A glut of horror films in Jan/Feb 09

What's up with all the horror films coming this and next month? There's one every weekend until mid-Feb.
We've just had The Unborn, then we've got:
My Bloddy Valentine
Underworld: Rise of the Lycan (action horror)
The Uninvited
Coraline (Gaiman fantasy horror)
And finally the Friday the 13th reboot on Friday the 13th of Feb.

It's January. They all get dumped here if they aren't done in October.

Horror tends to be very cheap to make. In box office months where the gate receipts are traditionally soft, the studios would rather benefit from a cheap horror film outperforming expectations and having a theatrical run of 30-50 million than release a larger budget 'tentpole' type film which might struggle to break even. Or which might do very well, but which surely would have done better during a time of the year when people are aggressively trying to see films in theatre.

That's it exactly, Roode. Once this streak ends, I doubt you'll have much more then seven or eight pure "horror" films between March and September. That's just how it is.

We'll still have the mid-grade studio divisions hard at work because thats what Fox Atomic, Sony Screen Gems, Dimension, etc have been designed for: to provide the parent studio with reliable cash flow so that they can affoird to gamble on the much bigger tentpole projects. The only ones genuinely pumping out horror in the 'big' months are Weinstein and Lionsgate. For those guys, these are the tentpole films for the year!

very well said Roode they just dump all the horror films in Jan and Feb because they are cheap and theres not much competition. I think all of these horror films looks really,really bad like worse than normal.