THE BEGINNING OF THE END: NETFLIX, REDBOX AND PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

At first, the summer of 2007 seemed to be a time of celebration for the Splat Pack. Box office grosses had been strong, DVD sales for titles such as the Saw movies were healthy, and the ‘It's only a Movie’ film series at the Museum of the Moving Image seemed to cement the Splat Packers as the premier horror film-makers of their time. Just as this apex of credibility was attained, however, their position began to erode. The New York premier of Roth's Hostel: Part II may have started the series off with a bang but the film fizzled at the box office when it was given wide release two days later. Grossing $8.2 million on its opening weekend, the film struggled to gross an underwhelming $17.5 million domestically during the course of its month-long cinema run, significantly less than the previous film's $47 million domestic haul. Still, some commentators observed that Hostel: Part II was technically a success because it was made on a mere $10 million budget. Critics Nathan Lee and Maitland McDonagh assured people at the ‘Considering Horror’ panel at the film series that the film ultimately would be a success; McDonagh added that Roth's film would ‘clean up on DVD’ (anon., 2007b). Nevertheless, it is difficult to wash off the taint of box office defeat which has profound discursive implications for how a film will cycle through ancillary markets.

There were other signs that the Splat Pack cycle was nearing its end. Even the commercial juggernaut of the Saw series began to slow down. That autumn's Saw IV grossed just over $63 million, which was a healthy take, but only the most optimistic in the industry could ignore that this gross was down almost $20 million from Saw III's $80 million take the previous year. This decline was also reflected on the DVD sales side, as Saw IV sold around 1.8 million copies on DVD, about a million less than Saw III's 2.8 million. As the series wore on, the numbers continued to decline. In the autumn of 2008, Saw V's box office crawled to a $56 million domestic take, and a year later, with the release of Saw VI, domestic box office went into freefall, grossing only $27 million.