How A Low-Budget 2025 Horror Movie Became A Streaming Sensation After A Quiet Theater Release

The news that 2024’s The Beldham has stayed in the HBO Max worldwide Top 7 for over a week now is fairly staggering, considering the indie horror movie’s modest performance in theaters during its 2025 release. The horror genre is famous for championing smaller productions, as evidenced by countless stories of low-budget movies excelling and winning over mainstream viewers.

From 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to 1980’s The Evil Dead, to 1998’s legendary found footage horror movie The Blair Witch Project to 2009’s Paranormal Activity, there are numerous great horror movies that resonated globally despite their minuscule budgets. More recently, Clown in a Cornfield’s HBO Max success reaffirmed this reality.

However, the success of 2025’s The Beldham on the same streaming service is still a sight to behold. Originally premiering at the 57th Sitges Film Festival in October 2024, director Angela Gulner’s feature film debut was then known as The House at Hallow End. A psychological horror, The Beldham earned positive reviews from its early screenings.

The Beldham Won Over Critics, But Audiences Missed The Indie Horror

However, the movie’s sparse, simple story and small cast meant that it was hard to imagine The Beldham becoming a crossover mainstream hit upon release. The Beldham follows the story of a mother who returns to live in her mother’s home with her young child, only to realize that the titular supernatural threat is lurking in the home, hoping to harm them.

Starring Patricia Heaton, Emma Fitzpatrick, and Katie Parker, The Beldham blends multi-generational family drama with dark horror. In that regard, Gulner’s film joins a spate of releases from the last ten years, including director Ari Aster’s Hereditary, 2020’s Relic, and the acclaimed Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House.

However, The Beldham has another spiritual predecessor in the subgenre of mothering horrors. Like 2014’s Australian indie hit The Babadook, 2017’s Mother!, 2019’s The Hole in the Ground, and 2022’s Huesera (The Bone Woman), The Beldham leans into the insecurities and fears associated with motherhood to ground its paranormal horror in something real and tangible.

The Beldham’s Quiet Intimate Horror Works Better On The Small Screen

While this approach saw ScreenRant praise The Beldham as “An emotional wrecking ball” upon the movie’s release, it didn’t help the film in theaters. The Beldham had a modest original release that saw the movie fail to become a breakthrough success, likely due to its small scale and quiet, eerie brand of scares.

2025 was a great year for horror movies, and many of the year’s biggest hits in the genre were big-budget studio releases. From The Conjuring: Last Rites to Final Destination: Bloodlines, to Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, to 28 Years Later, reliable major franchises accounted for a lot of the genre’s heavy-hitters at the box office.

Even 2025’s biggest original horror movies, the Michael B Jordan vehicle Sinners and director Zach Cregger’s sophomore effort Weapons, cost $90 and $38 million, respectively. The box office success of both movies was truly staggering, but this doesn’t take away from the fact that both were major, big-budget releases.

In contrast, The Beldham was a subtle, slow-burning horror movie whose style and tone were more reminiscent of The Babadook than Sinners. As such, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the movie managed to find its audience later on a streaming service, where viewers could let discomfort get under their skin while at home, rather than in packed multiplexes.

The Beldham’s HBO Max Success Proves The Streaming Service’s Horror Credentials

The Beldham’s success would have been impressive on any streaming service, but HBO Max deserves some credit for making itself a one-stop shop for horror fans. While the dedicated streaming service Shudder remains the best offering for fans of the horror genre, HBO Max has done a lot to make itself a credible competitor.

This week alone, its Top 10 included indie horrors like The Beldham, 2024’s Sydney Sweeney vehicle Immaculate, and Y2K, as well as mainstream horror smashes like Weapons and Alien: Romulus. Of course, Sinners has been number one all week, proving that director Ryan Coogler’s iconic vampire horror will be hard to unseat even almost a year after its release.

Meanwhile, the underrated psychological thriller Blink Twice, starring Channing Tatum, has also managed to beat titles like How to Train

Your Dragon to find its way into HBO Max's top 10. While director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar hopeful One Battle After Another still maintains a grip on the site’s number two spot, horror nonetheless dominates its top 10.

The same week that HBO Max turned The Beldham into a mainstream success months after its quiet original release, Jenna Ortega’s underrated horror comedy Death of a Unicorn also managed to find an audience on the streaming service. As such, it’s clear that The Beldham isn’t the only movie benefiting from HBO Max’s promotion of great horror to the masses.