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- Hollywood Tech Nerd Halloween 2024
Happy Halloween Hollywood tech nerds!
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Hollywood Tech Nerd Halloween 2024
It’s that time of year again! No, not my Aunt Joan’s parole hearing, it’s Halloween! Just like last year, I thought I’d do a bit of seasonally-relevant industry coverage and then list some of my favorite recent horror films you can stream.
WTF is “Horror Fatigue?”
I share a lot of articles from The Hollywood Reporter and in general think highly of their reporting. Not so for their recent article Why Hollywood is Terrified of Horror Fatigue in 2025, which posits that “top execs” are scared there will be too many horror movies in 2025 and it will wreck the box office.
Their proof of this? Smile 2 didn’t do quite as well as they expected it to against Terrifier 3. I’m not making this up!
The well-received Smile sequel went up against the second weekend of Cineverse’s unrated indie slasher sensation Terrifier 3, which had opened to a shockingly better-than-expected $18.9 million the week before (see opposite page).
Paramount was confident that Smile 2 would match or outgross the opening of the first film, and while it succeeded with $23 million, there’s no doubt that Terrifier 3 ate into its business. In its second outing, the latter fell only 51 percent to $9.3 million.
Yup, two horror movies doing big business the same weekend sure sounds like people are sick of horror films! Better get some superhero slop in there since those are definitely guaranteed to do well.
This latter point is made very well by Den of Geek’s David Crow, in a blistering response to the THR piece. Crow writes:
Whether or not younger moviegoers really are disengaging from the act of moviegoing—or simply becoming disengaged by the IP blockbuster-obsessed strategies of 2020s Hollywood studios—they, like every generation before them, still see the appeal of gathering in the dark and being chilled, tickled, and/or scared by something going bump in the night.
Faithful readers know this is one of my long-running bugaboos: how much difficulty the studios seem to have in understanding what makes people roll out to see something in theaters. As Crow notes, horror has infinite appeal because “the genre is elastic and open to constant interpretation and reinvention.” Smile 2 and Terrifier 3 can coexist at the same multiplex because they are structurally nothing alike even though they both belong to the same genre.
This is the danger in which the industry continues to put itself: the safe bet always has a shelf life. The comic book IP superstructure of the past 15 years is rapidly collapsing in on itself but the suits are worried about horror?
Steve’s Halloween Movie Recommendations
With the proviso that I haven’t seen everything that’s come out this year, here are a few of my favorite 2024 scary movies for your Halloween viewing pleasure:
Cuckoo - creepy and weird but fun movie about a young woman discovering horrible secrets in her new home
The First Omen - surprisingly good and stylish prequel to The Omen
Longlegs - one of the biggest horror movies of the year for a reason
Oddity - unnerving Irish film about a psychic investigating her sister’s murder
A Quiet Place: Day One - another shockingly good prequel, possibly my favorite of the series
The Substance - totally gonzo French body horror
What are yours? Email me at [email protected]
Tricks and Treats
If you haven’t done so, please take a moment and click over to my reader survey, which you can find here: The HTN Reader Survey.
It’s only four questions and shouldn’t take more than two minutes to complete. It’s a huge help to hear the sorts of things you’re interested in reading about!
Have a great Halloween and I’ll see you in November!
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
What’s next in video tech? (link)
The Apple Vision Pro’s foray into film won’t define it. (link)
What does Hollywood think the future of cinema looks like? (link)