Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard King

There’s a sly double-meaning baked into “attempting.” Richard King isn’t just applauding major studios for making horror; he’s pointing out, with a director’s dry precision, that the genre still resists corporate control. Studios can finance horror, market it, franchise it, but they can’t fully domesticate what makes it work: uncertainty, discomfort, the sense that something ugly is slipping past the gatekeepers.

The intent reads as both endorsement and gentle critique. On the surface, it’s optimistic: big money is taking the genre seriously again, which means wider releases, better resources, and the possibility of horror escaping the “midnight movie” box. Underneath, it’s a reminder that studio horror has a visible failure mode: sanding down the weirdness into something test-screened and algorithm-proof. When he says he likes that they’ve been “attempting” it, he implies the attempts are uneven - and that’s not necessarily bad. Horror thrives on risk, on directors being allowed to get it wrong in interesting ways.

Contextually, this lands in the post-2010s landscape where “elevated horror” (A24-style prestige dread) proved critics and audiences would show up for smarter, stranger scares, and where legacy studios, smelling opportunity, tried to recapture the lightning with reboots, shared universes, and “event” horror. King’s line is a small cultural weather report: the genre has enough heat that the biggest institutions can’t ignore it, even if they’re still learning how not to suffocate it.