Highest-grossing horror movies of all time - by special request

You can tell just from the name of this blog that I'm a big horror movie fan, which is why I've been trying to defend certain titles and filmmakers against mainstream disdain - even though horror is almost by definition an outsider phenomenon, beyond the pale of what a mainstream audience typically wants out of a movie. But of course there are exceptions. This is a list of the highest-grossing horror movies of all time, adjusted for inflation:

1. Jaws
2. The Exorcist
3. The Sixth Sense
4. Psycho
5. Gremlins
6. Jaws 2
7. House of Wax (1953)
8. The Amityville Horror (1979)
9. Alien
10. The Silence of the Lambs
11. Hannibal
12. What Lies Beneath
13. The Omen (1976)
14. The Blair Witch Project
15. Interview with the Vampire
16. Poltergeist
17. Scream
18. Seven
19. The Ring
20. Scream 2
(revised - 21. Halloween
22. Bram Stoker's Dracula
23. Sleepy Hollow)

These rankings are adapted from a list off of Hollywood.com, which for some reason included action/horror hybrids like The Mummy(1999) and Van Helsing, but not Gremlins or the two Hannibal Lecter movies, which I feel are a better fit. But this kind of genre slipperiness is to be expected, because in order for a horror movie to make a lot of money, it probably has to be more than just scary (half of these movies have happy endings), and so at the top of the list are dramas like The Sixth Sense and adventure movies like Jaws. I could have also included Jurassic Park or Signs or hell, Fatal Attraction, but they didn't feel right. Also, I think the Hollywood.com list is incomplete - I'm pretty sure that Psycho, adjusted for inflation, should show up here, as well as the likes of Rosemary's Baby, The Birds, or even the original Universal Dracula or Frankenstein.

I've been wanting to write up a list of what I think are the 50 best horror movies of all time and make it a running series on this blog (I need to see some more Asian horror classics before I feel right in doing that) but for now I'll say that nine of these movies would definitely be on that list - Jaws, Exorcist, Gremlins, Alien, Blair Witch, Seven, Halloween, Silence of the Lambs, and The Ring.

Highest-grossing horror movies

These are the 20 highest-grossing horror movies of the last five years:

The Ring (2002): $129.1m
The Village (2004): $114.2m
The Grudge (2004): $110.4m
Red Dragon (2002): $92.1m
Saw II (2005): $87.0m
Freddy vs. Jason (2003): $82.6m
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003): $80.6m
Saw III (2006): $80.2m
The Ring Two (2005): $76.2m
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005): $75.1m
The Amityville Horror (2005): $65.2m
Gothika (2003): $59.7m
Dawn of the Dead (2004): $59.0m
1408 (2007): $58.8m (so far)
White Noise (2005): $56.4m
Saw (2004): $55.2m
The Omen (2006): $54.6m
Final Destination 3 (2006): $54.1m
Hide and Seek (2005): $51.1m
The Skeleton Key (2005): $47.9m

I'm not counting sci-fi terror tales like Signs or War of the Worlds or action/horror hybrids like Resident Evil or Ghost Rider. What this means is that the most popular horror movies are ghost stories (7 titles) followed by slashers (3), gore movies (3), devil/possession movies (2), and the rest (zombies, voodoo, monsters in the woods, etc.)

In other words: there is no epidemic of torture movies plaguing theaters, despite what the lazy bluenoses would have everyone think.

(Oh yeah, and I would only call six of these twenty good movies - numbers 1, 3, 6, 13, 14, and 18.)