In 2025, horror movies made almost $1 billion at the U.S. domestic box office, proving that the genre is alive and well, even if some of its characters aren’t.
Much of this is due to the collective experience, according to Michael Clear, president of production company Atomic Monster.
“Everyone is kind of driven by watching media alone. But I think horror movies are an opportunity to go on a ride with a group of people,” Clear told the audience at “The Scary-Smart Business of Horror” panel.
When evaluating whether to go ahead with a project, Clear added, the team at Atomic Monster is all about the scares.
“It always goes back to that core experiential element,” he said.
“We don’t need a big scope or spectacle to really scare people. For us, it always starts with, ‘What are we afraid of? What’s the primal fear at the core of this?’ And then you build the scaffolding on top of it. You try to tell a compelling, emotional story.”
“M3GAN” screenwriter Akela Cooper revealed that when writing the movie’s script, she began to think of her character as one of the most iconic horror movie characters of all time.
“When I got the notes on my first draft, the producers said they had no idea how the doll was going to be made and that I needed to pull back on active movement,” she recalled. “That created a creative challenge for me, but it was also like a fun challenge.
“I then started thinking of ‘M3GAN’ kind of like ‘Jaws.’ Famously, they could not get that shark to work, so then they had to fill around it. You saw it in bits and pieces. So in the sequence where M3GAN is chasing the bully through the woods, I wrote that you only see her in certain spots, very, very quickly. It was kind of like a shark on land hunting this little boy.”
YouTube creator Mark
Fischbach, aka Markiplier, worked outside the traditional Hollywood machine, writing, producing, directing and starring in his movie “Iron Lung.” He even self-distributed the project, which has earned more than $50 million at the global box office. And on top of all that, he edited the trailer.
“Being outside the traditional studio sphere, there were deadlines that I didn’t know about,” he said. “When it came to the deadline of the trailer going out to movie theaters, I had no idea. So I put it together in two days.”
However, Fischbach acknowledged that doing everything yourself can be dangerous, as there is no one to say no.
“You have to say no to yourself,” he said, “and I often won’t do that. I was like, ‘I can take some Houdini tutorials, I could do that. I could build a render farm, I can do that.’”
The panel offered budding horror filmmakers words of advice when trying to find an audience for their movies: Don’t chase virality. “M3GAN” became a meme following the release of the movie’s trailer, but Clear stressed that when marketing a project, it’s important to stay authentic.
“We were never chasing that type of attention,” he said. “People responded to the uniqueness of M3GAN and the authenticity of it, and then it took on a life of its own.”
