Shannon Hanmer still remembers the first scary movie she saw in a theatre — the R-rated teen vampire thriller The Lost Boys starring Kiefer Sutherland as the blood-thirsty villain.
She was four years old.
“My mom thought it was about Peter Pan,” she said. Instead, a young Hanmer watched in horror as the 1987 film served up gruesome scenes of vampires plunging their teeth into victims and clashing with slayers wielding wooden stakes.
She was hooked.
“The visceral feeling I felt walking away from that stayed with me for a long time,” said Hanmer, who grew up in Dundas, Ont.
She later turned that love of feeling terrified into a career as an independent filmmaker. The latest project she produced, In a Violent Nature, is part of a recent wave of low-budget horror movies attracting surprisingly big box office returns for a genre where successes are fleeting and potentially short-lived.
WATCH | The official trailer for In a Violent Nature:
Making horror can be scary, filmmaker says
Terrifier 3 — an unrated slasher starring a maniacal axe-wielding clown — has become an unlikely star of the Halloween season, while the serial killer movie Longlegs is one of the highest-grossing horror films of the year so far.
Longtime fans of the genre — including Hanmer — are delighted to see murderous monsters enjoying broader mainstream acceptance. But after more than 10 years in the business, she has learned that horror movies rarely make a killing.
Even as her own career has changed for the better, Hanmer said she’s clear-eyed about the sobering fact that making nightmare-inspiring movies can itself be risky and scary. Some of her peers don’t know where their financing is coming from next year. Others are leaving the industry altogether.
“That’s why we feel lucky,” she said with relief, noting that when she and her team make their next couple of films, they’ll have people and money behind them. “And that’s something that we’ve never felt.”
IN A VIOLENT NATURE: If you need a slasher movie, this one will do the job. It’s leisurely, almost languorous, but when the blood flows, it flows in buckets. The killer in his mask looks like the world’s most terrifying Minion.
—@StephenKing
Some indie horrors score big at box office
In a Violent Nature earned about $4.2 million US at the box office worldwide, an unexpectedly high return for a film that cost less than $1 million to make, Hanmer said.
Other indie horrors have done far better this year. Terrifier 3 has grossed more than $50 million US so far, according to movie data site The Numbers, an impressive feat given the film’s reported production budget of just $2 million.
Longlegs, starring Nicolas Cage and shot in Vancouver, had a reported budget of just under $10 million, but has grossed well over $100 million in theatres internationally.
But these breakouts are generally the exceptions, not the rule.
“Indie horror is not financially successful,” Hanmer said. “Especially if you’re not into horror films, you don’t see how many films get made every year and just go straight to streaming and aren’t received well.”
The magic of successful indie horror films is that they can turn shoe-string budgets into box-office darlings, without relying on expensive Hollywood stars, said Jamie Bailey, the Toronto-based director behind The Mouse Trap, a slasher starring a killer Mickey Mouse.
The film was able to have the storied character as its major star because the copyright for the 1928 Disney animated short Steamboat Willie expired, allowing the earliest iteration of the mascot to enter the public domain.
Bailey had less than $100,000 to make the movie, which he shot over eight days in Ottawa last year. He’s still waiting for the final tally of what the movie made — it’s streaming on NBCUniversal’s Peacock throughout October — but it did well enough that he’s already working on a sequel.
Indie horror takes risks major studios avoid
What makes good indie horror movies resonate, according to Bailey, is that they can take risks that major studios might feel squeamish about.
“Studios like Disney would only make a handful of movies that cost $100 million or more. And I feel like, it’s not that it doesn’t make good content, but we’re getting kind of numb to hearing the same story over and over again,” Bailey said, arguing that most Hollywood films tend to follow a familiar formula.
“Because of that, there is now an opening for independent filmmakers to do something that the big studios wouldn’t.”
Damien Leone, director of the Terrifier movies, told the industry magazine Total Film that his franchise almost got picked up by an unnamed mainstream studio, but the offer came with demands to tone down the gore.
Instead, Leone kept the film independent, a gamble that appears to have paid off, given that the threequel’s use of over-the-top bloody carnage is part of its appeal.
Germain Lussier, a film reviewer at Gizmodo’s io9, posted on X that Terrifier 3 is “without question, the most disgusting, gory, vile thing I’ve ever seen. I kind of enjoyed it?”
WATCH | The official trailer for Terrifier 3:
Another source of success in the genre is that horror movies can help audiences confront fears and “what haunts us as a society,” said Gina Freitag, who co-wrote the book The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul.
If people are feeling social and political tensions in their own lives and the world around them, they might look for ways to release that tension and interrogate their feelings, even if they’re not doing it consciously, Freitag says.
“If you look at the waves of different sub-genres [of horror], and how they’re popular at any given time, you might see an influx of things around home invasions or alien invasions.
“Maybe that speaks to a fear of the other coming in and taking away things from us, removing our control, our sense of control or our sense of agency,” she said.
“And I think Terrifier can kind of replicate that in some ways for people.”
Big gambles can mean unknown returns
Hanmer says she still gets scared watching movies, which is “part of the addiction,” but the business of filmmaking is fraught with risk that comes with higher stakes.
Investors who bet on a project could take an extra gamble to give it a wider release in theatres rather than going straight to streaming. But that requires another big expense with an unknown return, especially given that theatres are still finding their footing in a post-pandemic world, said Hanmer.
“Anyone who tells you there is a specific road to success in film is trying to sell you something,” she said. “Box office results are hard to recreate in any genre, but post pandemic, everyone has yet to recover fully from the changes in theatre culture.”
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Even though their latest film was profitable, Hanmer says she and her team aren’t motivated by financial success. “If we wanted to make money, we would have taken a different path.”
Instead, she says they’re making movies they want to see — fulfilling their dreams by creating nightmares for the big screen.