add this guy to my list

CNN.COM quoted The Amityville Horror remake director Andrew Douglas as he waxed philosophic regarding the high number of horror film releases this summer.

"This film comes out amid a whole raft of films. It is interesting what causes that," he said. "Do we get the culture we deserve, or do some people smarter than us give us the culture we want? It's a perennial question."

But his true genius was revealed when he went onto to explain why horror films are cheaper

Mr. Douglas notes that horror flicks are fantasies, and they deliver a higher jolt of fantasy than people get in real life.

He cited a couple of general rules for Hollywood's eagerness to make them. Generally speaking, they are less expensive because they use fewer stars, and they are easier to market due to their loyal fan base.

Although I do not completely disagree with Mr. Douglas (who is currently vying for position of "Unterhack with Uwe Boll) I feel he forgot to mention the most important reasons films like his are so cheap:

A lot of these films are not original ideas (i.e. remakes and re-imaginings--a word that makes my blood boil) so they don't really have to spend a lot of money on a script or rewrites. They can cut and paste a couple of horror classics together run it through Google language tools and then smooth everything out with MS Word spell-check, grammar correction, and thesaurus. You can bang out a script like this in a matter of days.

Since the title of your movie (in his case The Amityville Horror) already exists in the realm of popular culture along with the mythology and urban legends it encompasses, you save on a shit load of advertising because the studio can bank on the name recognition.

Americans are a bunch of dumb sheep so there’s a good chance some of them are going to pay to see the movie anyway. The Amityville Horror wasn't screened for critics so some sheep who might have been turned off to the film by a bad review lost somewhere between eight and ten bucks plus whatever they consumed in soda, popcorn, and jujubees. This is where you make your money back… the sheep.

Last but not least, after you have assembled a cast of people you don't have to pay, bastardized someone else’s ideas to formulate your script, saved a shitload of money in your advertising budget thanks to name recognition, you have to take the most important step in making a cheap horror movie. You get some lame-ass-know-nothing-jerk-wad who will sit in the director’s chair and yell action and cut from time to time, before he sends it off to the editing room where the film really starts to suck.

Am I bitter?

God yes.