Yeah. Kind of sad. After she did the movie she found God and when to work for some televangelist preaching against things like horror films. To this day I'm not allowed to mention the movie around the family. As far as I know her parents still keep in touch with mine from time to time.

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.

You don't know what you got till it's gone. :~(

I think that nature is just more obvious with horror, but of course there's more films that appeal to a broader demographic. I'm not sure what it's like in Deutschland, but here in the US we have a respectable number of horror films released every year. Unsurprisingly, quite a few are released around Halloween, but even that's not an absolute. Case-in-point : The Conjuring 2 is due out in June of this year, and that is a fairly big movie.

Even more niche? Scifi. With the exception of JJ Abrahms crapping on every franchise he can get his hands on, Scifi movies have been fairly few and far between.

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.

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.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOY.

;_;

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.
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.

Well, that's easy. Read Fangoria.

I've never heard of that, thanks for the link.

My pleasure! It's a very famous magazine purely devoted to horror. I'm not sure where you live, but if there's a local newsstand or bookstore with a good magazine selection, they'd be sure to have it.

I live in Seattle. We have a good film industry locally, but horror isn't something that's big to make around here. A few productions going at any given time, but nothing like you find in other parts of the country.

On the brightside though that also means we don't have the glut of zombie films that some parts of the country have. I like zombies, but it's gotten way out of hand.

Unfortunately, since the legislature is inhabited by cheap bastards we don't have the tax breaks available that you see in Oregon and BC, so you see "Seattle" being either Portland or Vancouver a lot. Can't blame the filmmakers though. Only a small fraction of all movies make money and a subsidy can make a huge difference in whether you go home broke or with a bit of coin..

Well, what I meant was where you live in proximity to standard newsstands or bookstores that commonly stock magazines like Fangoria. Even the local FYE's around here have them. They're fairly easy to come by, so long as you're not out in some rural area, which it doesn't sound like would be a problem for you. They're not stocked based on proximity to local film scenes. It's an international magazine.

Thanks for the tip! Now, to find time to actually watch it, though... :(. Actually, I've realized I haven't watched any of those movies in years! I think the last horror movie I saw was The Conjuring, and I only saw a bit of it before getting uneasy with it... the years might have been turning me into a wuss! :D