Horror Hits Historic Box Office Low For The Third Time In Three Weeks

Published Oct 19, 2026, 12:45 PM EDT

Brennan Klein (he/him) is a senior news writer at Screen Rant, host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast, and contributor at Alternate Ending and Horror Press. He has been writing and podcasting about pop culture (especially horror movies) for over a decade at platforms including Blumhouse, Fangoria, Dread Central, The Backlot, and Arrow in the Head.

Crawlers is continuing an unfortunate trend for 2026 horror movies this Halloween season.

The latest October horror movie of 2026 was directed by Angel Gómez Hernández (Don't Listen) and stars Revenge's Matilda Lutz as an apartment manager who tries to save herself and her tenants when the apartment is quarantined amid an infestation of deadly spiders. Crawlers, which also stars Melina Matthews (Olympo), William Miller (Warrior Nun), and Gregg Sulkin (Wizards of Waverly Place), ​​​​​​​debuted at the domestic box office on October 16, just one week after the Jessica Chastain horror movie Other Mommy took No. 1 with Blumhouse's best opening weekend of the year.

Per Box Office Mojo, Crawlers was unable to match the solid debut of Other Mommy, earning a 3-day total of $468,457 that saw it premiering at No. 18 on the domestic chart for the weekend. While it was playing in just 1,037 theaters (significantly fewer than Other Mommy's 3,365), it was surpassed by movies playing on far fewer screens, including Ken Russell's The Devils (No. 12 with $1.6 million in 350 theaters) and the Indian action-comedy Jailer 2 (No. 9 with $3.3 million in 420 theaters). This is because the movie had a particularly low per-screen average of $451.

This total has officially landed Crawlers at No. 163 on Box Office Mojo's all-time chart of the worst debut per-screen averages of all time. This marks the third time in three weeks that a new horror movie has landed on the Top 200 chart. The first was the found footage movie The Influencer Project (which was produced by The Blair Witch Project's Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sánchez), which debuted on October 2 with a per-screen average of $376 that landed it at No. 136.

That was followed into theaters on October 9 by the giant snake thriller Beware Boiúna, which landed at No. 180 with a per-screen average of $491. While Boiúna narrowly managed to escape this fate, Crawlers has officially landed on the chart of the Top 10 worst debut per-screen averages for non-re-release 2026 movies. Below, see a breakdown of every non-re-release 2026 movie so far that has debuted in the Top 200 and where they land on the overall chart:

Rank	Title	PSA
#17	The Stunt Driver	$127
#24	Charlie Harper	$169
#31	Buffalo Kids	$203
#81	Infinite Icon: A Visual Memoir	$295
#90	Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass	$311
#91	Night Patrol	$312
#136	The Influencer Project	$376
#146	Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments: Sting of Death	$407
#163	Crawlers	$451
#178	Desert Warrior	$483
#180	Beware Boiúna	$491
#188	Rolling Loud: The Movie	$509

As Crawlers and its two predecessors have proven, the Halloween season is not giving a boost to all horror movies equally. While Other Mommy managed to overcome a dismal 17% Rotten Tomatoes score (worse than Crawlers at 55%, Boiúna at 58%, and Influencer Project at 47%) to earn a debut per-screen average of $8,263, it is one of just two major horror successes of this year's Halloween season.

The other win for the genre this year was, by an inestimable margin, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, which debuted with a $16,328 average, grossed more than $350 million worldwide, and became the highest-grossing movie in the Resident Evil franchise as well as the highest-grossing entry in Cregger's filmography.

Choose the movie with the higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

It ultimately remains to be seen how Crawlers performs in the long-term on video and demand and streaming, where it could make up for any financial deficits depending on its budget level (which has not been officially announced). However, it seems unlikely to make a major splash in theaters, considering the precedent set by The Influencer Project (which has legged out to a $476,763 total) and Beware Boiúna (which has so far earned $924,608 worldwide).

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Cast

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  Matilda Lutz

  Serena

• 

  Paul S. Tracey

  Paul

• Andrea Scott Méndez

  Molly

• Gary Anthony Stennette

  Dr. Woodward