Word: horror
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...things happened that opening weekend just before Halloween 2004. The first was that Saw made a ton of money, instantly cueing a sequel. That in itself wasn't news: horror is the most profitable genre around, earning big bucks on a pittance. Each new film can almost be guaranteed a large slice of the teenage-boy market, the last demographic devoted to spending Friday night at the movies. And where there's a market, Hollywood will rush to satisfy and sate...
...this year, 18 horror films have received a wide release, and 10 of those opened as their weekends' top grossers. Granted, to get that number into double figures I'm including V for Vendetta, which is after all about a defaced creature in a cave who plots violent revenge on his enemies, and Saw III, which would require a blackout on 3,000 screens to keep it from being declared #1 on Sunday. But the very first weekend of January, Hostel emerged triumphant over King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia. Two and four weeks later, Underworld: Evolution (a sequel...
...Sept.-Oct., slow times for prestige movies and blockbusters, are the big seasons for horror films. Scare cinema opens at its peril in the summer: Snakes on a Plane won its weekend, but did only about $15 million, much less than predicted. Come September, though, The Covenant took the top slot, and The Grudge 2 was #1 two weeks ago. Other horror pictures, Final Destination 3, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Beginning and The Hills Have Eyes (a sequel, a prequel and a remake) weren't their weekends' champs, but each took in more than $15 million - or about...
...Flags cost $55 million to make, plus another $35 to market. That's not a lot for a prestige epic, but it's in the Superman Returns empyrean compared to many horror films. Hostel, for example, was made in the Czech Republic for a pinchpenny $4.5 million and grossed 10 times that in North America alone; its worldwide take was $80 million, and we haven't even got to the video revenue, where horror movies clean...
...money was just the half of the Saw story. Word soon began percolating from kids to their elders that this was no ordinary horror movie. It was, in fact, an old-fashioned mystery, an exercise in ratiocination, a locked-room puzzle - except that instead of deducing where the secret door is, you have to saw off your foot to get out. That first film borrowed elements from Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (hide a clue in plain sight) and Alice in Wonderland (an audio tape bears the message "Play me"). I'm tempted to compare the two men's existential...