In recent news, Scream VI is having ball at the box office, scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis won an Oscar, and a new I Know What You Did Last Summer is reportedly in the works. Audiences love sequels to horror movies just as much as they make love at first fright. Why? It’s a common trope that the villainous antagonist appears to die at the film’s end, but then what-ho? They are resurrected for another installment, and then another… and another. Horror movies seem to have super-bouncebackability pulsing through their creepy veins. How do they span generations more successfully and frequently than nearly any other genre?
If you’re in a hurry and need to stop reading now, the cliff notes version is ‘profits.’
On a list of the ten highest-grossing horror movies, most have sequels, if not full-blown franchises. Luckily, The Sixth Sense is excluded from this complete set, but it includes Jaws, The Exorcist, It, The Amityville Horror, Alien, The Omen, and Gremlins. Did you know that Gremlins was categorized as horror? I thought it was just the ‘Gremlins genre’.
The horror genre’s been in the franchise business for generations. Though the term wasn’t used then, Old Hollywood-era Universal classics Frankenstein and Dracula were doing just that. Both films kicked off series from just about day one. In 1931 Tod Browning’s Dracula was filmed on the same sets at the same time as George Melford’s Drácula with Spanish-speaking actors.
Just how many times can you beat the same drum? The vampire Dracula has been featured as the title character in over 80 movies, but they’re not all related, so counting them in one franchise lump would be cheating. Likewise, the story of Amityville has over 30 films that share the title, and though they are cut from the same ‘inspired by the events’ cloth, they mainly act as standalone pieces.
The true blue franchise machines have a shorter history, but only by an inch. Alien has eight movies in its family tree and another baby on the way. Child’s Play featuring the beloved toy of terror Chucky also has eight films and tv series with two seasons. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Saw all tie at nine films. Hellraiser gave birth to nine films that were all below par with the original but made their comeback to better reviews on the 11th try, teaching us not to give up on our hell-raising dreams. It might take 35 years, but you’ll get there!
Puppet Master is the master of the franchise with 15 movies, despite accruing little to no critical success, which is fantastic. The love of film lives on. With series like Puppet Master, it’s truly thanks to the fans that the budget strings stay unsevered. Across the board, the sequel’s appeal for the filmmakers is that you have a built-in audience from the get-go. If you leave the original or fifth movie on any to-be-continued spectrum, you will have a specific fan base that will be happy to return for more. With so much selection, it can be up to the fan if they want to be along for the full rollercoaster or tap back in once nostalgia comes calling.
The rollercoaster starts with an initial green light that emanates from the glow of green dollar signs. Horror movies are typically and relatively famously low-budget and more likely to have a higher rate of return. A film like The Conjuring, made for just 20 million, made $318 million worldwide upon release. 2013’s The Purge was made for a startlingly low 3 million, and though it only grossed 89 million, when the numbers are crunched, it made 30 times its original investment. A film must make just three times its actual cost to be profitable, meaning that The Purge was a massive success.
A success that, among other reasons, landed it in the history books is the financial gains from The Blair Witch Project. Made for 60k, it raked in 245 million (about 4,000 times the investment). That gain though almost pales compared to the mind-boggling figures of Paranormal Activity. The haunted hit made $15,000 and grossed $193 million. At the risk of using too many exclamation points- that’s nearly 13,000 times the original investment!!!
It’s hard to imagine why studio executives would pass on a horror movie franchise opportunity. Built-in audience? Low initial budgets and high returns? Then you factor in merchandising, and while not Disney-level money, a franchise like Texas Chainsaw Massacre still brings in more bank-on t-shirts than Before Sunset.
The most remarkable aspect of the eternal horror franchise, though, is the quality of the product, and there’s not an exact rate on this, but I would dare say it’s the vast majority of the time, dropping quite rapidly as the sequels go on. The Rotten Tomato scores for movies in the Saw series cut off digits like limbs. It starts strong-ish with 50%, drops to 37%, coasts to 30%, and then takes another dive to 18% and 13%. There’s a little bump again with Saw VI, but then we end on not-so-final Final Chapter with 9%. And yet, the reviews mean nothing. Eight out of nine movies made it well past the profit margin!
The proof is in the blood pudding. Quality goes down, but ticket sales remain roughly the same. Does this speak more to the resilience of the filmmakers or the fans? It’s interesting to consider that it’s pretty rare for a director to make back-to-back movies in the genre. To continue using Saw as our tool of choice, the original director James Wan (Malignant, Insidious), did not direct the sequel. Ridley Scott didn’t direct Aliens, John Carpenter didn’t direct Halloween II, and Gore Verbinski let it go to voicemail after The Ring. The intent must be to give the follow-up more fresh surprises for the audience, but it’s relatively unsurprising when the sequels suffer regardless.
Audiences don’t appear to be suffering, though. They must be getting as much out of it as the producers, or they wouldn’t keep going back. The psychology behind this and the horror enthusiast is a topic for a different article, a seminar… or an entire college course. We know that as long as fans keep turning up for cheap spooks that elicit high profits, the franchises will lead on.
A new generation of the genre rode in with Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out (a 4.5 million budget that grossed $255 million). It forged path for modern age ‘highbrow’ pieces like Pearl, Barbarian, and now M3gan that take real-world socio-political concepts and amplify the fear factor on screen. Even these films aren’t immune to the call of the franchise. A24 has green-lit the next installment after Pearl, which is to be MaXXXine, and less than two weeks after M3gan was released, the sequel M3gan 2.0 was announced with a January 2025 delivery date attached.
Trends may come and go with the seasons, but as horror movie franchises continue to prove themselves eternal, we know what you did last summer and what you’ll do next summer. And fall… And most likely winter… And in that case, definitely spring. As the fans know, a little fear never goes out of style throughout the year.
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