5 terrifying horror movie records to influence your Halloween watch list

For this year's spooky season, GWR film consultant Stephen Follows has done a deep dive into the fascinating world of horror movies, combining research for next year's edition of Guinness World Records with the publication of his own Horror Movie Report 2.0.

Here we present our five favourite horror movie records.

Before we start, any discussion of horror movies inevitably has to begin by setting out its definition of horror, which is difficult. Whether you go on the inclusion of certain tropes and features (supernatural activity, madness, violence) or the general directorial aim of the filmmaker (fear, suspense, unease) you're always going to get some strange outliers.

The 2012 children's movie Hotel Transylvania, for example, ticks all the boxes in terms of content, but it's not what most people would call a scary movie. Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster Jaws, on the other hand, is undeniably a film that sets out to terrify and shock, but because the monster is just a big shark, you'd be hard pressed to classify it as a horror movie.

For the purposes of these records, Stephen has compared the genre tags from numerous online sources – places like IMDb, Wikipedia, Letterboxd, etc. – and gone on a broad consensus model of what constitutes horror, i.e. if people mostly agree that a film is a horror movie, then it is a horror movie.

1. First horror movie

French filmmaker George Méliès was one of the original pioneers of cinema. Working from his studio in Paris in the 1890s, he endeavoured to use the newly invented moving picture technology to tell stories and create spectacles that were otherwise impossible. He used his background in stage magic to craft simple special effects and did everything he could to bring a sense of life to his two or three-minute silent films.

However, there was only so much he could do with what was effectively a silent, black and white TikTok, filmed on a camera that was about the size of a fridge and that he couldn't move. As a result, the first horror movie, Le Manoir du Diable ("The Devil's Mansion", often given the English title The Haunted Castle) is unlikely to have struck terror into its audience when it premiered in Paris on 24 December 1896. 

In case you couldn't figure out what you just saw. That three minute spectacle involved the demon Mephistopheles going about his devilish business in a haunted house before being interrupted by a pair of musketeers. After a few supernatural hijinks, one flees leaving the other alone. Mephistopheles then terrorises the man with various devils, ghosts and witches before being driven out with the help of a convenient crucifix.

Truly the stuff of nightmares.

A little less than a year later, Méliès produced Le Château Hanté (confusingly also known as The Haunted Castle in English), which was effectively the same film again, just abridged to fit in a shorter 45-second runtime. This established another great film tradition by being the first remake.

2. Most commonly cursed object

Cursed or possessed items, whether bought at sinister antiques stores or inherited from mysterious relatives, are a well-established feature of the supernatural horror genre. In recent years the most well-known cursed object is probably Annabelle, the doll from the Conjuring series, but the history of horror cinema has seen supernatural forces channelled through clocks, cars, kitchen appliances, various items of furniture and in one notable case, a single car tyre.

Which item, you may ask, is the most cursed? What should you steer clear of when browsing a yard sale outside a haunted house? The answer is rings, particularly wedding rings. At least 188 films have been made where evil creeps into people's lives through an innocuous looking bit of jewellery. Not many of these films have been particularly big hits, but there sure are a lot of them.

The history of horror movies has seen more than twice as many haunted rings as creepy dolls, and foul cursèd tomes (old books are always cursèd, never simply cursed) are in a distant third.

The one famous cursed item that you don't need to worry about anymore is the ghost-haunted VHS tape from 1998's Ring. Given that no-one has a videocassette player anymore, Sadako is getting packed off to Goodwill without having a chance to put a death hex on anyone.

3. Most critic-proof genre

With almost every genre there is a clear relationship between a film's critical reception and its success at the box office. Put simply, films that are heaped with praise tend to make more money than films that are panned. Put much less simply, Metacritic score and box office gross have a Pearson correlation coefficient of between 0.8 and 0.9 (where 1 is a direct, one-to-one relationship, and 0 is no relationship at all). 

Horror movies are the exception to this rule. The Pearson correlation for the horror genre is just 0.17 – meaning that a well-reviewed horror film is only marginally more likely to succeed than one that critics agree is a stinker.

Why is this? Well, there are a few things going on here – one factor is that film critics don't, as a general rule, get along with horror. It has the fewest Oscar nominations of any genre (just 1.1% of all nominations), and even classics like The Exorcist got more than their fair share of criticism. (The New York Times, for example, suggested that people should only bother watching it to "marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult".) As a result, horror fans are less likely to trust reviews than fans of other genres.

However, if you compare professional critics' scores with audience ratings, you'll see that they aren't generally that different. This suggests that horror fans don't actually see brilliance where the critics see trash, it's just that they're happy to watch a film that looks like it's probably going to be awful. Horror fans are hungry for interesting and original new ideas. They will watch dozens of terrible films find that one that approaches the genre in a novel and interesting way. 

4. Most horror obsessed country

When you think of horror movies, you probably think of the USA. This is fair enough as the American film industry produces more horror movies than any other country. However, this is mostly because the USA produces the most films overall, and by quite a wide margin.

American filmmakers have produced 10,238 feature-length horror movies since the year 2000, but even this huge number represents only 17% of US film production during that period. In the same window, the small but successful Indonesian film industry has produced 433 horror movies, which account for 25.8% of the country's entire cinematic output over the last 24 years.

That makes it the most horror-focused film industry (country).

Indonesian horror draws heavily on the country's folklore, in which ghosts, curses and malevolent magical creatures have always played a prominent role. Interestingly this emphasis on the supernatural seems to be common across Southeast Asia as the countries with the second and third highest proportion of horror films (Thailand and Malaysia respectively) are also in that region.

Notable examples of the new wave of Indonesian horror include the work of director Joko Anwar, whose films Pengabdi Setan (English title: Satan's Slaves, 2017) and Perempuan Tanah Jahanam (English title: Impetigore, 2019) have attracted a cult following on streaming services. Both feature characters tormented by restless forces unleashed by the sins of earlier generations.

5. Cheapest genre

It's not as clear as the relationship between Metascore and commercial success, but there is generally a clear link between a film's budget and its box office success. With most genres, more money in equals more money out. The correlation (Pearson again) between production budget and box office gross is as high as 0.75 for genres focussed on spectacle, such as sci-fi epics and musicals. Though it's not as dramatic a difference as with critical reception, horror movies are again the outlier, with a correlation of just 0.5.

What's more, there is usually a minimum budget needed for a film to be taken seriously by audiences and critics – often in the tens of millions of dollars. Ultimately, very few people would even try to make a sci-fi epic on a shoestring budget, and even fewer would go and see it if they did. There are certain minimum expectations in terms of locations, effects and cast sizes that put those genres out of reach for indie filmmakers.

This is not the case with horror movies, which have the unique ability to transform their weaknesses into strengths. Don't have the money for special effects? Simply don't show the monster, it's scarier that way anyhow. Don't have enough money for lots of locations? Do a haunted house movie, even better, do a found-footage haunted house movie like Paranormal Activity. No money for, er, literally anything? Send some actors into the woods with camcorders and a draft script like The Blair Witch Project.

The majority of the horror movies that make it to cinemas were made on a budget of less than $20 million, which sounds like a lot, but it's classified as "mid-budget" in the film industry. Around 22% percent were made for less than $5 million, which probably compares well to the catering budgets for some Hollywood blockbusters.

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