Horror returns to make a killing

As America's preeminent zombie auteur, George Romero is no stranger to death in its various guises. The writer-director responsible for the groundbreaking "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) and "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) shook up the horror genre, making low-budget popcorn movies with a recurrent plotline: The deceased return en masse from the grave, the living fight them, havoc ensues.

But in fall 2001, when it came time for Romero to sell his new script, "Land of the Dead," he, along with the rest of the country, faced a grim reality. "I sent the first draft out a few days before 9/11," said Romero. "And then I got all the expected responses."

In the wake of the national tragedy, his script was DOA. "Everybody wanted to make the warm, fuzzy movies," the director recalled.

Since then, the public's appetite for "comfort movies" has proved to be enormous. But what cultural pundits and industry analysts grossly misjudged was the kind of escapist fare audiences would also want: a good scare.

"You'd think they'd just want to go to the theater and laugh," said Mark Canton, CEO of Atmosphere Entertainment, a production company. "But human nature is such that you don't turn away from the horrific images you see on TV. You go to the theater to be scared with a bunch of people around you. You go to get a release."

In the last few years, the increasingly diverse horror genre has shed much of its guilty-pleasure status and infiltrated the mainstream with unstoppable, zombie-like momentum. Midnight movies shot on minuscule budgets regularly haul in huge box office receipts along with a surprisingly large female audience and have become Hollywood's flavor of the month. Accord- ingly, all of the major studios (as well as their genre divisions and independent film distributors) have placed at least one horror film -- or, in the case of Universal, four, and Screen Gems and Lions Gate Films, five -- on their upcoming slates.

"It's effective and economical," said Walter Parkes, producer of the 2002 horror hit "The Ring" and head of DreamWorks' motion picture division.

To hear movie marketing mandarins tell it, the genre's popularity seldom relies on costly star power or brand-name directors, and the films reliably generate powerful word-of-mouth buzz with minimal overhead.

"At a time when big-budget movies are carrying absurdly high break-even numbers, a good scare elicits a visceral reaction in a moviegoer that doesn't require hundreds of thousands of dollars in special effects," Parkes added.