Has the box office suddenly become 'Hostel' towards horror?
Jun 11, 2007, 04:28 PM | by Joshua Rich
Categories: Film
Here's something scary for you, PopWatchers: The horror genre is dead! So say both The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, at least. Specifically at issue is Hostel Part II's frighteningly poor $8.7 million opening this past weekend — way below the $19.6 mil debut of Hostel a year and a half ago.
How big a problem is this? Good question; glad you asked. The Timeses would have you believe that it's a giant one. After all, fright flicks have been a dependable profit stream for Hollywood since Scream scored $103 mil 10 years ago. They're cheap to make and market, and they steadily draw a young crowd eager for an excuse to cuddle and cringe in a dark room. But the genre has been bleeding lately: Even while the Saw series has banked a bundle, the last blockbuster horror hit was The Grudge, which earned $110.4 mil (on a reported budget of $10 mil) back in 2004. And check out this year's death toll: Thr3e, Primeval, The Hitcher, Dead Silence, Vacancy, The Invisible, The Hills Have Eyes 2, The Reaping, et slashera.
Then again, as my colleague Gary Susman wonders: Isn't this whole thing cyclical? Wasn't there a big horror boom in the 1980s, followed by a fallow period in the early 1990s, followed by a boom again? Perhaps we're just on the down side now, and things will pick up again shortly. What's more, maybe the problem is oversaturation (this year, The L.A. Times says, there will be 42 horror releases) — and, for that matter, oversaturation of substandard movies. As EW's Jeff Jensen (yes, he's also a Doctor of Box Office Letters) argued in an impassioned e-mail to me this weekend, a piece of crapola like The Reaping was never going to be a hit, no matter how many double Academy Award winners they threw in there. And Hostel Part II — well, audiences gave it a poisonous CinemaScore grade of C. Maybe it just wasn't good.
Then again, maybe it was too violent: The so-called "torture porn" sub-genre that the Hostel flicks belong to has become de rigueur for filmmakers catering to a crowd apparently seeking more and more extreme thrills. But perhaps audiences have grown tired of the excess. Perhaps, if this downward trend continues, we'll start seeing more watered-down horror flicks. Or do you think the slasher slump will subside only after filmmakers amp up the blood-and-guts quotient even more? I shudder to think about what's on your mind.
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