Horror
In 1931 Universal released Dracula and Frankenstein in the same year, and both landed. What the studio discovered was that audiences will pay to be frightened. Fear was not something to avoid; it was something people came to buy. The era of castles and monsters ran for a while, and then in 1960 Hitchcock moved the address. The monster was not in a castle in a distant country but in a motel off the road — and it had a human face. The frightening thing moved in next door.
The way that film was made was unusual too. Hitchcock used the crew from his own television programme and shot it in thirty days. Black and white was mostly a matter of cost. He gave up his $250,000 director's fee for 60% of the gross, and ended up with more than $15 million. And it changed the audience as well: cinemas put up signs saying no one would be admitted once the film had begun, set out a life-size cutout of him, and even posted guards. The lead character is killed in the first act, and latecomers would have been lost. The now-ordinary rule that you cannot walk in after the start is traced back to this.
Night of the Living Dead, in 1968, fell into the public domain for a reason this map has told elsewhere: the title was changed shortly before release, and the copyright notice was left off the new title card. It is the same layer of story as Chaplin's The Gold Rush losing its rights through a lapsed renewal. Not whether a film is good — whether one piece of paperwork was done. Romero said later that the film gave them their careers, and has also said that having no copyright let more people see it and kept the film alive. A mistake ended up giving the work a longer life.
The fastest way into this node may be the numbers. Halloween cost about $300,000 and took $70 million. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: $140,000 to $30.9 million. The Blair Witch Project was shot for around $60,000 and took about $248 million — Guinness recognises the ratio, $10,931 returned for every dollar spent. Paranormal Activity was shot for $15,000 and took $193 million. The sums differ, but the same shape keeps repeating. That is probably why horror stays the busiest band on this map. It is the cheapest thing to make and the likeliest to land. So this is where new people come in.
In 1973 The Exorcist became the first horror film nominated for Best Picture — ten nominations, two wins.