10 Horror Movies You Didn't Realise Secretly Bombed

Budget: $3 million

Box Office: $242,623

Long, long before Peter Jackson took the reins of The Lord of the Rings, the Kiwi filmmaker directed hyper-violent and crass indies, Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles.

For his third outing, Jackson went all out, creating the goriest film ever made: Braindead. (That's not an exaggeration. The final scene alone required 300 litres of blood.) The splatterfest may have received mixed reviews upon its New Zealand premiere, but it did well enough to get released in the United States.

Now, because Braindead had no Hollywood names, and Jackson wasn't a household name at the time, it's not a surprise to learn this zom-com bombed.

But nobody expected it to fail THIS badly! When Braindead opened in the US, it brought in less than $25,000 in its first weekend. By the time it left theatres, Braindead didn't even make back one-tenth its budget.

But it's not all bad news. After LOTR was a global success, Jackson's early work experienced a resurgence, allowing a legion of movie fans to be entertained (and utterly horrified) by this gross-out horror.