Horror Report

Category: Box office

  • It was a Silent Night.. It was a deadly night for a movie called Silent Night Deadly night

    It was a Silent Night.. It was a deadly night for a movie called Silent Night Deadly night

    Picture it: November 1984.. Ronald Reagan just won re-election handily.. the nation was fearing a beat in the woods but raising the flag in patriotism…
    The chill is in the air.
    Christmas gifts are getting scooped up at those 1980s malls where the speakers are blasting 1980s music at a volume that feels illegal now.
    And right there, near the food court, near the arcade, you catch a glimpse of the movie times. Because maybe… just maybe… in the middle of the hustle, you’ll buy yourself a break. A breather. One big-screen, Hollywood-ish escape.

    In Cressona PA you see Prince and Purple rain.. but there is another one..

    Silent Night, Deadly Night.

    How bad could it be?

    You show up, ready for a cheesy seasonal slasher… and you find out you stand no chance. The movie’s getting pulled. Not “it’s selling out.” Not “we don’t have your showtime.” Pulled, as in: some theaters won’t run it, and the distributor starts backing away like it touched a hot stove.

    Because in 1984, people stood their moral ground… and this was a national argument.

    What makes it funny (in a dark way) is that today we live in an era where Christmas horror is practically its own aisle. We’ve got full-on gore carnivals, movies that treat the holidays like an excuse to paint the walls. Even Terrifier 3 was out here reminding everyone that December can be a bloodbath if a filmmaker wants it to be.

    So in 2025, Silent Night, Deadly Night almost looks… gentle. Like a troublemaker from a different generation.

    But in 1984? People didn’t see it as quaint. They saw it as a threat.

    When “Killer Santa” hit daytime TV

    A big part of this firestorm wasn’t even the movie itself but it was in big part, the marketing.

    TriStar ran TV spots that mashed up holiday cheer with the image of a Santa figure doing what Santa is not supposed to do—breaking in, weapon in hand, violence implied. And the big mistake? Those ads didn’t just run late at night for adults. They landed in daytime slots, when kids were watching.

    THIS was the ad that ill-fated the film:

    That’s the part people forget now: the outrage wasn’t abstract. It was parents seeing the commercial in the middle of normal life and concerned their child saw Santa with an axe.

    And then it became organized really fast.

    Variety reported protests in Milwaukee from a group calling itself Citizens Against Movie Madness, led by local mothers. The protests spread—New York, the Bronx, Brooklyn—signs and chants and that old-school civic energy that feels almost extinct today. The leader was Kathleen Eberhardt, then 32.

    Stations reacted too. According to reporting summarized in Vulture’s deep dive on the controversy, at least some TV outlets moved the commercials to late-night, and others yanked them altogether.

    Then the cultural heavyweight moment hit: Siskel and Ebert went after the movie hard on TV, and Gene Siskel aimed directly at the people behind it, calling the profits “blood money.”

    Suddenly, the controversy wasn’t a local protest story. It was national, loud, and embarrassing for a “respectable” distributor.

    We were even led to believe that a that a Lewisburg woman saw a TV spot for the movie during ‘afternoon cartoon hours.’ She didn’t recall the station.. sounds like an automatic urban legend to me.

    In 1980 a movie called CHRISTMAS EVIL featured an ax wielding Santa.. No outrage. But that is because the advertising campaign just was not there like it was for Silent Night Deadly Night..


    The other brutal truth: it started dropping at the box office

    Now here’s the other piece that matters, and it’s less romantic than the protest narrative:

    The movie also started slipping financially.

    Opening weekend, it pulled in $1,432,800 and played in 398 theaters.

    Second weekend? It dropped 45.4%..

    But it was also facing a huge problem: It was released the SAME WEEKEND as NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, a movie that was more widely accepted and not protested. It was just a child predator with knife fingers. Not Santa.

    TriStar publicly started wobbling right around then, talking about whether it would even be “commercially viable” to keep rolling it out.

    And once a studio starts speaking in that careful corporate language, you can feel the exit coming.

    The pullback was real enough that the Associated Press was describing it bluntly: TriStar was dropping the film from U.S. distribution after protests and poor early earnings.

    And one of the protest organizers, Kathleen Eberhardt with Citizens Against Movie Madness, celebrated the decision with the kind of quote that sounds like it belongs in a time capsule: “Wow. I think it’s great.”

    The irony: pulling it probably helped create the legend

    Here’s what I love about this story, even if the movie itself is… let’s be honest… not exactly Oscar bait.

    In 1984, people talked about it like it was the end of civilization. We already had Jason slashing through forests

    In 2025, it’s basically a campfire tale about a moral panic—an artifact from a time when Santa still had a kind of cultural protection around him, like you could get grounded just for disrespecting the concept.

    And the greatest irony? By pulling it, they may have cemented it.

    Because there’s a difference between a throwaway slasher and a forbidden slasher.

    If TriStar had just let it play, it might’ve come and gone like a hundred other low-budget horror flicks. But once it became “the movie they tried to stop,” it picked up that outlaw aura. People love a thing more when someone tells them they shouldn’t have it.

    And that’s exactly what happened over time.

    The film grew into a cult item, spawned sequels, and eventually inspired a remake in 2012 (titled Silent Night) and the newest 2025 incarnation..

    So 40 years after the chaos of the citizens against movie madness … angry moms … TV ads during cartoons (it that really even happened), SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT has become an annual Christmas much watch.. not because it is a great movie. But because it is just that bad.

  • The mysterious Spielberg UFO movie

    The mysterious Spielberg UFO movie

    Steven Spielberg is reportedly making a new movie, and if the rumors are true, it’s going to rock the world of UFO enthusiasts — or at least get their hopes way up. Of course, a lot of that could simply be marketing hype mixed with existential wish-casting. But if there’s anyone who could stir that kind of anticipation, it’s Spielberg. After all, this is the man behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — films that didn’t just entertain people, but quietly rewired how an entire generation thinks about alien contact.

    The recent UK Telegraph article describing the project leans heavily into a familiar narrative within UFO culture. One story that always resurfaces is the alleged White House screening of E.T. for Ronald Reagan. Supposedly, when the film ended, Reagan stood up and said — maybe joking, maybe not — that there were people in the room who knew that everything they had just watched was true. Whether that moment actually happened exactly as described almost doesn’t matter anymore. It’s become part of the mythology.

    The new Spielberg film itself is still wrapped in secrecy, but one detail from the article jumped out at me — and I had completely forgotten this — a significant portion of it was filmed in New Jersey. That immediately brings to mind the so-called New Jersey drone sightings that dominated headlines just a year ago and then vanished entirely. Not even below the fold — just gone. But if you talk to people in New Jersey, you’ll hear that the drones never really stopped. They’re reportedly still seen regularly. They’ve just become so common that no one talks about them anymore. Like planes in the sky.

    That’s part of what makes this Telegraph article so fun, and what makes this Spielberg project so intriguing. There’s even a rumor floating around — clearly conspiracy-theory territory — that a real alien might “star” in the movie. Obviously, that’s not happening. For one thing, it would probably violate every Screen Actors Guild rule imaginable, not to mention require the creation of an entirely new galactic union chapter. Unless, of course, the alien is playing itself. Or themselves. Or itself. The grammar alone would be a nightmare.

    THE TELEGRAPH MOCKS:

    Tinfoil hat wearers have reacted with characteristic calmness and sagacity to the news that Spielberg is returning to his sci-fi roots with his new production, filming of which was completed in the summer. It is said to have had several working titles, including The Dish and Non-View, but is now reported to be called Disclosure.

    The new name, if it is correct, would provide “evidence” for the conspiracists that Spielberg knows more than he is letting on – “disclosure” being a key term for the alien truthers. They hold that the American authorities have secret information about UFOs and extraterrestrial life and want it to be publicly revealed, in a process they term “disclosure”.

    Chris Ramsay, a Montreal-based magician who has a YouTube channel devoted to UFO theories, went viral with a tweet in which he most clearly set out the conspiracists’ thinking about Spielberg’s new film. Like any good conspiracy theorist, he described his thesis as something “that’s so crazy it just might be brilliant”.

    Still, the idea is entertaining. And beneath the humor is a more interesting possibility: that Spielberg, over decades of filmmaking, may have become acquainted with enough people in enough rooms to suspect that something is going on. That maybe Reagan wasn’t joking. That maybe E.T. wasn’t just a children’s movie, but a soft disclosure story told in the safest way possible.

    Regardless of what ultimately comes of this new film — whenever it’s released, and whatever it ends up being called — the anticipation is already enormous. The marketing machine seems primed, the speculation is growing, and expectations are high. We have little doubt the movie will be good. And even if it isn’t…

    Well, it’ll still be out of this world.

    (Sorry. I had to make at least one pun.)

  • Fnaf 2 becomes the must see anti holiday movie

    Fnaf 2 becomes the must see anti holiday movie

    Five Nights at Freddy’s Part 2 might not be a Christmas movie, but it’s absolutely the anti-Christmas movie for anyone trying to dodge holiday fluff right now.

    And dodge it they did.
    The fanbase showed up hard and the movie unseated Zootopia 2, pulling in around $63 million domestic and over $100 million worldwide on opening. That’s a lot more than many people expected it to do heading into the post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas window. This movie is hot right now in that weird in-between space where people are kind of done with turkeys but not quite ready for carols.

    Domestically, that’s the second-biggest horror opening of the year for Blumhouse–Atomic Monster, after The Conjuring: Last Rites at $84 million. Yesterday’s numbers were solid too, with a drop of about 33%, which is actually better than the 39% drop the first Five Nights at Freddy’s movie took. It’s always an open question whether a film like this can keep that kind of momentum going, but at least for this weekend, it has absolutely blown past a lot of expectations—and even outpaced its own predecessor.

    So, Merry Christmas to Blumhouse and the whole gang at Freddy Fazbear’s.


    If holiday joy isn’t your thing this year, there’s always a killer animatronic waiting for you in the dark.

  • Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 will be fine even if it is awful

    Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 will be fine even if it is awful

    Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 Is About to Chomp Zootopia 2

    Five Nights at Freddy’s Part 2, the sequel to the initial hit, is about to take down Zootopia 2 at the box office this weekend. If you look at the Rotten Tomatoes website, you’d never expect that to happen. Right now it’s sitting at one of the lowest critic scores we’ve ever seen ..just 12%. That’s it. That means the overwhelming majority of movie critics basically despise this film and think it’s a waste of time to watch and maybe even a waste of time to make.

    But this is a tale of two cities and two audiences. While critics hate it, people in general love it, with an 89% audience score from 500+ verified ratings. The original movie made about $297 million on a $20 million budget, and it’s expected that this sequel might actually do even better.

    Is it going to be Oscar-worthy material? Probably not. It might not even be the best movie you’ve ever seen. But it’s doing something critics haven’t really tapped into.

    For a long time, 80s and 90s nostalgia reigned supreme. That era is fading. People now can’t always relate to a time and place that’s long gone, but they can relate to a time when they were playing this game.. or when they were parents of kids who were playing it in the mid-2000s. That’s what we have here: an homage to new nostalgia, something different and unique to this generation of people growing up now, and to Millennials who are older and had kids who downloaded this game. Parents and kids alike enjoyed playing it.

    Remember from in the mid 2000 teens how many Five Nights at Freddy’s–themed birthday parties we saw? That’s the energy showing up at the box office now.

    What this really shows is how little critics matter anymore. There was a time when a movie poster could boast a perfect score with critics or a Roger Ebert quote on the back of the VHS and that meant everything. Those days are so far gone they’ve turned to dust. Now it’s word of mouth, social media, instant reviews, and live theater reactions that matter, and that’s what’s happening here.

    We haven’t seen Five Nights at Freddy’s Part 2 just yet. We will. And when we do, even if it’s the “worst movie of all time,” guess what?

    We will probably enjoy it.

  • Netflix will now own Freddy but also make takedown theaters as we know it

    Netflix will now own Freddy but also make takedown theaters as we know it

    Jane Fonda has been leading the charge, along with the Screen Actors Guild, railing against the Netflix deal that would gobble up Warner Bros. for 43 billion dollars. The emotions in Hollywood have gone from apprehension to anger about this deal, and people are actually worried it could be consequential to the First Amendment itself. Some might say that’s hyperbole, but think about this.

    Netflix is going to be given token releases to theater chains such as AMC, IMAX, and Cinemark. Those stocks fell 8% on Friday because this merger may represent a total consolidation of the industry under a corporate conglomerate. Corporate conglomerates aren’t rare these days. We don’t have many companies like we once did—just big giant corporations eating up the competition and owning it.

    This is also the tech giants owning something as opposed to the old Hollywood elite. Warner Bros owns a lot of horror franchises. Let’s think about Pennywise the Dancing Clown and Freddy Krueger. Let’s think about some of the others you’ve come to love on different streaming platforms. Netflix will now own those rights and distribute them the way they see fit, if this deal and acquisition go through.

    So maybe we all agree with Jane Fonda, and maybe we’re all a little bit worried. And quite frankly, if Netflix really wants to do something here, they can either kill movie theaters—or allow them to thrive.

  • Stranger Things finale in theaters will be a cultural moment

    Stranger Things finale in theaters will be a cultural moment

    Netflix unveiled the full list of cities and theaters participating in fan screenings of the Season 5 finale of Stranger Things, which has been confirmed to have a runtime of 2 hours and five minutes.

    The screenings will take place in over 500 theaters in the U.S. and Canada starting on December 31, 2025 at 5:00pm PT, timed to the finale’s global premiere on Netflix, and run through January 1, 2026. The full list of theaters and RSVP information can be found on Netflix’s website, stfinale.com.

    Shawn Levy stated that the last episode belonged on the big screen..

    This promises to be a pivotal pop culture moment..

    Many theaters are already selling out.. Get tickets now..

  • WEIRD and WICKED wins

    WEIRD and WICKED wins

    So we are all really weirded out by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo making their rounds promoting WICKED FOR GOOD..but hey, maybe weird worked!

    The box office has been thankful for the oddity..

    Universal Pictures‘ musical sequel “For Good” swept up a spectacular $68.6 million across Friday and preview screenings from 4,115 locations in North America. That puts it on pace for a $151.5 million opening weekend through Sunday.

    It’d be the biggest release ever for a Broadway adaptation and the second-biggest ever for a Universal release, only behind “Jurassic World.”

    It’s also well ahead of the $112 million haul that the first “Wicked” debuted to in the same pre-Thanksgiving frame last year. If the Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande film hits its current projections, it’ll rank among the biggest domestic openings of the year, currently led by “A Minecraft Movie” ($162 million) and the “Lilo & Stitch” remake ($146 million).

    So … how about that!

  • Prayers for movies: Pope hosts Hollywood stars at Vatican and laments the fall of cinema

    Prayers for movies: Pope hosts Hollywood stars at Vatican and laments the fall of cinema

    Pope Leo told a group of leading Hollywood actors and filmmakers at an audience in the Vatican on Saturday that cinemas were struggling to survive and that more should be done to protect them and preserve the shared experience of watching movies..

    “Cinemas are experiencing a troubling decline, with many being removed from cities and neighbourhoods,” he said.

    “More than a few people are saying that the art of cinema and the cinematic experience are in danger. I urge institutions not to give up, but to cooperate in affirming the social and cultural value of this activity.”

    You can read more here..

    Full story…

    May God continue to bless movie theaters?

  • Little gremlins will return in 2027

    Little gremlins will return in 2027

    There have been rumors for years—maybe decades—about another Gremlins movie. Every so often, whispers would pop up online and then fade away. Well, it looks like this time it’s actually happening. Several entertainment outlets are now reporting that a new Gremlins film is officially on the way, with a planned release sometime in 2027.

    Chris Columbus is reportedly returning to lead the project, and Steven Spielberg will also be involved, which makes the entire thing feel like a genuine continuation of the franchise rather than a cash-grab reboot. That alone gives fans a reason to be optimistic.

    Details are being kept under wraps for now—no confirmed plot, no confirmed cast, nothing concrete beyond the creative team. But if this is moving forward the way it’s being discussed, we’ll definitely be getting more updates in the coming months.

    Honestly, the biggest shock might not even be that Gremlins is coming back…it’s realizing that 2027 is only two years away. Time is moving fast. Maybe too fast. But hey—if we’re speeding into the future, at least we’re bringing the Mogwai with u

  • From the numbers being seen, there’s a good chance that you did not go to the movies this October

    From the numbers being seen, there’s a good chance that you did not go to the movies this October

    Empty theaters. Empty seats. If you’ve stepped foot into a movie theater lately — or more likely didn’t — you’ve probably noticed that the box office has been looking a little bleak this October. And no, it’s not because there weren’t Halloween movies to go see. Even the horror releases, which usually carry October, are crawling.

    In fact, people just aren’t going to the movies at all.

    Domestic box office revenue for October 2025 is expected to land somewhere around $425 million — which makes this the worst October in 27 years, according to Comscore. The only exception is October 2020, when nearly every theater was closed and the world was in pandemic lockdown, and even then Christopher Nolan’s Tenet still dragged in $55 million on its own.

    But if we remove 2020 from the conversation, the last time October was this low was 1997, when ticket sales landed at $385 million — and remember, that’s not adjusted for inflation. By 1999, October box office had broken the $600 million mark. Back then, movie theaters were packed. Today? We’re looking at showtimes where you could shout across the auditorium and no one would tell you to be quiet.

    So what happened?

    You can’t blame COVID anymore. You can’t say “people just didn’t know what was in theaters.” Everyone knows what’s out — they’re just… choosing not to go. Streaming habits, pricing, quality of films, people not wanting to gamble $17 on something they may not like — it’s a cocktail of issues.

    At this point, AMC might need to call Nicole Kidman back and tell her to film a sequel to the “Heartbreak Feels Good” spot. Maybe this time she’s just sitting in a totally empty theater whispering, “We come to this place… alone.”

    Because right now?

    It’s a ghost town out there.