Inside the terrifying, risky world of making indie horror movies

Shannon Hanmer still remembers the first scary movie she saw in a theatre — the R-rated teen vampire thriller The Lost Boys starring Kiefer Sutherland as the blood-thirsty villain.

She was four years old. 

"My mom thought it was about Peter Pan," she said. Instead, a young Hanmer watched in horror as the 1987 film served up gruesome scenes of vampires plunging their teeth into victims and clashing with slayers wielding wooden stakes.

She was hooked. 

"The visceral feeling I felt walking away from that stayed with me for a long time," said Hanmer, who grew up in Dundas, Ont.

She later turned that love of feeling terrified into a career as an independent filmmaker. The latest project she produced, In a Violent Nature, is part of a recent wave of low-budget horror movies attracting surprisingly big box office returns for a genre where successes are fleeting and potentially short-lived.

Terrifier 3 — an unrated slasher starring a maniacal axe-wielding clown — has become an unlikely star of the Halloween season, while the serial killer movie Longlegs is one of the highest-grossing horror films of the year so far.

Longtime fans of the genre — including Hanmer — are delighted to see murderous monsters enjoying broader mainstream acceptance. But after more than 10 years in the business, she has learned that horror movies rarely make a killing.

Even as her own career has changed for the better, Hanmer said she's clear-eyed about the sobering fact that making nightmare-inspiring movies can itself be risky and scary. Some of her peers don't know where their financing is coming from next year. Others are leaving the industry altogether.

"That's why we feel lucky," she said with relief, noting that when she and her team make their next couple of films, they'll have people and money behind them. "And that's something that we've never felt."

In a Violent Nature earned about $4.2 million US at the box office worldwide, an unexpectedly high return for a film that cost less than $1 million to make, Hanmer said.

Other indie horrors have done far better this year. Terrifier 3 has grossed more than $50 million US so far, according to movie data site The Numbers, an impressive feat given the film's reported production budget of just $2 million.

Longlegs, starring Nicolas Cage and shot in Vancouver, had a reported budget of just under $10 million, but has grossed well over $100 million in theatres internationally.

But these breakouts are generally the exceptions, not the rule.