While the vast majority of high profile horror titles tend to release right around Halloween, a season that lasts for anywhere up to two months depending on your personal preferences, audiences are more than willing to be scared out of their seats all year round.
A case in point is Netflix‘s Top 10 most-watched list, which has already seen The Conjuring and its sequel crash-land onto the rankings despite the duo of critical and commercial smash hits only being added to the library a couple of days ago. Late February might be a million miles away from spooky season, but James Wan’s duology is playing incredibly well with the platform’s subscribers right now.
The Conjuring 2 currently occupies second place on the Top 10 behind only darkly comic thriller I Care a Lot, while the first installment is in eighth position. Of course, in an ideal world, fans would have seen The Devil Made Me Do It by now, but the threequel was delayed as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic and won’t arrive until June. Still, clearly people are more than willing to revisit the adventures of Ed and Lorraine Warren as the debut of the first outing without James Wan behind the camera gets closer and closer.
Perhaps viewers are just preparing themselves mentally for the third Conjuring, which will launch simultaneously on the big screen and HBO Max, by watching the first two movies through the gaps in their fingers from the comfort of their own homes. Or maybe it’s simply the massive popularity of the franchise, which has raked in over $1.9 billion at the box office through a series of sequels and spinoffs to become the single-highest grossing horror brand in the history of cinema.