2020 was a banner year for Netflix in terms of original content, with eight of the streaming service’s ten most-watched original movies ever being released between March and December, covering multiple genres. Spenser Confidential, Extraction, The Old Guard and Project Power were action-packed and star-powered blockbusters, Enola Holmes an all-ages mystery caper, The Kissing Booth 2 appealed to the younger demographic, and George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky delivered existential sci-fi.
However, there’s always been the feeling that the platform has been lacking when it comes to high profile in-house horror, which seems strange when it’s well proven as a low risk and high reward enterprise. That being said, His House was the genre’s most acclaimed effort of last year both theatrically and on streaming, holding a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score of 100%, which would surely nudge the executives towards ramping up their investment in the future.
Netflix have certainly been stocking up their library with licensed horror titles, though, and they added another one on Friday, but it would be an understatement to say that it slipped entirely under the radar as it wasn’t announced beforehand. Death of Me hails from Saw veteran Darren Lynn Bousman, starring Maggie Q and Luke Hemsworth as a couple who discover a video that shows one of them killing the other, leading them to try and decipher the mystery before it becomes too late.
The movie was shot in the summer of 2018 before being acquired by Saban Films a year later, but then sat on the shelf for fourteen months, only to be quietly dumped into theaters last October where it earned just a little over $230,000 at the box office. So far, it hasn’t come anywhere close to troubling the Netflix Top 10 most-watched list, and looks like it could be forgotten about completely by this time next week. That being said, if you’re after some relatively new horror content, you can certainly do worse.