Splatterstick Box Office #Fail

The Evil Dead II scared the shit out of me before I even saw the film. I was mesmerized and repulsed by the video box cover when I was a kid, so much so that while I'd stare at it intently, I couldn't bring myself to look at the back cover. I finally got around to watching it while I was teaching in Japan. I'd seen everything I pretty much wanted to see at the video store by that point, and I wanted to know what all the fuss was about...

And it was freakin' awesome. Scary, because I didn't know what to expect when that freaky deaky Raimi-cam rush started, but also a lot of fun, equal parts Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Three Stooges. I watched The Evil Dead trilogy in reverse order, and went on to enjoy some other horror films from the eighties that mined a similar splatterstick vein - Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator, and Return of the Living Dead.

I'd always thought that the production of horror films was cyclical, thematically speaking. The eighties were a period of relative prosperity, hence the infusion of comedy, while the seventies, and to a lesser degree the oughts were a little bleaker, and as a result, the movies themselves had a darker worldview.

However, after looking at the numbers, I realize that hypothesis is probably...bunk. The box office receipts show that people prefer their torture, murder, mayhem, and misery on the silver screen without a soupçon of black comdey to help lighten things up.

Let's take a look at the numbers for two of the splatterstick films that I like, Evil Dead and Re-Animator.





The results aren't bad, given that both films managed to make money, and the fact that they were written, directed, produced, and performed by a group of relatively unknown people. But when you compare the financial results of The Evil Dead and Re-Animator with similar efforts from the seventies like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the results are much less impressive.





The financial performance of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is especially noteworthy in light of its relatively low production costs when compared with a similar freshman effort, The Evil Dead and the overall box office gross for both productions.

Given the healthy box-office performance of grimmer fare from the seventies, and the continued success of that bleak cinematic outlook in the oughts, I doubt we'll ever see a "mainstream" splatterstick revival even if the economy improves during the teens of the 21st century: bleak is just better business sense.





I did find a couple of interesting anomalies in amongst the box office receipts of aging celluloid horrors. Films that had no gore, no nudity, and were for all intents amateur productions shot on a digital camera, out-performed all the other horror films that I looked at by wide margins.





So who knows? As computer animation gets cheaper, and amateurs get more proficient at using digital cameras, maybe I will live to see an "indy" splatterstick revival.

Nota Bene: All film grosses reflect performance at the box-office, and not the revenue from rentals or sales of cassettes or DVDs. The adjusted productions budgets for The Evil Dead and Paranormal Activity were calculated using numbers for 1981 and 2007, however, the adjusted box-office grosses were calculated according to the years that they were released, which was 1983 and 2009. Numbers for the box office gross and production budgets were found on IMDB, while the adjusted ticket prices were based on the figures from Box Office Mojo. Production budgets were adjusted using the CPI Inflation Calculator.