a lull and that audiences aren’t turning out to see the scary stuff like they used to. Apart from the breakout hit Long legs from Neon – which has become by far the studio’s highest-grossing film – and a few popular franchise extensions (A Quiet Place: Day One And Alien: Romulus), the scene was quiet overall, especially on the big studio front. Still, the basic economics of the genre are solid here too. Night swimming (Universal) didn’t cost much to make and grossed more than $54 million worldwide. The Strangers: Chapter OneWith $47 million worldwide, Lionsgate, which has suffered a series of terrible bombs, is probably one of this year’s bright spots.

The most interesting things happen in the indie space, and this is where we see horror do particularly well. There are Long legsof course, which remains one of the best box office stories of the year. But IFC has had modest success Late Night with the Devil and Mubi did pretty well with it The substancewhich has already tripled the studio’s $12.5 million global rights acquisition from Cannes.

And then there is horror 3. I’ll get into the film itself in a moment, but I just want to highlight the amazing job that director Damien Leone and studio Cineverse have done to turn this series of truly crazy gore-fests with an increasingly crazy mythology into a truly mainstream success story. For example: This is an unrated film that will be playing on nearly 3,000 screens in its second weekend. The production reportedly cost around $2 million and earned more than ten times that in its first four-day weekend. I really can’t emphasize enough how crazy this is! It’s unheard of!

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However, again not quite. It’s an iteration of the Texas chainsaw Be a role model, build word of mouth, increase the violence and give younger viewers who have become bored with what they see something new and something dangerous. And that’s it mean. A thing that brings together some of the biggest hits of the year – something we see in it Alien: Romulus, Long legs, horror 3, The substanceAnd Late Night with the Devil– is that these films aren’t afraid to be cruel to the characters in them. They don’t all have bad endings, but none of them are particularly optimistic.

That’s my main takeaway from what worked this year: modern audiences look at the world and know that no one is coming to save us. They don’t expect good to triumph, at least not without first paying a terrible price.

horror 3 is how it is predecessora film I find difficult to recommend to most readers of this newsletter, who are probably kind and decent people. This is an unkind, lewd film that really works Because his corruption, not in spite of it. Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) has become an icon for killing people in horrific, hideous ways; He does it slowly and, as strange as it may sound, lovingly, and he caps the murders with a dot, a smile, and the beep of his funny little horn.

Look, here’s the thing: I think the film reviewer’s main job is to tell the audience whether or not a film works on their own terms. Does the comedy make you laugh? Is the thriller tense? Does the action film leave you sufficiently invigorated? Horror comes in many varieties – it’s a genre that encompasses everything from the soul-piercing fear of horror The witch to the comical splash of Evil Dead 2– and one of these variants revels in stomach-churning with realistic-looking violence created through grotesque, practical special effects. And on his own terms, horror 3 and its predecessors are enormous successes.

The lore of these films has gotten crazier and crazier. The art has evolved from a Michael Myers-style immortal bogeyman to something more explicitly supernatural. He works with (or possibly for) Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi), one of Art’s victims from the first film, whose body has been taken over by a type of demon from hell sent to Earth to make Sienna (Lauren LaVera) suffer in the hopes of to erase their faith and bring about eternal darkness on earth.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating here; The film is permeated with religious symbolism. And although I’m sure there are some who think it’s blasphemous to, for example, place a crown of thorns on the head of the suffering Sienna – who in the first film was equipped with feathered wings and a fiery sword like a gender-swapped Archangel Michael – while she was being tortured in the hope of making them abandon their belief in the world and give up hope, there’s a good case to be made that it is in fact a Christmas movie, and not just because Art spends most of the film in Santa Claus clothes.

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Technically, I think this metaphor would work a little better if the film were set during Easter; Maybe Leone will save that for the sequel. (Imagine Art the Clown in a pink bunny costume throwing Easter egg hand grenades!) However, I myself am neither religiously inclined nor educated enough to build a coherent theological argument on this horror 3in name; Maybe Leone loves iconography and wanted to bring to life the most metallic Christmas horror film of all time. How else to explain the dream sequence in which a statue of the Virgin Mary, I believe, holds a choke collar to a demon smith who is making a sword that can kill Art and Victoria?

The More terrible I guess the films are interesting outside of the gore, which is my point, even if they work quite well on that superficial level alone. Never before has such a variety of fearsome tools been used in such grotesque ways: he uses chainsaws, rats, homemade bombs and even liquid nitrogen to terrible effect. I don’t think anything in this film quite tops the bedroom sequence from the second one in terms of eye-covering squirming, but those who want to enjoy a good kill or six will go home with full bellies.

The Smile Films are more mainstream More terrible Movies: lots of terribly inventive kills, if slightly less intense on-screen gore, all just to punish a single character until they freak out.

The original was a huge word-of-mouth hit, opening 2022 with $22 million before reaching nearly five times that amount domestically, at least in part because it felt like a throwback to the high-octane horror of the early 2000s felt like The ring or Candyman. There’s really only one rule, and it’s pretty simple: someone is watching someone with you terrible Smylex grin commit suicide, causing the witness to begin imagining similar smiles everywhere; After a week, they feel like they are going crazy because no one believes they are being stalked by a terrible smile demon, and so they kill themselves in front of someone who will become the next victim, thus continuing the chain.

Smile 2 The plot begins six days after the end of the original, with the character we saw witnessing the death of the film’s heroine attempting to pass on the Curse of the Smile by killing two Russian drug dealers. (He’s exploiting a Smile Demon loophole. Just go with it, it’s fine.) He botches it and the cycle begins again, with the curse in the drug dealer’s body from pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), Lewis, lands Fregoli (Lukas Gage), who kills himself by repeatedly hitting him in the face with a 35-pound weight plate. The sound his skin makes as it peels away from his jaw is as horrific as anything else in it horror 3 and the sound effect repeated throughout the film suggests that something terrible is about to happen.

As the first Smile came out, I joked that it formed the subtext over modern horror text. There’s a running joke that almost all modern “elevated horror films” from A24 and the like are “about trauma”. Smile It was literally about how experiencing trauma curses those who have to deal with it and fundamentally changes their brains. The sequel takes this idea and applies it to the completely crazy world of pop superstars. Riley tries to get her life back together after a series of Britney Spears-style mishaps and mishaps. Drugs, car accidents, dead friends: she had a tough year.

Needless to say, things are about to get rougher.

Smile 2like its predecessor, makes masterful use of the jump scare, that horror trick where the camera lingers and spins and boos a big scary face and sharp noises and oh yeah, I just jumped in my seat a little. I hate films that rely on this crutch, but only because it works for me every time. It helps that your eye is magnetically drawn to Naomi Scott, who simply dominates the screen Smile 2. She is routinely filmed in close-up, her face filling the screen, her eyes darting around manically as the mental walls close in. It’s an amazingly intense performance, award-winning stuff. Between her work here and Demi Moore’s work here The substanceit will be difficult for awards bodies this year to completely ignore the horror, although I’m sure they’ll find a way.

Again, Smile 2 is a film that is difficult to recommend to a general audience: it is brutal, bloody and somehow a downer. But it’s also incredibly effective. If you’re a horror hound, you can expect a wealth of riches at the multiplex this month.