Halloween is just about here! I’ve got my Halloween costume all picked out and ready to wear. I went with the top half, creepy Squid Game Red Light Green Light Girl, and bottom half, Dune sand worm. I’m also gearing up for a 24 hour horror movie marathon. First movie on the docket? Why, of course, Boo 2! A Madea Halloween. Was that ever in question?
What I’m even more excited about is reviewing tomorrow’s Halloween Horror Showdown winner, Cinder (“A crew of firefighters fall prey to a mysterious presence when they respond to a fire at a secluded farmhouse.”). It sounds like it could be a winner. Make sure to tune in for that.
In the meantime, I thought I’d give you the 10 most successful horror films of the last decade. Since I can already hear you tallying up the movies I missed, let me be clear about the criteria here. I’m only including movies that are spec scripts, the idea being that these are all projects that you, the unknown screenwriter, could’ve written and sold yourself. That means no book adaptations (bye bye Stephen King), no sequels or franchises (none of the post-Conjuring universe films made it). No reboots (sorry, Halloween).
I know there are a couple of films here that aren’t quite specs. But I included them because I believe if anyone else would’ve written them, they still would’ve been purchased and made. There were also some judgment calls that I left off the list. Is Warm Bodies a horror flick or a comedy romance?
The idea of this exercise is to show you what the market is looking for. Often times, as writers, we come up with ideas blindly, without considering the marketplace. I’m not saying that the marketplace should be your only criteria for generating ideas. If it was, you’d write a bunch of derivative junk. But it needs to be taken into account so that you know you’re not off on an island with your idea.
Okay, are we ready?
NUMBER 1
Title: A Quiet Place
Year: 2018
Box Office: 188 mil
Logline: In a post-apocalyptic world, a family is forced to live in silence while hiding from monsters who hunt through sound.
Notes: For those who are annoyed by my many references to this movie, this is the reason I keep going back to it as the primary example of how to write a great horror spec. It’s the biggest horror spec success story of the last decade. Do we need any more validity than that?
NUMBER 2
Title: Get Out
Year: 2017
Box Office: 176 mil
Logline: A young African-American man visits his white girlfriend’s parents for the weekend, where his simmering uneasiness about their reception of him leads to a shocking discovery.
Notes: One of the best examples of putting a character in an uncomfortable situation then slowly ratcheting up the heat until they’re boiling. This script also re-introduced the social horror thriller, which has changed the horror game in the four years since.
NUMBER 3
Title: Us
Year: 2019
Box Office: 175 mil
Logline: A family’s serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgängers appear and begin to terrorize them.
Notes: An intriguing setup that didn’t get enough rewrites to truly flesh out its potential. It’s fairly shocking that this film did identical numbers to Peele’s far superior, “Get Out.” While I still think this movie is deserving of its Top 10 slot, it benefitted greatly from people dying to see Peele’s Get Out follow-up.
NUMBER 4
Title: Split
Year: 2016
Box Office: 138 mil
Logline: Three girls are kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities. They must try to escape before the apparent emergence of a frightful new 24th.
Notes: I was on record saying this one would bomb. So I’m not going to pretend like I understand the love for Split. My issue was that 23 personalities was way too many. With that said, Night smartly played into one of the most bankable sub-genres out there – the serial killer genre.
NUMBER 5
Title: The Conjuring
Year: 2013
Box Office: 137 mil
Logline: Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren work to help a family terrorized by a dark presence in their farmhouse.
Notes: What’s interesting about this one is that it was your basic haunted house flick. Goes to show you can take a fairly straight-forward template and, if you execute it well, people will connect with it. I know some will say the average screenwriter couldn’t have written this, but I’d say that’s only partially true. It took 40 years for someone to notice that the Warren IP could be valuable and start writing movies about them. Who’s to say there isn’t another horror IP people are sleeping on that you can adapt right now?
NUMBER 6
Title: Don’t Breathe
Year: 2016
Box Office: 90 mil
Logline: Hoping to walk away with a massive fortune, a trio of thieves break into the house of a blind man who isn’t as helpless as he seems.
Notes: This is the only movie on the list that I haven’t seen. And it’s probably the most interesting title on the list considering that it’s the least ‘horror’ of all the entires. The metrics say Don’t Breathe should not have done nearly 100 million dollars of box office. And yet it did!
NUMBER 7
Title: Mama
Year: 2013
Box Office: 71 mil
Logline: After a young couple take in their two nieces, they suspect that a supernatural spirit named Mama has latched onto their family.
Notes: I went gaga over this movie. I especially liked the emotional component of the film, with this creepy mother figure eventually becoming this warm protective figure by the end.
NUMBER 8
Title: The Invisible Man
Year: 2020
Box Office: 70 mil
Logline: When Cecilia’s abusive ex takes his own life and leaves her his fortune, she suspects his death was a hoax. As a series of coincidences turn lethal, Cecilia works to prove that she is being hunted by her former boyfriend.
Notes: One of the best examples of taking a social issue – toxic masculinity – and turning it into an entertaining horror movie without being on-the-nose or pandering about it. That’s because the writer focused on making an entertaining movie first, and pushing a message second.
NUMBER 9
Title: Lights Out
Year: 2016
Box Office: 67 mil
Logline: A young woman must deal with a deadly supernatural spirit that can only operate in the dark.
Notes: I know, this one was adapted from a short film. But I still think anybody could’ve written this concept and, if it was good, sold it. An example of how a very simple premise can still be effective in the horror market.
NUMBER 10
Title: The Visit
Year: 2015
Box Office: 65 mil
Logline: Two siblings become increasingly frightened by their grandparents’ disturbing behavior while visiting them on vacation.
Notes: Definitely one of the creepier movies on the list and one of my favorite films from M Night. Actually, now that I think about it, that’s a short list. It’s The Sixth Sense and this. Oh man but that twist ending. For one film, Night was back in peak form!
One of the things I noticed when going back through all the horror films was that horror movies had this huge resurgence the last few years. Once you start adding the sequels and adaptations, horror is making a LOT more money than it did in the early part of the decade. I mean go back to 2010 through 2015 and look at the highest earning horror movies. They’re 30-50 slots down the list. Contrast that with today, and you can find horror movies finishing in the top 10 (It).
You have to wonder, why is that? I think it has something to do with how polarized the country has become in the last five years. Society has become kinda scary. So we’re more attuned to horror. And movies allow us to experience horror in a fun way, as opposed to in a dogmatic angry way. It’s sort of like the perfect outlet to deal with a lot of the anxiety we’re feeling at the moment.
But I still think the core of successful horror boils down to the same thing that worked 50 years ago – which is families dealing with problems. If you look at A Quiet Place, Us, Get Out, Mama, The Conjuring – all these movies are exploring the family dynamic on a deeper level. That’s the secret ingredient to horror, in my opinion. You try and find that emotional component to make the movie more than a jump-scare fest.
Another thing to note is the categorization breakdown of the ten films on the list. There are four supernatural horror films – Lights Out, Mama, The Conjuring, and Us. There are three non-supernatural films – The Visit, Don’t Breathe, and Split. There are two quasi sci-fi movies on the list – Get Out and The Invisible Man. And there is one [sort of] creature feature on the list – A Quiet Place (which also has a tinge of sci-fi). What this tells me is that the horror genre is more varied than it gets credit for. When I think of the biggest horror movies, I tend to think, “Killers with masks” and “the supernatural.” But, as you can see, there’s a lot more than that on display. The market seems open to embrace any horror avenue, as long as the concept is compelling and the execution is good.
With that said, horror is still the most competitive market in screenwriting because it’s one of the last genres you can dependably sell a script in. And because it’s so easy to build franchises in horror, everyone wants a piece of that pie. That means garden variety concepts aren’t likely to get you anywhere. As someone who gets to see all the scripts that people write, I can tell you that one of the most common mistakes screenwriters make is assuming their idea is more original than it is. So when you come up with an idea, you have to ask yourself if that idea is TRULY unique. That it isn’t something you’ve seen before. That it’s not ripped from the latest headline. That you realistically believe someone else could not have come up with this idea. If you’ve done all that, you will have a competitive advantage because your script will be unlike anything else out there.
Looking forward to tomorrow, everyone. Until then, what do you think about the ten biggest original horror movies of the last decade? Can you draw any conclusions from the list? Share your thoughts in the comments.
