CharlesGrey: Well, Stephen King is probably the most extreme exception. But in general, how many "AAA" Horror films are released these days, compared to all the Action films and Romantic Comedies? Seems to me that, aside from a few exceptions, the vast majority of releases are small-ish independent productions.
Part of the problem is, that most Horror films are produced for adults, while the majority of AAA releases are "family friendly" to sell more copies/tickets. Wasn't even the latest Terminator film rated 12+ or something like that? Transformers, Avengers, Star Wars, Jurassic World -- that kind of thing brings in the money, and I guess you can't do that with darker themes and/or tons of explicit gore.
andysheets1975: Yeah, horror is pretty much a shell of what it used to be. There's a good reason people involved with the genre will get nostalgic about the "70s and 80s Horror Boom", for which King was fortunate enough to have become the poster child. The boom then became a glut, it busted and has never truly recovered.
Films like that still exist, a large part of the allure of them was that they had such low budget that they had to be really selective about the gore. And some of them had some rather amazing writing. I'm in the process of writing a werewolf short and it's probably going to be more like the older movies before horror got big budgets. Probably 1 or 2 rooms with 2 actors. If it gets made it'll take a day or two of filming tops and probably more like half a day.
I think there's also the bit that at this point you can show almost anything you might want to show. I see a lot of films where the writers either didn't go to film school, didn't know the genre conventions or completely ignored them.
We can show people getting their throat's slit and disemboweled and some film makers seem to think that's justification for showing it. Sometimes ti works, but more often than not it just distracts from the point. The point before the evisceration is almost always scarier than the actual evisceration anyways.
andysheets1975: Yeah, horror is pretty much a shell of what it used to be. There's a good reason people involved with the genre will get nostalgic about the "70s and 80s Horror Boom", for which King was fortunate enough to have become the poster child. The boom then became a glut, it busted and has never truly recovered.
tinyE: There is good stuff out there, you just really have to look for it. Your big name studios aren't going to invest in anything cutting edge, disturbing, or truly scary because it's too big of a risk. They are only interested in spending money on something they can guarantee a return on, which is the standardized America Shopping Mall Movie-Going Audience standard run of the mill crap.
Indeed that's probably the main problem. Around here there's pretty much always at least 2 or 3 projects in the works in this genre. We're not big on horror films locally, but this sort of thing goes on all over the country. The trick is usually hearing about the films when they're done as they frequently have no marketing budget.
Obviously, most of them make no money because they're crap, but there's overlooked gems as well.