Although action horror might be making a comeback soon, it has been 27 years since the arrival of one blockbuster heralded the genre’s golden age. While Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a lot of gory, scary fun, the R-rated, brutal Blumhouse reboot of The Mummy franchise proves once and for all that the series has moved on from the playful, action-oriented storytelling of earlier movies in the series. 27 years ago, Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy movies ushered in a horror genre trend that lasted for half a decade.
One Stephen Sommers-directed action horror blockbuster, The Mummy, started the action horror trend on May 7, 1999, when the $80 million movie made a staggering $422 million at the box office. In a truly bizarre coincidence, Van Helsing, another movie in the same genre from the same director, was released exactly five years later on May 7, 2004, and this under performer ended up being the movie that signalled the end of the same trend.
The Mummy Started The Action Horror Boom On May 7, 1999
The Mummy was a massive hit with audiences and fared well with critics, although retrospective reviews have been kinder to the movie than contemporary critics were at the time of its release. What was originally seen as a fun but disposable summer blockbuster is now viewed as a classic, and one of the only truly great movies to come out of the action horror boom of the early 2000s. However, that was not for lack of trying on the part of filmmakers from the era.
Thirteen Ghosts, Ghosts of Mars, the Underworld series, the Resident Evil movies, Doom, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and House of the Dead all arrived in the years that followed the success of The Mummy. Although none were critical successes, this flood of releases did solidify action horror as the leading movement in the horror genre at the time. Meanwhile, the likes of Blade II, Hellboy, Constantine, and Dog Soldiers proved that the action horror genre wasn’t entirely allergic to critical credibility and success.
Van Helsing’s Box Office Underperformance Ended The Action Horror Boom On May 7, 2004
However, almost as fast as the genre rose to box office prominence, action horror faded to obscurity. The critical and commercial underperformance of Van Helsing was a major factor, coming five years to the day after The Mummy’s unexpectedly massive success, but a confluence of other factors also played a part. The success of The Ring in 2002 and Saw in 2004 spawned legions of knock-offs in the years that followed, and the emergence of a darker, gorier, and bleaker horror landscape post-9/11 resulted in a move back toward the genre’s traditional R-ratings.
There are admittedly a few rare big PG-13 action horror movies released after the peak of the genre’s popularity, such as 2007’s Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend. However, the Japanese horror remakes and gory, more grounded and less supernatural psychological thriller movies inspired by the outsized success of the Saw and Hostel series made up the two cycles that dominated the genre for the rest of the decade, while slashers returned to the forefront by the late 2000s. Thus, five short years after The Mummy put action horror movies on the map, Van Helsing proved the world had already moved on.
