From A Quiet Place to Get Out, we’re currently in a pretty exciting era for horror films that fare as well at the box office as they do with critics, with several highly anticipated genre entries still on the horizon. Among these upcoming features is the new Halloween, which arrives in theaters later this week on a wave of positive buzz, but the movie’s own producer doesn’t think this boom’s going to last.
CinemaBlend reports some words of caution from Blumhouse Productions founder Jason Blum, who argued that horror trends move in cycles:
“My feeling about horror being a big deal right now is that it’s very cyclical. It’s a big deal, so now everyone’s going to make horror movies. There are going to be a lot of crap ones, and then everyone’s going to say, ‘Horror’s not working anymore!’ And then there’s going to be much, much less horror. Then there’s going to be a great one because there haven’t been that many, and they’re not going to get made unless they’re really good, and then there’s the boom.”
One man who’s seen many an era come and go for the genre is director John Carpenter, whose original 1978 Halloween helped usher in a new wave of slasher cinema. Sure enough, the filmmaker agreed with Blum that this flourishing period for horror won’t last forever.
“You’ve got the secret. You haven’t forgotten about Japanese horror, have you? Way back then – you haven’t forgotten. That was a big deal! It went away. And [Jason Blum is] partially responsible for bringing in the new horror stuff.”
As the producer of the Paranormal Activity series, Blum played a role in establishing the found footage trend that started in the second half of the 2000s and eventually flamed out. He referenced this phenomenon as an indicator for the potential lifespan of this latest boom, too, saying:
“Since I started it’s dipped and come down. Paranormal Activity took off, and then it dipped around about five or you know, whatever, I don’t know, four or five. It dipped, and then now it’s ramping back up again. And I guarantee you in 12 months there’ll be so many bad horror movies people will be like, ‘I’m never going to see another horror movie again.’ Because now it’s like, ‘Oh, we can make money if we make a horror movie!’ And then they’re bad… That’s the market. That’s how Hollywood works.”
While it’s hard to find much fault in Blum and Carpenter’s reasoning, it’s clear that the new Halloween is arriving at a good time, with a strong box office performance projected for the flick when it hits theaters on October 19th. Should David Gordon Green’s movie perform as expected, it’s practically guaranteed that a sequel will follow, in which case, here’s hoping that Michael Myers’ future outings won’t be the ‘crap’ that Blum was warning us about.
