The Highest-Grossing Horror Movie Remakes Of All Time

Horror movies kill at the box office, but not always for the reasons you might think. Creatures who go bump in the night don't break opening weekend records or top the all-time box office charts like movies from major brands like Marvel, DC, or Star Wars. Unlike those tentpole pictures, studios rarely invest a ton of capital into producing horror movies in the hopes of turning an even-more-massive profit. Horror movies are a triumph of economical moviemaking — or to put it more bluntly, they're cheap. 

You can make a great horror movie for less than the catering budget on an Avengers film, and still rake in a ton of money at the box office and on home video, so it's no wonder that dollar-for-dollar, two of the most profitable movies of all time are horror films. It's a pretty great formula: cheap production budget plus built-in horror audience equals profit. What could be better? Well, turns out there is one thing — horror remakes. You take everything that makes a horror film so profitable, plus you decrease your risk even further by releasing a movie based on a popular, pre-existing intellectual property. 

Hollywood Economics 101: if your franchise stops making money, just wait a few years and then remake or reboot it. It's flat-out frightening how successful some of these spooky movie remakes can be. Don't turn out the lights, because here are the highest-grossing horror movie remakes of all time.

It's named after a day of superstition, but Friday the 13th has been very fortunate at the box office. Everybody's favorite hockey mask-wearing, machete-wielding monster has earned a total of $382 million domestic and $466 million worldwide on a combined budget of $78.6 million, an average cost of $6.5 million per film for an average gross of $38 million worldwide. No wonder they made 12 of them, sending Jason to hell, space, and face to face with Freddy Krueger. The original Friday the 13th earned $39 million domestic, $59 million worldwide in 1980 on a budget of $550K. Despite two films in the franchise literally having "final" in the title — Part IV: The Final Chapter in 1984 and Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday in 1993 — Jason finally retired after the 2003 OG horror cinematic universe crossover, Freddy vs. Jason. 

But just like any unstoppable killing machine should, Jason returned again. This time it was 2009's Friday The 13th, a franchise reboot that opened to a magnificent $40 million, a boffo opening weekend that doubled its $17 million budget and signaled the potential for a $100+ million domestic run. However, 2009's Friday The 13th sunk faster than, well, Jason Voorhees in Camp Crystal Lake (sorry, not sorry), though it still earned $65 million domestically and $92 million worldwide. It has been more than a decade since the last Jason movie, and frankly we're shocked he hasn't made a comeback... yet.

Based on the satirical 1972 thriller by Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives is a different kind of horror story. There are no zombies, demonic spirits, or knife-wielding super-predators. No, the villains of this film are middle-aged dudes who crack dad jokes and cold ones, wear grass-stained, white New Balance sneakers, and discuss propane vs. charcoal grillers. In the 1975 film, a young wife and mother moves to the quaint little town of Stepford, Connecticut with her family, but is taken aback by the all-too-perfect behavior of the female residents. With their picture-perfect looks, devotion to domestic duties, and "whatever you say, dear" submissive attitudes, the wives in Stepford make the models from a 1950s coffee print ad look like Gloria Steinem. Turns out the wives are actually robots, making this story like The Handmaid's Tale meets Westworld. 

The Stepford Wives made a modest $4 million in 1975, but struck a nerve, as "Stepford Wife" is now a pop culture pejorative. The film was remade nearly 30 years later, this time as a half-comedy/half-horror hybrid, with a big budget ($90 million) and major movie stars (Nicole Kidman, Christopher Walken, Bette Midler, Glenn Close) attached. Audiences weren't any more impressed than they were in 1975. The Stepford Wives made $59 million domestic and $103 million worldwide. While The Stepford Wives bombed based on its budget, it is still technically one of the highest-grossing horror movie remakes ever.

Nothing puts butts in seats like ghosts in houses. For example: The Amityville Horror, in which a newlywed couple and their children move into a home that was the site of a grisly mass murder and are soon terrorized by demonic forces. Hopefully they got a good deal on Zillow (you just can't pass up a bargain). The 1979 original was a bona fide mega-hit, earning $86 million worldwide, about $305 million adjusted for inflation, and becoming the second highest-grossing movie of the year after Superman: The Movie (fun fact: Margot Kidder starred in both, making her one of the few actors to ever star in the two biggest hits in a single year). The series saw diminishing returns with Amityville II: The Possession in 1982 and Amityville 3-D in 1983, so the evil house was taken off the market for 22 years until its 2005 remake starring Ryan Reynolds. The haunted house flick was once again a hit, earning $65 million domestically and $109 million worldwide on an $18.5 million budget. Despite numbers like that, there wasn't a follow-up until 2017's Amityville: The Awakening, which flopped big time, making only $7 million worldwide. Talk about scary!

H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man is an 1897 novel about a scientist who creates a serum that turns him invisible, though his newfound abilities steadily drive him insane. The most famous version of the story was the 1933 film starring Claude Rains and directed by Frankenstein director James Whale. The Invisible Man has since become a staple of the Universal Pictures monster movie lineup and was one of the most influential special effects films of all time. 

While The Invisible Man's popularity may be harder to see compared to his creature contemporaries Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman, the idea of a man who goes mad after turning invisible has been a mainstay in movies ever since, from Memoirs of an Invisible Man starring Chevy Chase to Hollow Man starring Kevin Bacon. In 2020, Universal flipped the script and no longer focused on the titular invisible man, but on his victim. The Invisible Man stars Elisabeth Moss as the abused ex of a tech billionaire who is left his fortune — but begins to suspect her husband didn't die, but simply vanished, literally, and is now tormenting her. Audiences dug this fresh take on an old classic as The Invisible Man opened to $28 million, four times its $7 million budget. With a box office cume that stands at more than $60 million domestic and $100 million worldwide, The Invisible Man represents a bold new vision for classic Universal horror.

After the record-breaking results of The Exorcist in 1973, Hollywood figured that if the devil was big business at the box office, his son must be too. Hence The Omen, a 1976 psychological horror film that managed to snag major movie stars Gregory Peck and Lee Remick to play a diplomat and his wife who accidentally adopt Satan's son. Surely you can return a kid in that situation, right? Heads roll, literally, as different supporting characters try to stop the lil' devil, meeting outlandishly grisly fates straight out of a Final Destination film. The original The Omen earned $48 million in 1976 on a $2.8 million budget, making it one of the ten biggest hits of the year. Its two sequels — Damien: Omen II in 1978 and Omen III: The Final Conflict in 1981 — saw diminishing returns, but the series did something that horror movie franchises typically don't do — it stayed dead! For a while, anyway. Thirty years after the original, The Omen returned on June 6, 2006, or 6-6-06, leaving us to wonder if they made the movie solely to capitalize on that release date. The Omen earned $65 million domestically and $119 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. A movie that profitable usually launches a new series, but Satan's son never got another sequel, so maybe the devil truly was in the details.

Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House was a landmark in horror because it didn't rely on typical terror tropes, but instead focused on the psychology of its complicated characters. Her book has inspired two films, a play, and a Netflix TV series, each version taking numerous liberties with the story. The first was The Haunting, released in 1963, and directed by Robert Wise, a journeyman director most famous for The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music. It was a modest success, but wasn't nearly as profitable as Wise's biggest hits. Fast forward 36 years later to 1999. Jan De Bont, a few years removed from Speed and Twister, convinced Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta Jones, and Owen Wilson to make a haunted house movie loosely based on Jackson's novel. With A-list talent like that, plus top-notch special effects, The Haunting's budget ballooned up to $80 million, roughly $124 million in today's dollars. It made back its budget, but barely, earning $91 million domestically and $177 million worldwide, a thin profit margin that spooked studios away from spending that much on a CG-heavy ghost story. The Haunting of Hill House was remade again in 2018, this time for Netflix. While the streamer doesn't release budgets or ratings, the show got huge buzz and will be getting a sequel, so we'd say it was pretty successful.

Based on the 1897 novel by Bram Stoker, Dracula has been a motion picture mainstay for decades. Much like Frankenstein, the Count's big screen appearances are all but impossible to count, with so many sequels, spinoffs, remakes and ripoffs it'll drive you batty. Dracula was first committed to film in the copyright-infringing 1922 silent German expressionist film, Nosferatu. The most famous version arrived nine years later in 1931's Dracula, the Bela Lugosi film that launched the Universal horror series and established our shared pop cultural perception of the most famous vampire. 

While iconic, this version of the character was a far cry from Stoker's original, and became a victim of its own success. The Universal Dracula had been parodied by everything from breakfast cereals to Sesame Street, so much so it has ceased to strike fear in viewer's minds. Francis Ford Coppola sought to change that and showed off how authentic his film was by titling it Bram Stoker's Dracula. Of course, this version took liberties too, and Bram Stoker's Dracula wound up looking more like Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. While the film is best remembered for Keanu Reeves being woefully miscast as a British barrister Jonathan Harker, it was a huge hit in 1992. Bram Stoker's Dracula opened to $30 million, earning $82 million domestically and $215 worldwide on a $40 million budget. While Reeves' performance bites, this vampire flick's box office results definitely do not suck.