20 Hit Horror Movies NOBODY Saw Coming

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.