One Year Later, Please Don’t Forget About ‘Cobweb’
Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb was one of my most anticipated horror releases last year. I primed myself by revisiting Bodin’s Marianne on Netflix (which remains one of the scariest shows of the century), and the hype only grew from there. The cast, including Lizzy Caplan and Anthony Starr, was to die for, and Bodin, a fantastical director, had surely kept Cobweb’s most beguiling secrets hidden in its marketing materials. Cobweb delivered, making not only my year-end list, but also managing to crack the Top 10 for Dread Central’s Best of 2023. A year later, however, Cobweb remains marred in mystery, an unfortunate legacy for one of the freshest horror releases in some time.
After Cobweb’s release, I bemoaned its July theatrical premiere in an editorial. As a horror fan, I questioned the efficacy of releasing movies like Cobweb—not just a horror movie, but a very distinctly Halloween movie—in the middle of the summer. I graciously accept my L’s, and while I think the broader point stands, the summer strategy was more motivated than I realized (thanks, Twitter). As I heard from several filmmakers online when the article went live, a July release is part of a larger strategy for certain films to land On-Demand come October. Disney did the same thing with last summer’s Haunted Mansion. Bury it in summer, and let it get rediscovered for Halloween.
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The impetus for the article was well-intentioned. Cobweb not only had a botched release but also a wildly incomprehensible marketing campaign that rivals The Poughkeepsie Tapes in 2007. The trailer was shown theatrically. It was framed as the horror movie of July. I was grateful enough to catch an early screener, and as is my horror-loving duty, immediately told everyone to seek it out when it was released on July 21. Lionsgate was definitely going to release it, right?
Well, they did. Kind of? The week of release was characterized by scores of incredulous horror moviegoers. Some rural markets had Cobweb, and some metropolitan ones did not. Audiences could find tickets an hour away, or in the worst cases, not at all, and this was the week after release. Opening weekend? I’m not sure anyone even saw it. I’m not even convinced it was playing. Even if you told me it was, I’m so entrenched in my tinfoil conspiracy, that I might not believe you.
Reportedly, Cobweb grossed around $8 million worldwide, but none of those figures include domestic receipts. In other words, Lionsgate never reported a U.S. box office take despite the movie ostensibly releasing here. Even the YouTube trailer description from the official Lionsgate account notes a July 21 theatrical release.
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Strange as that release was (and, yes, it still haunts me at night), the purpose here isn’t simply to revisit Cobweb’s peculiar theatrical bout, but rather to expand upon how one of the decade’s best horror movies is all but forgotten a year later. Cobweb hit digital platforms on August 11 and got a lackluster Blu-Ray release on September 12. I saw and bought it at Target, though I had no idea it was even poised to hit shelves until it was just there.
Cobweb did manage to briefly top the rental charts on iTunes (we covered that here), and its October Hulu premiere was marginally successful, reaching as high as Number 4 on their streaming chart, but since then, Cobweb has all but disappeared from the public consciousness. The movie doesn’t yield the same cult zealotry that something like Malignant does, and absent a big theatrical bow like Barbarian, the film has failed to secure a space in the contemporary genre zeitgeist. It is, broadly, being treated as streaming horror, even though by its very nature, it isn’t.
Conceptually, I think of streaming horror as any number of streaming-only horror releases that generate interest the weekend of their release only to disappear into the genre void when the next New Thing comes along. For every His House (a classic whose limited availability is heartrending, truly heartrending), there’s: The Open House, Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight, Run, Fresh, Veronica, Apostle, Cargo, Oxygen, The Perfection, May the Devil Take You, Calibre, Sister Death (a prequel to Veronica I bet you didn’t know existed), Old People, Velvet Buzzsaw, and, well, I could go on.
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I love a lot of those movies. Though I’ll also concede it’s the first time I’ve thought about any of them since I first watched them. I object to the impression that movies are content as much as any cinephile out there, though I do simultaneously think it’s important to recognize that executives within a capitalistic framework do, in fact, conceptualize movies just that way.
For Samuel Bodin, Cobweb was his feature directorial debut. And it was an incredible one. The scares are unrelenting, the mystery beguiling, the acting strong, and the commitment to leaning into the absurdity of its conceit refreshing in a horror landscape that, on occasion, plays it a little too safe. The movie was a milestone for the filmmaker. For Lionsgate and Hulu, it was just another peg in their content-generating machine.
And while there’s nothing I can do to combat a profit-driven production and distribution cycle that only seems to be getting worse by the day (where’s my Midnight Mass physical release, Netflix), I can at least encourage you to watch Cobweb. Buy Cobweb. Tell all your friends about Cobweb. Birthdays figure pretty centrally to the plot, and with the movie turning one this year, it’s as good a time as any to ensure it doesn’t just vanish into the walls of a monolithic content monster.
Here’s what I had to say last year:
“Marianne remains one of the scariest Netflix original horror shows ever made, so of course, Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb arrived with considerable expectations attached. Luckily, Cobweb is as weird and unrelenting as Marianne fans would expect. Familiar elements—creepy noises, abusive parents, scary drawings—at first threaten to erode the carefully crafted fairy tale aesthetic Bodin is going for. This is horror as punctuation, embellished narrative conceits that unsuspectingly strike. Destined to be a Halloween classic, Cobweb’s botched release is an unfortunate pox on one of the year’s very best.”
Luckily, Cobweb is still streaming for free on Hulu. Check it out for the first time or the fifth time. It’s an ambidextrous little horror gem that deserves your attention. When you do, be sure to let me know what you think on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
Categorized:Editorials
