2024 is the year horror movies came out on top

Horror is always a resilient genre at the box office. Often, when blockbusters flounder, horror movies remain consistent as the dark undercurrent of the multiplex. That has been the case more than ever in 2024, which has been something of a bloodbath for struggling blockbusters — with only a few notable examples, mostly in the world of family movies.

Against the backdrop of tumbling blockbuster dominoes, horror has been arguably stronger than ever before. Nobody expected Joker: Folie à Deux to struggle in cinemas at the beginning of October, but even fewer people expected it to be unseated at the top of the US box office charts by ultra-gory slasher threequel Terrifier 3. And yet, that's exactly what happened.

Terrifier 3 is currently sat at $85.2m (£67.5m) worldwide, which is a remarkable total for a film that only cost around $2m (£1.6m) to make. That's a 42-time multiplier from budget to gross. If one of the year's biggest movies, Deadpool & Wolverine, wanted to match that multiplier, it would have to make $8.4bn (£6.7bn) — almost four times the haul of the highest-grossing movie ever.

Damien Leone's sadistic killer clown isn't the only horror success story from this year, though. In fact, there's a horror-adjacent movie in the worldwide top 10 for 2024. Tim Burton's highly-anticipated sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice earned $451m (£357m) globally, riding the twin waves of 80s nostalgia and Jenna Ortega's fame.

Just a few spaces down the year's box office list, you will find Alien: Romulus. After a handful of misses for the franchise, Fede Álvarez was able to make the xenomorph a scary beast again. Strong reviews and positive audience response carried Romulus to $351m (£278m) worldwide, putting Álvarez in poll position to direct the next movie in the series too.

Read more: Alien: Romulus director teases Easter eggs and tells fans to 'pay attention' (Yahoo Entertainment, 3 min read)

You can find box office triumphs throughout the great and good of the horror genre in 2024. Smile 2 remains in cinemas and is on course to match its predecessor's unexpectedly huge total, while alien invasion prequel A Quiet Place: Day One has, at the time of writing, managed to out-gross Joker. Demi Moore, meanwhile, is back at the top of Hollywood after her boundary-pushing body horror The Substance soared to a total that could reach $75m (£59m) according to Deadline — not to mention possible Oscars buzz.

But the most impressive thing about 2024 in horror is not the box office. It's how inventive and special the films themselves have been. Many of them have been sequels and prequels, but that hasn't stopped them bringing fresh approaches and new ideas to the genre.

Nowhere has this been truer than in the context of Longlegs — Osgood Perkins' incredibly intense serial killer story. That movie had one of the most novel marketing campaigns in recent Hollywood history and, as a result, generated an extraordinary amount of buzz ahead of its release in July. They even had the restraint to keep Nicolas Cage's terrifying performance in the titular role almost entirely hidden until the film's opening day.

Read more: Longlegs viewers struggling to sleep due to ‘horrific’ Nicolas Cage performance (The Independent, 2 min read)

This audacious approach in terms of both filmmaking and marketing proved very fruitful for Longlegs, which scored great reviews and impressive financial returns. On critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 86% of critics gave a positive review. The movie ultimately made $126m (£100m) from a budget in the region of $10m (£8m) — a 12.5-time multiplier. To return to the Deadpool example, that film would have needed to make $2.5bn (£2bn) to match Longlegs in terms of its budget-gross multiplier.

We've already spoken about some of the biggest and best horror movies of 2024, but there are many more that have succeeded both critically and commercially in a year that has been difficult at times for the film industry as a whole. Other spooky success stories from this year include Speak No Evil, Heretic, Trap, and The First Omen.

Read more: The best 30 horror films of all time according to fans (Yahoo Entertainment, 3 min read)

It just goes to show the resilience of the horror genre. While other genres require hefty budgets and big-name movie stars, the prospect of a good scare is still enough to bring people out of their homes and into their local multiplex. These are often cheap movies, but audiences almost always feel like they've got their money's worth. One more spin of the Terrifier Christmas song to celebrate the end of the year? Sounds good to us.