By Travis Johnson
We’re in the middle of something of a resurgence in low-to-mid-budget horror, and a lot of that is down to the efforts of James Wan, who re-configured the industry’s entire approach to scaring popcorn-munchers not just once (that’d be Saw) but twice, with the one-two punch of the Insidious movies and, especially The Conjuring.
The latter in particular is now a bonafide franchise, with its first spin-off, 2014’s less-than-stellar spooky doll movie, Annabelle, getting a follow-up, to be directed by Swedish filmmaker, David F. Sandberg, who gave us the hyper-successful Lights Out.
All narrative concerns aside, what’s fascinating about these films is how insanely profitable they are. A blockbuster like Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice can pull in $872 million worldwide and be considered a moderate disappointment, Annabelle pulled in $256.9 million against a budget of $6.5 million, and Lights Out – which was based on Sandberg’s earlier short film – earned $126 million against $4.9 million.
Sandberg cites his low budget short explorations as the reason he can do so well with such limited resources, and observes that he’s not the only one. “It has happened before, like with the movie Mama, which was a Spanish short that got turned into a feature, and Fede Alvarez, who made the Evil Dead remake, also got potential from a short on YouTube. I’ve seen it happen a lot of times, so it seems like it is the best sort of calling card ever.”
That calling card earned him the attention of Wan, who produced both the feature version of Lights Out and Annabelle 2. “James had already seen the short, it was making its rounds online, and he really liked it, but didn’t know if there was enough there to make a feature out of it,” says Sandberg about Lights Out‘s journey from short to feature. “So I wrote a treatment, like this is the story I want to tell, these are the characters, and that made him come on board, he saw that there was something here. Since James has his relationship with New Line and Warner Bros., they came on board as well. So it all just worked out really well and really quickly.”
Annabelle 2, which recently wrapped filming in Los Angeles, was developed in parallel with Lights Out, meaning Sandberg found himself in the enviable position of making his first two features back to back. “Yeah, it’s strange. It’s been a year and a half since we came to this country [from Sweden] and I’m already on my second movie. But it’s like, hey, that’s what I want to do, so let’s do it, I can sleep some other time.”
Annabelle 2 hits theatres on March 19, 2017.
