When it comes to new horror games, there are times of feast and famine, and this past year we gorged until our bellies bulged and our mouths dripped with gruesome grease. In 2024, we received a rich spread of dark experiences from solo creators, indie teams, AA developers and AAA studios in a vast array of genres and visual styles. There was a fantastic Silent Hill 2 remake and beefy updates to contemporary classics like Phasmophobia, Alan Wake 2 and The Outlast Trials, and there was also a steady cadence of brand-new horror franchises expanding the genre in unexpected ways. First, let's take a moment to celebrate a sampling of the year's fresh horror universes. This is not a comprehensive list of new horror franchises in 2024, but it's a suitable demonstration of how vast and varied the offerings were this year.

Blumhouse wasn't going to publish a game in 2024. The studio, one of the leading names in horror films, announced in February 2023 that it was launching a video game publishing business and executives were scouting projects from independent teams with budgets under 10 million. The goal of Blumhouse Games was to support a few rad horror titles per year, with a tentative plan to start publishing them in 2025. But then, in September 2023, the Blumhouse folks stumbled across Fear the Spotlight. It was a moody, voxelized horror game about two friends sneaking around their haunted high school and communing with the ghosts of students that died in a fire in the '90s.

A new indie video game publisher made its debut in Los Angeles last week: Blumhouse Games, a division of the horror movie production company co-founded by director Jason Blum in 2000. Unsurprisingly, its specialty will be horror. During the livestreamed Summer Game Fest showcase, Blum and creative lead Louise Blain announced a slate of six experimental horror games, the first of which, Fear the Spotlight, will launch later this year. Blum described the games label as "going back to our roots, with a focus on indie horror, pushing boundaries and elevating new, original stories". Like the company's movies, from Paranormal Activity to M3GAN, its games are all low-budget productions with interesting ideas.

According to a report from Reuters, ChatGPT is listed as the author or co-author of at least 200 books on Amazon's Kindle Store. However, the number of bot-written books is likely higher than that since Amazon's policies don't require authors to disclose their use of AI. Brett Schickler published on the Kindle Store a children's book written and illustrated by AI. Although Schickler says the book has earned him less than $100 since its January release, he only spent a few hours creating it with ChatGPT prompts like "write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy." Science-fiction publication Clarkesworld Magazine has temporarily halted short-story submissions after receiving a flood of articles suspected of using AI without disclosure, which was reported by PCMag.

Horror movie powerhouse Blumhouse is getting into video games. The company behind hits like M3GAN, Get Out, The Purge and Insidious is opening a production and publishing division that will work on original horror games for PC, consoles and mobile. We do films, we do TV and there is this massive, growing segment in media and entertainment called gaming," Blumhouse president Abhijay Prakash told Bloomberg. "The space is hundreds of billions of dollars; we're in a great position to try and access it." As with the film side of the production company, Blumhouse Games will keep the budgets modest.

In 2009, Fox released James Cameron's Avatar, an absurdly expensive, but also absurdly profitable, science fiction adventure featuring cutting-edge special effects. Its success provided further confirmation to what had already become entrenched conventional wisdom in Hollywood: Movies should be big because big makes money. That same year, Paramount distributed Paranormal Activity, a horror movie shepherded by the then–little-known Blumhouse Productions. Directed by the unknown Oren Peli, it originally cost $15,000, was shot on consumer-grade video cameras, and had already been kicking around festivals for a couple of years. It went on to gross nearly $200 million, confirming that conventional wisdom didn't always apply.

It's been a great season for horror, with Blumhouse's "Happy Death Day" becoming the latest horror film to top the domestic box office in its opening weekend. The $5-million film, a bloody riff on the classic "Groundhog Day" concept, brought in an estimated $26.5 million in the U.S. and Canada, according to figures from measurement firm ComScore, above the $15 million to $20 million analysts projected. "We are absolutely thrilled with the opening," said Universal's Executive Vice President of Domestic Distribution Jim Orr. "Happy Death Day" marks Blumhouse's ninth film to open at No. 1 and its third to debut at No. 1 this year alone, following "Split" and "Get Out." The latest from producer Jason Blum and Universal Pictures, the film, about a woman who relives the day of her murder until she learns her killer's identity, earned a B rating on CinemaScore and a 64% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.