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Box Office: Scary Movies Like 'Happy Death Day' And 'It' Are Event Movies For Kids

This article is more than 6 years old.

Universal and Blumhouse

The top movie of the weekend was Universal/Comcast Corp.’s Happy Death Day, a well-reviewed chiller that earned $26 million on its opening Friday-Sunday frame. The $5m horror movie, starring Jessica Rothe as a coed forced to relive the day of her murder over and over again, took advantage of a clever premise, a solid trailer that played in front of It for the last month and the goodwill afforded to Blumhouse in the wake of Split and Get Out.

As you’ve surely noticed, it’s been a hell of a couple of years for theatrical horror, with one well-reviewed and/or well-received over-performer after another. To paraphrase Zoolander, horror is so hot right now. Why is that? Well, I think it’s worth noting that 61% of Happy Death Day’s audience over its opening weekend was under 25 years old.

It’s no secret that Hollywood at large is attempting to figure out how to entice younger audiences back into movie theaters. This is the first generation to have limitless on-demand/on-request quality entertainment from the comfort of their couch at the push of a button. As such, the industry as a whole has run into a conundrum: The films that allegedly do best here and abroad are big-budget action fantasies that have roots in prior cinematic triumphs. Yet kids young and old either have no strong feelings about the prior franchise installments or are choosing to watch the prior version on VOD or Blu-ray. And since, more often than not, Robocop (1987) is better than Robocop (2014), that qualifies as the smart choice. And these nostalgia-driven films often play best to adults anyway.

If we argue that most of the bigger would-be blockbusters are essentially IP-driven action fantasies aimed at nostalgic adults, then the recent wave of big horror movies are something different. Be they good or bad, the likes of The Purge: Anarchy, Lights Out, Get Out, Don’t Breathe and The Shallows are somewhat original (even the sequels or prequels tend to be original stories) and are explicitly aimed at younger audiences in a way that I would argue the current wave of hero’s-journey-ish comic book movies and MCU-wannabees (the good ones and the bad ones) are not.

And because they tend to be cheap and not aimed at global four-quadrant glory, horror movies can have outright original stories, contain “controversial” subject matter and offer a focus on women, minorities and/or the working poor.

Photo by Justin Lubin - © 2016 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and RatPac-Dune Entertainment LLC All Rights Reserved

The movies in the current crop of mainstream horror, especially those coming out of Blumhouse (often courtesy of Universal) and James Wan’s Creepy Puppet (courtesy of New Line and Warner Bros.), are often original, edgy, dangerous fare about kids and/or are targeted at older kids in a way that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is not. That’s not to say that kids (young and old) won’t flock to Thor: Ragnarok next month, but as more and bigger franchises become essentially long-gestating sequels or nostalgic cash-ins of yesterday’s cinematic glories, a movie like Happy Death Day is in itself an event. It is entirely original, has a well-written female lead, focuses on young protagonists and isn’t a case of Hollywood feeding kids reheated leftovers of their parents’ favorite IP. For kids who want kid-targeted original theatrical content, horror is where it’s at.

Yes, kids and adults can and do flock to Spider-Man: Homecoming and Get Out to the extent that both films are big hits. Moreover, you’re probably asking, where the hell does It fit into all of this? The blockbuster adaptation of Stephen King’s iconic 1980’s novel, which has earned $315 million domestic and $631m worldwide on a $35m budget, was a Beauty and the Beast-style nostalgia cash-in, right? It was also (to those who didn’t read the novel or watch the miniseries) a big-scale, R-rated horror movie about young kids being terrorized by a scary clown. It was a mix of the two, offering the stuff kids liked in modern horror movies along with multigenerational nostalgia for adults. Because it was R-rated without being Martyrs-level gruesome, It operated as a gateway drug for R-rated horror for younger kids.

Split and It became buzzy hits in the school cafeteria partially because they were aimed at said age group. But it’s not just the “horror films reflect the current fears of their time” thing or “folks flock to horror films when times are terrible” scenario. Beyond their evergreen appeal (with or without female empowerment angles), films like Happy Death Day and The Shallows have replaced the “hard PG” live-action fare that helped mold the modern adult movie nerd. With PG-13 four-quadrant fantasy blockbusters replacing everything outside of PG-rated toons and explicitly adult genre fare, we don’t have the likes of The Goonies, Labyrinth or Back to the Future. When we get a throwback original like Monster Truck or The Book of Henry, we all point and laugh while we pen our “Why Hook and Radio Flyer are masterpieces” essays.

Sony

Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s Monster Truck was way too expensive ($125 million), which was also an issue with Walt Disney’s doomed $190m Tomorrowland. And both films, which I can somewhat defend, forget that many of the 1980’s classics were just a little scarier, darker or more violent than we might have expected from kiddie fare. That was a huge part of their appeal. If you were a seven-year-old in 1987, something like The Monster Squad felt like it had slipped through the cracks. People bled and died badly, kids swore and kicked wolfmen in the crotch, etc., etc. In 1984, a movie like Gremlins was edgy and gruesome in that not-quite kid-friendly way that made it a classic among kids of that era. It was a PG movie with an R-rated heart, and it helped create the PG-13.

We don’t get movies like Back to the Future anymore, which is why we all lost our marbles for Netflix’s Stranger Things. Today’s equivalent of Back to the Future would be a super expensive franchise starter where Marty has to save the whole world along with his parents’ marriage. In the place of original and edgy kid-friendly fare like The Craft, we get big-budget, IP-driven fantasy franchise fare (some of which are quite good and much better than The Craft or The Goonies) technically aimed at kids but often pitched at nostalgic adults and overgrown “fanboys.” To a kid today, a movie like Get Out or Don’t Breathe is the real event film, a movie pitched at them, with relatable kids and young adults with down-to-Earth problems, and containing edgy fables that aren’t always tied into a broader universe.

So, yeah, horror movies are big right now, and they are doing well with the demographics that Hollywood is most eager to re-engage. Yes, they are resonating in these terrible times and yes their subtexts are of-the-moment topical and yes films like The Purge: Election Year or Annabelle: Creation are more likely to star “not a white guy” protagonists. But, without negating those factors, horror films that are doing well are doing well because they are comparatively kid-targeted entertainments that are somewhat original, offer the kind of harder-edged thrills that 80’s kids would have associated with The Dark Crystal or Poltergeist. Oh, and they aren’t actually remakes or reboots of your parents or grandparents’ favorite horror movies. They are entertainments made for today’s kids, and truly for today’s kids.

The adults I know are excited for Glass because it’s an Unbreakable sequel, but the kids are excited because it’s a Split sequel.

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