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I think horror movies have taught us all a valuable lesson - never travel abroad.

Kim Hollis: Chernobyl Diaries, the new horror concept from Paranormal Activity's creator Oren Peli, opened to $8 million over the three-day portion of the weekend and $9.4 million including the holiday. Like Paranormal Activity and its sequels, the budget was kept low at $1 million. What do you think of this result?

Reagen Sulewski: At that budget level, it's pretty much pure profit (though of course there's P&A, which would dwarf that figure). The revolution in film making continues to make it easier for people to make professional looking films on the cheap, but it would be nice if some of these projects actually amounted to something in terms of quality. I suppose this is a bit of an artifact of the fact that horror audiences seem to be quite undiscriminating. From that perspective, studios are just chasing the money.

Brett Beach: Will this prove to be Oren Peli's "Dead Silence"? Consider that it was only a million behind MIB3 in mdnight grosses, and that that 90 minute stretch may have been its highwater mark. Word-of-mouth is toxic. As inexpensive as this was, his name was being touted as the closest thing akin to a draw-in for the horror crowd. More projects like this that seem to be cash grabs (or things best left for the straight-to-DVD route) can only help to tarnish his reputation.

Max Braden: For $1 million, I'm not going to complain about anything that actually earns money in theaters. Since the Paranormal Activity coattails aren't very long, I think something in the sub-ten-million range was to be expected. I would have scheduled it for mid-August when summer is waning and the high-school/college age target audience is getting anxious for upcoming school, but I don't know that changing the release date would have pulled in anything significantly above this result.

Tim Briody: I'd wager that very few people who've seen all the Paranormal Activity movies knows who Oren Peli is. This is just Horror Movie of the Week that benefited from a holiday weekend and the market not being saturated with the genre, which happens from time to time. As long as they're cheap and profitable, the cycle won't ever change.

Bruce Hall: I'm going to kind of echo a point Tim made and say that I kind of doubt the average guy on the street could tell Oren Peli from Orrin Hatch. It's okay, though, because for a film like this one, all you need is a killer hook. A movie opened this weekend about a group of attractive white people who book a vacation to Chernobyl and get slaughtered by demons or...something. It's a great hook and even if the movie sucks (did anyone walk into this with high expectations?), it's enough to convince some kid to take his girlfriend to a matinee and hope she gets scared enough to let him put his arm around her. A half million of his peers do the same thing and Tuesday evening, Oren Peli is buying another house. The dollar amounts aren't impressive but the profit margins are. It's a rapid return formula that's been a staple of the horror genre for a long time.

Edwin Davies: This is a pretty good result considering the budget. Even if legs prove to be nonexistent - and, considering that the film pretty much collapsed over the course of its first weekend anyway (its take on Monday was less than half of its Friday numbers whereas every other film on top 10 either saw hardly any decline or took more money on Monday than they did on Friday), that seems a given at this point - Chernobyl Diaries will make a tidy little profit. However, when you consider that this film managed to do that without actually being a decent film, it makes me wonder how much better it could gave done if it had been good, or even merely okay. The bar is often set pretty low for horror films, so any film that manages to have an ounce of quality to it tends to shine pretty brightly.

Kim Hollis: While the numbers are theoretically fine compared to budget, I think this is a pretty blah result. The trailer was kind of fun and I say that as someone who doesn't really like horror films. It seems like better marketing could have gotten a higher take, even with the ultimately toxic word-of-mouth. After it's released on home video, Chernobyl Diaries will be a nice little moneymaker, though, and I guess that's all that producers of these quick-hit horror movies are looking for.

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