Horror is always a genre that’s hovered around saturation point, but it’s also one of the most consistently lucrative and marketable mediums of cinema. However, the very existence of Dark Castle Entertainment was cynical to begin with, so much so that it didn’t take long for the entire idea behind the production company to be almost completely abandoned.
Co-founded by Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler in 1998, the outfit’s sole initial purpose was to remake the back catalogue of legendary schlock maestro William Castle. As a result, audiences were gifted with 1999’s House on Haunted Hill, 2001’s Thirteen Ghosts, and 2005’s House of Wax in fairly quick succession, all of which left a lot to be desired.
Each was mildly successful but equally panned, and even an attempt diversification didn’t fare much better when Dark Castle conspired to gift the world with one-scene wonder Ghost Ship and interminable psychological terror Gothika in the interim, before it was decided that orchestrating an entire brand driven by nothing but remakes nobody asked for maybe wasn’t the wisest idea.
Sure, the aforementioned trilogy lives on in cult infamy as a Reddit thread can attest, but things haven’t gotten much better in the two decades since when you consider such luminaries as awful comic book adaptation Whiteout, box office catastrophe The Losers, Sylvester Stallone’s rotten Bullet to the Head, and George Clooney’s forgotten Suburbicon are just some of the Dark Castle productions to have come and gone without making a splash at all.
Creativity should always be the driving force behind any film or television project, but Dark Castle ditching its own M.O. in double-quick time after repeatedly missing the mark might just be the most notorious all-time horror fail that nobody ever talks about.
