Do You Like Scary Movies?

Why horror movies understand innovation better than tech

There were reports of people fainting in cinemas.

Audiences walking out.

The producers apparently didn’t even bother submitting the film to the MPAA for a rating. They already knew it would land an NC-17.

The box office kiss of death.

And this wasn’t the 1970s. This was 2024. The film was Terrifier 3.

A movie about a clown.

Or is he a mime?

Honestly, it’s hard to tell which.

Maybe it’s because I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street far too young.

Perhaps because the most active WhatsApp group on my phone is called “Fright Club”.

Either way, I knew immediately:

I had to see this movie.

A bloody mess

That film had absolutely no right to become as successful as it did.

It was grotesque. Excessive. Transgressive in a way modern cinema almost never is anymore.

And somehow I walked out of the screening grinning from ear to ear.

Not because I suddenly wanted every movie to become an ultra-violent clown nightmare, but because the whole thing felt different.

In the social media era, where so much culture feels focus-tested into oblivion, that felt heretical.

Terrifier did everything modern studios usually avoid at all costs.

It was weird. Mean. Tonally unpredictable.

No major executive was going to confidently walk into a boardroom and pitch that.

But the filmmakers didn’t need permission from the machine because the budget was tiny anyway.

Director Damien Leone even handled a huge amount of the practical effects work himself.

And somehow, against all conventional industry logic, a new horror icon was born.

One capable of standing alongside Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers.

Studios had spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to manufacture that kind of cultural impact.

Meanwhile a practical effects guy with a tiny budget had accidentally done it for less money than most executives spend on their cars.

And honestly, I think the tech industry has a lot to learn from that.

Embrace the weirdos

At this point in my career I’ve worked in a lot of different tech companies.

Some prioritised salesmanship above almost everything else. Others were run by deeply technical leaders who cared intensely about engineering culture.

But underneath the surface I noticed something surprisingly consistent: leadership teams love people who think like they do.

The same communication styles.

The same personalities.

The same assumptions.

And yes, that works pretty well for maintaining a stable corporate identity.

Right up until the world changes.

Horror has always understood something modern tech increasingly seems to forget: creativity rarely comes from rooms full of people who all think the same way.

The genre survives because it embraces outsiders, weirdos and deeply unconventional ideas.

Art the Clown was never going to emerge from a boardroom.

Meanwhile major studios were still busy rebooting Halloween for the fifth time.

Horror succeeds because it still allows itself to risk embarrassment.

I’m not convinced modern tech still does.