Underrated Horror Movies That Flopped At The Box Office

Before he was catapulted to massive worldwide success with the Lord of the Rings films, Peter Jackson was known primarily for making gory splatter comedies in his native New Zealand. One of the films that bridged the gap was the 1996 horror comedy The Frighteners. Relatively expensive compared to Jackson's prior films, The Frighteners had the bad luck to be released into theaters where it had to square off against the box-office juggernaut that was Independence Day.

Partly as a result, the film was a financial disappointment, failing to recoup its reported $26 million budget at the domestic box office - by comparison, Jackson's next project, the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, had a budget of more than $90 million and brought in over $300 million at the domestic box office. Yet, Frighteners is absolutely worth a look, for those who may have missed it. Boasting an exciting supporting cast and atmospheric filming locations, it's also a showcase for Jackson's Weta Digital effects team, which would go on to global fame with The Lord of the Rings.

With a reported budget of around $60 million, to say that Paul W. S. Anderson's “Hellraiser in space” picture underperformed at the box office is putting it mildly. Most estimates place its domestic box office at around $26 million, which is less than half its budget. Even the most ambitious figures, which suggest that Event Horizon may have raked in something like $40 million in total, still show it coming in well under what it cost to make.

And yet, Event Horizon is another of those pictures that found a real life for itself on home video, where it has become a cult hit whose anniversaries are celebrated by horror hounds and dark sci-fi fans alike. Chalk it up to a skin-crawling performance by Sam Neill and some of the wildest production design ever committed to film.

John Carpenter is one of the most beloved horror directors of all time - but he's also no stranger to undeserved flops. While The Thing may be the most dramatic turnaround in his filmography, a flick that massively underperformed at the box office and with critics, only to be reappraised as one of the greatest of all time, it's not the only one. Released in 1994, In the Mouth of Madness caps off Carpenter's unofficial “Apocalypse Trilogy,” which also includes The Thing and Prince of Darkness.

An homage to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, In the Mouth of Madness is a meditation on sanity and the nature of reality that includes plenty of mind-twisting moments and gloppy monsters. It also barely managed to earn out its modest $8 million budget at the box office, making it one of the last horror films Carpenter would direct.

In the years since her solo directorial debut, Kathryn Bigelow has gone on to become the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director and has been named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of the year in 2010. When Near Dark, a vampiric neo-Western, was first released back in 1987, however, things didn't look nearly so rosy. The film's $3 million box office was only a little over half its budget, despite mostly positive reviews at the time of its release.

Even as Bigelow's star has risen, though, so has the reputation of her debut, and these days Near Dark enjoys status as a cult favorite, thanks in part to Bigelow's serious treatment of the material, not to mention performances from popular character actors such as Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton, as the unforgettably evil vamp Severen.

It's hard to imagine these days, given the film's massive nostalgia boom, but Monster Squad was once a box-office bust. When the film was released back in 1987, it made less than $4 million against a reported budget of more than three times that. In fact, this '80s classic from Fred Dekker and Shane Black is one of the great success stories of home video, where it took on a new life and became a nostalgic favorite for countless people who grew up with it. So many, in fact, that it got a documentary feature exploring the phenomenon in 2018.

Fortunately, it also stands the test of time, thanks to its sharp dialogue, Stan Winston's special effects, and a combo of kids-on-bikes adventure with the classic Universal monsters.

To put it mildly, audiences were not prepared for Ravenous when it released in 1999. For proof, one need look no further than the film's current cult status, as compared to its meager box-office returns. A period piece set in the 1840s, the film reportedly cost some $12 million to make - and brought in roughly 1/6th of that.

Loosely adapting the story of real-life cannibal Alfred Packer and the Donner Party, Ravenous mixes in elements of the wendigo legend and what has been called a caustic satire of Manifest Destiny. It's also got a weird soundtrack you will never, ever forget, composed by Damon Albarn (of the bands Blur and the Gorillaz) and Michael Nyman (composer of the score for Jane Campion's The Piano).