what is the future of horror movies?

 I have high hopes for the future of horror movies more and more good horror films have been coming out such as Hereditary, Get out and a lonely place to die. the reason I think this is so exciting is because horror has been one of the worst film genres for years not to say there haven't been good ones but they are few and far between. Entire franchises of horror films have grown even though the scripts were clearly written by baboons. To explain my grievances and hopes fully I'm going to go back to the early 2000's Saw, the ring and the Blair witch project came out in 2002, 2004 and 1999 respectively. I'm gonna start with SAW.

Saw while being a good film as a psychological horror, gore and a twist ending was one of the first films to start a bad trend Saw, Hostel, final destination and other films started the idea that if you're horror film has gore or a twist ending its a scary film this is wrong gore while it can be entertaining isn't scary its gross with later saw films being called torture porn while what they are meant to be is horror. Saw also had a twist ending and while that's fine scream is a good example of this a lot of films that came out after Saw had random twist endings to try and copy that shock factor but for most of them the twist was either too out of nowhere too predictable or left the film with a lot of plot holes. I feel its important to note that the 80s horror franchises like Friday the 13th and nightmare on elm street had either ended or were on their last legs in the 90s which left an opening for franchises and entire subgenres to take their place. Saw itself is still going as a franchise with spiral set to some out in 2021 and Final destination going on until 2011. (I have a place in my heart for final destinations awesome deaths) the films coming out in the 90s and 2000s were going to go on for years to replace the 80s franchises but another market also got involved with The ring as my chosen example:

The Ring which was based off of a Japanese film called ringu. The ring succeeded very well from its Hollywood adaptation grossing around 130 million dollars in the US alone. This unsurprisingly started a trend of money hungry studios buying the rights to hundreds of Japanese horror films to try and replicate the success of the ring. for some of them this worked for some it did not this I think is because different cultures find different things scary people in the US are not going to be as scared as the Japanese are when it comes to their horror films when they don't have the lore and history behind the ideas and monsters in the films. Bigfoot isn't going to scare someone in Australia or Japan as culturally it doesn't apply. while some people may get scared of monsters from different cultures its hit and miss beyond that and more importantly is the fact that these films got rushed into production sometimes as soon as the original film got released in Japan. The last problem is the fact these films were changed to scare American audiences in the process ironically making them less scary as the process takes away from the antagonist.( if you want watch screened video on J-horror which is a better analysis than mine)

The grudge got a second Hollywood remake this year making only 50 million comparted to 130 getting panned by viewers and critics alike. this shows the turnaround I'm talking about ill get to that later.

The Blair Witch project made a whopping 250 million from a budget of 60,000 USD spawning an entire genre of films (found footage) and leading many to believe it was real. This was one of the biggest horror films of the 2000s spawning multiple much worse sequels. Found footage as a genre took of with Cloverfield and paranormal activity being the most notable. This was another goldmine for Hollywood studios as by their very nature they are very cheap to make compared more conventional horror films. While this genre had a much lower affect on Hollywood industry it started something else..................

What I believe happened next was a combination of all of the above Jump scares, supernatural entities and gore. while found footage and Americanisation's of Japanese films faded out they created a new thing a monster even :). They led to ghosts what i mean by that is ghost stories had generally been left by the wayside by horror film makers for years as something people tell around the campfire and nothing else. Japanese films had brought them back into the limelight but as that faded out filmmakers quickly realised the way to make them much more affective was to make them fit the audience. As they had been left by the wayside for years there wasn't many recent films to draw upon for ideas on how to make good new ones so what they did first was take found footage and use that as the connector in a sense. This created paranormal activity. from that there was a basis to draw upon family moves into a new house haunted by ghosts. Paranormal activity tended to have slightly pissy ghosts who turned lights on and off and pulled your duvet while you were sleeping. So they had to change to work from that jump scares the most despicable form of horror while they had already been around they came into their own now. now you have a structure ghosts new family and jump scares. between the conjuring, insidious and paranormal activity there have been 17 films spawned from that. making millions and millions at the box office with the already established pattern studios went for it with a lot of other horror films being similar. so within the last 20 years we've had 3 turnovers from 80s and 90s horror franchises dying to 2000s J-horror found footage and gore then late 2000s 2010s jump scare ghost story saga. Now during all this there have been other horror films Thee purge for example which takes aim at gentrification and the class divide in America. what weve got now I feel is a turning point while other genres could've been primed to take centre stage they have found a new home with horror TV recent ones include Hulu's Stephen king show, AHS, The walking dead, The exorcism the haunting of hill house and more horror has found a new home in TV and has a chance to expand upon it's ideas. Results of this are clear the haunting of hill house is scarier than most horror films and the walking dead is now in it's bajillionth series spawning multiple spin offs and videogames many having great reviews from critics and viewers alike. along the side lines has always been psychological horror and with the recent successes of Get out, us, hereditary, the lighthouse, midsommar, it comes at night, let the right one in and the invisible man to name a few. Other subgenres like comedy horror are coming back with ready or not and happy death day 1 and 2 being the main ones. I'm very hopeful for the foreseeable future of horror i wanted to name more subcategories but the it would just be a long list of horror films and TV:). but if anything sooner or later this pattern will probably repeat itself but for now I'm gonna stay excited.

                                                                     HAPPY HALLOWEEN