Horror Is a Booming Business, and Blumhouse Wants All of It

Horror profits jumped almost 26 percent year over year, according to Nielsen market research. That single number explains why a bookstore devoted entirely to the genre opened last month in Alexandria, Virginia — and why a merged Hollywood studio now claims more than half of the entire horror box office.

Chanthal Harris owns Long Dark House, a bookstore that stocks only horror and the supernatural. It's been open for just over a month, and she says she already sees steady traffic from both longtime genre readers and curious newcomers.

"I've had people comment about the curation and how they're finding something unexpected," Harris says. "And I'm also surprised at how many people are trying to dip their toe into horror."

Harris came to the trade after a career in aviation. She credits her parents for the taste: her father fed her love of fantasy and science fiction, her mother loved horror. "To me it was completely normal. I didn't think of it as a spooky thing," she says. Business, she adds, "has exceeded my expectations."

What does the money look like on the film side?

The numbers there are even louder. Last May, Backrooms — a film about a horrifying liminal space (an eerie in-between place that feels unsettlingly familiar) existing beyond our reality — smashed box office records. It grossed over $400 million worldwide on a $10 million budget, petty cash by Hollywood standards.

The film began as a short on YouTube. Its creator, Kane Parsons, was still in high school, 15 or 16, when the studio reached out.

"We're drawn like moths to a flame to things that are scary," says Michael Clear, president of Atomic Monster, which merged with Blumhouse to form Blumhouse Atomic Monster. Clear says finding filmmakers online isn't new for them: David Sandberg, director of Lights Out, one of the company's first productions, was also a YouTube creator.

"They say it's hard to describe what scary is but I know it when I see it," Clear says.

Did COVID change horror's share of the market?

It did, dramatically, according to Abhijay Prakash, Blumhouse president, who handles the company's business strategy. "Horror as a share of the box office… pre-COVID, was never more than 10% of the box office," Prakash says. "Then after COVID though, it's occupying a much larger share. It's over 15%, almost 20% last year and this year. And inside of that we are over half of that box office."

So what does this change for audiences? Mainly supply: a studio holding over 50 percent of horror ticket sales has every incentive to make more of it, across more formats.

Why the surge? The Recreational Fear Lab theorizes people flock to fear because the real world has been so frightening. Clear thinks it's more complicated. The bar for what draws people to theaters has been rising for 10 to 15 years, he says, and isolation may have pushed people toward social activities.

"People are craving collective experiences. We're finding more now than before the pandemic that people are going to movies in larger groups," Clear says. "It just so happens that our genre, because it's participatory — if we do our jobs right, we're getting reactions, audible reactions from the audience."

"Scary stories in the dark," Prakash underlines, "[has] delivered for thousands of years."

Real scares, not AI ones?

Short-form horror is spreading on social media, and much of it is made with AI. Clear welcomes the democratization — "people who find tools that can enable them to create will allow more people, more talented people, to enter the space" — but he draws a line for his own studio.

"The things that are scariest are the things that feel the most real," Clear says. "Our focus is always on doing things as real as possible. Doing things as practically as possible."

The 'Disney of fear'

Prakash told The Ankler early this year that his goal for Blumhouse Atomic Monster is to be the Disney of fear. He means it literally: "Every place that consumers engage with scary stories is a place that we as a business, as a company obsessed with horror and scary stories will be," he says.

The studio is exploring an attraction based on its Five Nights at Freddy's franchise, and Prakash points to the popular stage version of Paranormal Activity as proof the model travels beyond screens.

Clear frames the ambition as expansion, not just service to existing fans: "We like to think that we can provide a kind of gateway horror."

The next test of that gateway may come from the printed page: Long Dark House's early foot traffic suggests the audience for scares keeps growing in every format it can find.