Horror's 2026 So Far: Cheap Hits in One Column, Sequels Variety Could Have Skipped in the Other
Variety's running tally of 2026 horror describes a wild year, and the shape of it is a split: low-budget box office hits such as Backrooms and Obsession on one side, sequels the trade paper says the world could have lived without — Scream 7 and The Strangers – Chapter 3 — on the other. A list that puts those four titles in the same breath is making an argument about what audiences rewarded versus what they merely recognized in a poster, though Variety frames the sequel half only as a shrug, not a box office verdict, and the only numbers it offers are built into the phrase “low-budget hits.” The overall assessment is warmer than that split suggests: a year loaded with scary movies, many of them good-to-great, a welcome surprise that kept multiplexes busy. Horror keeps being the genre where a first-time idea and a franchise installment can share a marquee, and Variety's list ranks the standouts rather than sorting them by budget.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The interesting column here is the cheap one. Few genres still let a modest original sit in the same conversation as a known name, and Variety puts Backrooms and Obsession right next to the sequels.
Two different claims are being blended there: box office performance and the quality verdict. Variety's evidence for the hits is commercial; the good-to-great judgment is critical. A year can score on one and not the other.