Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, which ought to be the horror business’s favourite weekend since records began. Instead, the major studios have left the cupboard bare. Box-office forecaster Todd Thatcher’s preview of the US box office for 30th October to 1st November sums it up: “there are no significant wide releases other than Christmas at the Kringles.” Yes, the one big new film opening on Halloween weekend is a Christmas film. Somewhere a jack-o’-lantern is quietly weeping into its candle.
The only new horror in wide release is the horror-comedy Briarcliff, on roughly 1,800 screens, which Thatcher expects to take “maybe $2 to $2.5 million” and miss the top five altogether. His predicted chart has DC’s Clayface holding on at the top with $13.5 million, ahead of You Can See Everything ($12.9 million), Laika’s Wildwood ($8 million), the Olivia Colman folk-horror Wicker and Street Fighter (about $4 million each). All of those are holdovers. These are forecasts, of course, and audiences have a habit of making forecasters look silly.
Arachnophobes should look away now, though you’d have been in no danger of bumping into Crawlers anyway. Roadside Attractions’ spider chiller, directed by Ángel Gómez Hernández and starring Matilda Lutz, put an apartment block into lockdown during an infestation of venomous spiders and opened wide on 16th October across 1,040 cinemas. It took $462,691, an average of $445 a screen, according to The Numbers. A week later it was down to 117 screens and $35,730, a drop of 92%. Worldwide it has made just under a million dollars, which, divided by the number of spiders on screen, may not cover the catering. Screen Rant has gone further, with a headline declaring that horror has hit a historic box-office low for the third time in three weeks, although the San Francisco Chronicle is running the exact opposite headline: that 2026’s horror boom “is bigger than Halloween”.
Both, in their way, are right. The studios spread their scares through September and October this year, so Blumhouse’s Other Mommy has already reached $51 million in three weeks, and the cheap and cheerful horrors have mostly made their money and gone. What’s left for the big night itself is a gap where the horror slate used to be, and the streamers are cheerfully filling it. Netflix’s chart this week is wall-to-wall horror, with Below at No. 1 for a third week, MGM+’s From arriving at No. 7 and the film Primate on the movie list.
Which leaves horror fans facing a familiar dilemma on Saturday night: a trip to the cinema to see a well-reviewed film that came out a fortnight ago, or the sofa, the remote and a bowl of sweets meant for trick-or-treaters. We know which one the sweets are betting on.
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