Putting to rest the premature obituaries proclaiming the death of horror at the box office, THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE took the #1 position during its opening weekend, earning $30.2-million on 2981 screens.

To put that number in perspective, here are the results of other recent horror releases: THE CAVE has just passed $12-million. DARK WATER is petering out at just over $25-mllion. LAND OF THE DEAD topped out at $20-million. And THE DEVIL'S REJECTS had trouble reaching $17-million.

With a strong opening like this, the film is likely to generated good word-of-mouth and go on to become a major success, probably passing the $100-million mark. In fact, with its modest $20-million price tag, the film is well on its way to turning a profit, even after factoring in additional distribution costs for prints and advertising.

If there's a lesson here, it seems to be that horror can reach a wide audience by crafting a film that is dramatic and convincing, instead of just rehashing the same old cliches over and over again.

Another lesson is that horror fans continue (unwittingly, no doubt) to collaborate with the mainstream media in marginalizing and de-legitimizing the horror genre. Many ainstream film critics more or less dismissed the film (which failed to earn a 60% "fresh" rating in the Rotten Tomatoes weekly survey), while  some self-proclaimed horror fans online were predicting that EMILY ROSE would fail because of its hybrid nature: theoretically, horror fans would be bored by the courtroom stuff, and mainstream audiences would be put off by the horror. By championing films like HIGH TENSION and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, at the expensive of EMILY ROSE, horror journalists and critics perpetuate the myth that horror is a cult genre for gorehounds only, incapable of producing worthwhile films.

In fact, the hybrid nature of EMILY ROSE underlines its success, making the horror apealing to a wider audience because it is convincing and dramatic in a way that the average slasher hack-em-up could never hope to achieve (e.g., HOUSE OF WAX). So, what seemed like a risk (combining the horror and courtroom genres) turns out to have been a brilliant move -- a case where a little artistic ambition paid off financially.

As producer and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman said of his and director-cowriter Scott Derrickson's genre-bending approach, "You just try to go for people who like good movies and try to have faith in the audience. One reason we wrote this as a script and got it finished before we took it to a studio is that we didn’t want to pitch ‘courtroom horror film hybrid’ and have it go into development, and have notes from people about 'It’s not scary enough.' It was a very tight script we presented, saying this is the film we want to make, and they bought into it. We’re interested in seeing a movie like that, a hybrid that gives you things you like about two different genres. You have to faith that the audience does not always want to see what they’ve been seeing over and over again. But you can’t predict it."

As for the rest of the weekend's top ten, fantasy and horror films were almost entirely shut out.

RED EYE, the Wes Craven-directed thriller, landed in 5th place with $4.6-million, raising its total to $51.3-million. That's not spectacular but it's better than most other fear films have done this summer.

THE BROTHERS GRIMM were not too happy in 7th place, with $3.3-milion, for a three-week total of only $33.2-million.

And SKELETON KEY was locked out of the top ten, falling into 11th place with $1.6-million. After five weeks, the film has a total of $45.9-million.

Read the rest of te Top Ten here.

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