Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie - Hardcover

Collis, Clark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1948221357 ISBN 13: 9781948221351

Publisher: 1984 Publishing, 2025

Synopsis

LIMITED DELUXE EDITION (first 5,000 copies worldwide) has black foil gilded page edges, textured cover spot varnish, and is printed on heavyweight paper stock. As featured in People, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, The Economist, Empire, Sight and Sound, Deadline, New York Post, Fangoria, and more!

Blockbuster box office. Critical acclaim and Oscars recognition. From Get Out and Weapons to The Substance and Sinners, the horror genre is enjoying a glorious–and gory–golden age.

Screaming and Conjuring details the films and frights that led to this extraordinary renaissance, from the release of the groundbreaking Scream in 1996 to the arrival of 2013’s The Conjuring, which spawned a multi-billion dollar franchise. Written by entertainment journalist Clark Collis (author of You’ve Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life), this exhaustively researched book is the first in-depth examination of a remarkably fertile and influential time for big screen horror.

Wes Craven’s Scream was followed by a flood of classic terror tales such as The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, Final Destination, The Others, Pan's Labyrinth, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Saw, Hostel, Paranormal Activity, and Insidious. This comprehensive history covers the often difficult and tortuous making of all these films (and many more), giving readers the exclusive lowdown on productions which were often as intense as the horrifying sights that ended up on screen.

Screaming and Conjuring features recollections from a host of genre icons, including actors Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) and Neve Campbell (Scream), directors Eli Roth (Hostel) and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Drag Me to Hell), and legendary makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero (The Mist, The Walking Dead). The book also includes 200 production stills, film posters, and rarely seen images.

About this title

About the Author

CLARK COLLIS is a British entertainment journalist who has contributed to The Guardian, Empire, Q, Mojo, and Entertainment Weekly, where he was a senior writer for 18 years. He gew up in Wells. Somerset, and studied history at Cambridge University. He is the author of the 2021 book You've Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life and 2025's Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

Don Coscarelli is a filmmaker famous in the horror community for his often-terrifying movies and routinely amiable nature. While only in his mid-twenties, Coscarelli wrote and directed 1979’s independently financed Phantasm, about an otherworldly undertaker who goes about his evil business with help from a lethal flying sphere. The film was a franchise-inaugurating hit which so impressed a young J. J. Abrams that the director later referenced the movie by giving the name Captain Phasma to Gwendoline Christie’s character in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. More than two decades after making Phantasm, Coscarelli directed 2002’s Bubba Ho-Tep. Another low-budget movie, the horror-comedy starred Bruce Campbell as a mummy-battling Elvis Presley and, like Phantasm, would go on to be hailed by horror fans as a cult classic. A few years later, Coscarelli confirmed his reputation as a maestro of the genre by directing the first episode of the horror anthology TV show Masters of Horror, “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road.”

Coscarelli tends to recall his professional setbacks and battles with a smile. Even so, when the filmmaker spoke over Zoom for this book, his mood darkened as he talked about the state of his career, and of the horror genre as a whole, during the early 1990s. The director illustrated the parlous state of the horror movie at that time by relating what he described as a “funny story,” although the humorous nature of the anecdote would only have become apparent retrospectively.

After directing 1989’s wilderness-set adventure-thriller Survival Quest, Coscarelli thought he had found his next film when he read the horror novel Dead in the West. The book was written by prolific Texan author Joe R. Lansdale, whose many tales include the stories that Coscarelli would later adapt for Bubba Ho-Tep and his Masters of Horror episode. “I seized on Dead in the West, which is sort of a Clint Eastwood western with zombies, okay?” said Coscarelli. “It’s a great book; it would make a great movie.”

In search of finance, the director approached New Line Cinema. This independent studio had enjoyed so much success with 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels that New Line was nicknamed ‘The House that Freddy Built,’ a reference to the franchise’s supernatural killer, Freddy Krueger. Surely, Coscarelli thought, the company would see the potential in the project. “I distinctly remember sending it over to New Line, which had made all this money off of the Freddy stuff,” said Coscarelli. “I can remember getting a call back from the New Line guy and he goes, ‘Don, this is a zombie movie. We would never make a zombie movie.’ Of course, this was before the rise of the zombie stuff. You couldn’t sell a zombie film back then. I literally took the script, and every time the ‘z’ word was in it, I changed it to ‘creature’.” The director was still unable to secure financing. “It was a tough period,” he concluded. “I was in the wastelands from ’91 to ’95.”

Coscarelli is not alone in looking back at the period as a rough one for horror movies. Although some significant genre films were released during the early ’90s, including 1992’s Tony Todd-starring Candyman and the same year’s Francis Ford Coppola-directed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there is no doubt that the genre had reached something of a nadir, with even hardcore fans wearying of being served sequels from fading franchises and other cash-grab releases. As Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson explained to me, “We were going through that era where people were just throwing five dollars at a movie, making a horror film, getting a return on their investment, and moving on. No one cared about quality.”

Several decades on, however, the horror genre is in unarguably robust health. As I write this introduction in the spring of 2025, horror movie fans can look back at a remarkably fecund period. The list of notable genre movies released over the last 12 months alone boasts Longlegs, Heretic, Alien: Romulus, A Quiet Place: Day One, Late Night with the Devil, The First Omen, Strange Darling, Abigail, V/H/S Beyond, Immaculate, Smile 2, Sting, Cuckoo, Oddity, Terrifier 3, The Substance, MaXXXine, the English-language remake of Speak No Evil, I Saw the TV Glow, Blink Twice, In a Violent Nature, Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime, the South Korean film Exhuma, Nosferatu, Wolf Man, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, The Dead Thing, Heart Eyes, and Stephen King adaptation The Monkey. Filmmaker Michael Dougherty is a lifelong fan of the genre who directed the beloved 2009 horror anthology Trick ’r Treat as well as the 2019 blockbuster Godzilla: King of the Monsters. When I spoke with him in the summer of 2024, Dougherty admitted to feeling a little daunted by the sheer quantity of new horror movies being released. “It’s almost so overwhelming that I can’t keep up,” the director said. “It’s a golden age, but it’s kind of what you make it, right? Between streaming and theatrical, it’s up to you to pick and choose and navigate your way through all these different horror films.”

At a time when entertainment industry experts are expressing fears about the future of the big-screen experience on a seemingly daily basis, the horror genre is a reliable generator of profits for cinemas, outperforming expectations again and again. When The Hollywood Reporter revealed in March 2022 that filmmaker Fede Álvarez was set to direct a new movie in the Alien series for 20th Century Studios, the article noted that the project was “intended to be made for Hulu as part of 20th Century’s ambitions to make more than 10 movies a year for the Disney-operated streaming service.” The studio later changed tack and released Álvarez’s film, Alien: Romulus, to cinemas in the late summer of 2024. The movie was a worldwide theatrical hit, earning $105 million at the US box office and another $245 million internationally.

The Substance, too, endured a circuitous route to the screen. French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s movie stars Demi Moore as a middle-aged celebrity whose attempt to recapture the physical attributes of youth results in grotesque disaster. The film was produced by the UK-based Working Title, but their parent company, Universal Pictures, decided not to distribute Fargeat’s body-horror story. The Substance was instead put into cinemas by streaming service MUBI and went on to become a critical and commercial hit. The film earned $77 million worldwide and was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Picture, Actress, Director, Original Screenplay, and Makeup and Hairstyling. Although the film would win just the latter trophy, Moore’s defeat in the Best Actress race by Anora star Mikey Madison still represented a victory for horror. Madison’s handful of previous significant film roles included playing a murderer in 2022’s Scream, the fifth film in the slasher series. The actress became the first of the franchise’s ‘Ghostface’ killers to win an Oscar.

Terrifier 3 is yet another 2024 horror movie that confounded expectations, this one spectacularly so. Director Damien Leone’s gruesome and unrated slasher movie, starring David Howard Thornton as the homicidal Art the Clown, cost just $2 million to make. When the boutique entertainment company Cineverse released the film in the US a couple of weeks before Halloween, Leone’s movie replaced the much-hyped and much more expensive superhero sequel Joker: Folie à Deux as the biggest film in the country, with weekend earnings in excess of $18 million. “David beat Goliath,” Cineverse CEO Chris McGurk told media outlet The Wrap on the Sunday following the release of Terrifier 3. “Even if we had just made $5 million, we would have had a home run. $10 million would be the grand slam of grand slams. But to actually do over $18 million and to win the weekend amongst all those studio tentpoles is just really unbelievable.” Terrifier 3 would ultimately gross $53 million at the domestic box office alone.

In December 2024, Time posted an article about the following year’s “most anticipated movies.” Of the 41 films written up by the outlet’s Ben Rosenstock, an impressive ten were horror movies. Several of those projects were the work of acclaimed directors, with Black Panther filmmaker Ryan Coogler releasing his first genre movie Sinners, Guillermo del Toro delivering his long-in-the-works version of Frankenstein, and del Toro’s fellow Best Director Oscar-winner Danny Boyle overseeing franchise reboot 28 Years Later, the first in a planned new trilogy for the rage-virus series.

The business model of movie studios is now firmly centered around big-budget productions based on globally recognized intellectual properties. From Inside Out 2 to Deadpool & Wolverine, nearly all of 2024’s biggest box office successes were franchise continuations. Horror movies tend to be relatively cheap to make, and the genre is one of the few remaining ways filmmakers can tell fresh, even personal, stories and still stand a chance of securing a significant theatrical release. Although many recent horror hits have been entries in established franchises, the genre also produced an array of original movies, often from fresh talents like In a Violent Nature director Chris Nash and I Saw the TV Glow filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun. “I love the splattery horror movies, I love the Sam Raimi movies that almost feel like comedies, but I also love the serious horror movies that are subtle and artful,” says Schoenbrun. “I always sort of joke that David Lynch and David Cronenberg were my two dads. I Saw the TV Glow is very much threading the needle between coming-of-age, and horror, and a really personal investigation of a queer sense of self.”

Screaming and Conjuring tracks the roots and early years of this extraordinary renaissance, starting with the release of the ground-breaking and influential Scream in 1996 and concluding with the arrival of 2013’s The Conjuring, which spawned the horror genre’s most successful franchise of all time. The 17-year period between the theatrical debuts of these two movies found audiences enjoying an incredible volume and variety of films. Many would be recognized, either when released or later, as horror classics, with the likes of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Others, The Strangers, The Descent, Sinister, The Mist, Jennifer’s Body, and Michael Dougherty’s Trick ’r Treat now firmly established in the upper reaches of the horror canon. Several of the era’s films, including 28 Days Later, Saw, The Ring, Hostel, Resident Evil, and Final Destination, would birth franchises, a large number of which are going concerns today.

The period would see different types of horror films going in and out of vogue. The wave of slashers populated by TV stars that followed the release of Scream would cede ground to a craze for remakes and for more visceral and violent tougher material, so-called “torture porn.” Don Coscarelli never got to adapt Dead in the West—at least not yet—but through the 2000s, zombies were stumbling about, or running like Olympic sprinters, in films like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake and Shaun of the Dead, as well as The Walking Dead, the hugely popular TV show developed by The Mist director Frank Darabont. Supernatural tales proved similarly popular, with the success of 2009’s Paranormal Activity ushering in a wave of ghost stories like Insidious and, ultimately, The Conjuring.

Horror fans would be introduced to new onscreen genre icons, from Neve Campbell to Tobin Bell to Conjuring stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, as well as thrilling to performances from familiar favorites like Robert Englund, Kane Hodder, and Barbara Crampton. The genre would also act as a launchpad for future A-list talent like Rachel Weisz, Vin Diesel, Christian Bale, Naomi Watts, Dwayne Johnson, and Cillian Murphy.

While established filmmakers such as Coscarelli, Wes Craven, Sam Raimi, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, and Mick Garris continued to work in the genre, such horror luminaries were joined by a new group of creatives, which included Kevin Williamson, James Wan, Leigh Whannell, James Gunn, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, Diablo Cody, and Scott Derrickson. Many of these younger talents would leave horror—if only temporarily—to become architects of much more lavishly budgeted ventures, helping to build an industry reliant on superheroes and other IP, for better or worse.

Gremlins and Piranha filmmaker Joe Dante once told me that “the horror movie is inherently a political genre.” That statement was proved in the years following the release of Scream, as writers and directors were affected by, and dealt with, current events. Some incidents, like the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, would have a cooling effect on horror as politicians scrambled to apportion blame for the tragedy and found an easy scapegoat in the entertainment industry. Other events, such as the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the Bush administration’s subsequent War on Terror, would inspire filmmakers working in horror as much as, if not more than, those creating in other genres.

More than ever, horror would show itself to be a community, one linked by multitudinous bonds. Directors, writers, producers, and special effects artists inspired each other to achieve greater artistic heights. Filmmakers worked together on projects and recommended collaborators to their peers. Sometimes, iconic genre directors would even meet up en masse to complain, commiserate, and make plans over burgers and drinks. The story of the era is also the tale of the companies who made it their business to make a business from terror, such as New Line, Dimension Films, Lionsgate, Screen Gems, and Blumhouse.

Screaming and Conjuring is told from the perspective of the American film business, but that industry was greatly influenced by what was happening in the genre abroad. Filmmakers in the US watched, and were inspired by, the movies coming out of the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, France, Spain, and elsewhere at the same time that producers were hiring foreign filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Alexandre Aja, and Andy Muschietti.

The post-Scream period would set the table for the era that followed. Filmmakers who established themselves in Ghostface’s wake have continued to unleash new terrors. They have been joined by other auteurs like Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Julia Ducournau, who have all benefited from, and further enriched, a thriving horror scene.

Screaming and Conjuring is a love letter to the genre and to the artists who overcame often seemingly insurmountable odds to bring their visions to the screen. Hopefully, it is also a love letter for fans of the genre—of which I am most definitely one—who have kept their faith with the notion that there are few things more fun than having the hell scared out of you by a movie. As Adam Green, director of the 2007 slasher film Hatchet, told me, “Doing horror conventions, you get to travel all over the place, and all of a sudden there’s a line of people that want to tell you stories. ‘This was the last movie I watched with my dad before they died.’ ‘This was our first date.’ Whatever it might be. All of a sudden, the industry bullshit, it just becomes noise, because you look people in the eyes, and shake their hands, and [they] care so much about what it is you do. Not a lot of genres are like that. I highly doubt romantic comedy fans give a shit about the filmmakers. I’m very lucky to have these people in my life. I know everybody thinks they have the best fans. I have the best fans.”

Edition details

• Publisher: 1984 Publishing
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1948221357
• ISBN 13: 9781948221351
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 504