The weeks leading up to Halloween are the most popular time of the year for horror movies, so it was only natural that I would choose one for this week’s Yesterday’s Hits column. But which one? Horror is a popular and relatively profitable genre, in large part because horror movies are generally not too expensive to produce, making it easy for them to turn a profit. Yet there are surprisingly few flat-out blockbusters in the genre. Since 1939, only four movies that might be labeled “horror” have placed among the top five box office hits of their respective years. Two of these were Psycho and Jaws, both of which remain classics not merely of the genre, but of cinema in general. And I wrote about the most recent of the bunch, The Sixth Sense, back in June.
This leaves only The Exorcist. But while William Friedkin’s film has been endlessly parodied over the years, it remains one of the most-watched horror movies of all time, a perennial Halloween favorite. In other words, it’s not what I normally look for in my Yesterday’s Hits selections. So, for the obvious reasons, I’ll be skipping over my usual question of what happened to The Exorcist’s popularity because, well, it never really went away.
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