With the box office success of “Smile,” “The Black Phone” and his “Barbarian” this year, writer-director Zach Cregger says it’s clear that “original horror is working right now.”
Though the genre has long relied on franchises like “Halloween,” “Saw” and “The Conjuring,” Cregger says younger filmmakers are finding scary features “creatively fertile territory” for exploring unexpectedly complex themes.
Cregger’s solo directorial debut was lauded as a late-summer sleeper hit, making more than $42 million worldwide on a modest production budget of $4.5 million.
Now available on streaming, it tells the story of a young woman (Georgina Campbell) who finds her Airbnb-rented house in a half-ruined section of Detroit weirdly occupied by a stranger (Bill Skarsgård). It goes on to subvert a number of horror conventions, and found audiences outside the traditional genre fans.
“Adults that are craving new and groundbreaking stuff, there’s not a lot of places to go,” Cregger said. “Studios are only putting money into big IP superhero stuff, which for me as a 40-year-old man, I’m not really like drawn to that.”
He struggled to find a studio to back his film. Cregger said he looked up the production companies associated with every horror movie that has been made in the past 15 years, then sent his script to all of them. None agreed to fund the project.