Sunday, June 10, 2007

Horror Boom about to Bust?

The Los Angeles Times weighs in on the state of the horror film market:
So has the horror bubble burst?

Those who traffic in mayhem insist not, though almost everyone admits that this year's crowded market, filled with horror retreads, has left splatter fans unimpressed.

"There became a glut of so many horror movies, and I think the audience is oversaturated," says Dimension Co-Chairman Bob Weinstein, who launched the horror film craze with the satiric slasher flick "Scream." "Sometimes the industry has the habit of making the same movies over and over again."

Moreover, topping the last thrill is intrinsically hard. "There's nothing you can do to a human being on screen that is taboo anymore," says Oscar-winning writer-producer Akiva Goldsman. "Over and over again, people are breaking the boundaries of the body, hurting people, chopping people up, ravaging people…. For things to be truly scary, we're going to have to find new boundaries to tread on."

Undeniably, horror, one of cinema's most enduring genres, is having a spiritual crisis. Once the playground of such iconic directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott, the genre has gone way down-market. Not that it's mattered much to the businesspeople who run Hollywood. Ever since 1996, when "Scream" snagged $100 million at the box office, the town's love affair with horror has been reignited. The films cost little to make and historically have delivered big returns. In recent years, whole divisions of major studios — Dimension, Rogue Pictures and Fox Atomic, to name a few — have been staked on horror's vitality.

For smaller studios, horror can be the IV that keeps their hearts beating. "It costs less to make a good horror film because you don't have big visual effects budgets or the $20-million stars," says Tom Ortenberg, president of theatrical films at the independent company Lions Gate.

And expectations are more modest. As Joel Silver, who heads Dark Castle Entertainment, a genre label, characterizes the horror business: "We're only looking for doubles and triples. We don't need home runs."
Read the full article here.