20 Hit Horror Movies NOBODY Saw Coming
These horror hits came totally outta NOWHERE.
Horror has proven itself to be the most commercially reliable of all film genres for decades, and it's certainly enjoying one hell of a particular boom period right now.
The genre has consistently proven itself a gateway for talented filmmakers to make their mark without huge budgets or A-list stars, because horror fans are an enthusiastic bunch who simply want to see fun, interesting, and scary stories told.
Even so, every so often a horror film comes along that totally blows past expectations at the box office, enjoying mind-boggling levels of success which can only scarcely be believed.
And that's absolutely true of these 20 horror movies, each of which wildly overperformed even the most optimistic of expectations.
Every single one of these films could've easily flopped at the box office and only been discovered later on home video, but each managed to unexpectedly catch on with horror fans in numbers nobody anticipated.
By the end of their run, these horror movies all grossed many, many times their production budgets, and in some cases even birthed a most unexpected franchise...
20. The Visit
In 2015, M. Night Shyamalan was coming off a generational run of flops - a full decade's worth of divisive if not downright terrible films, from Lady in the Water to The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth.
The latter two movies, big budget misfires that they were, seemingly ended Shyamalan's blockbuster tenure, and so when he returned in 2015 with a $5 million found-footage film he funded himself, it was impossible to expect much good from it.
After being rejected from every studio in town who viewed a rough cut of The Visit, Shyamalan re-edited it and finally secured a release with Universal, and even accepting the film's low-budget nature, few saw this making much of a dent.
But quite a dent it did make, receiving broadly positive reviews and grossing $98.5 million globally, which at the time represented the biggest budget-to-profit ratio of any Shyamalan film, until he topped it with Split the very next year.
Needless to say, The Visit was considered a refreshingly low-fi return to form for the filmmaker after a decade on the critical and commercial skids.