Well this makes us happy.

For the third weekend in a row, M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Split just landed atop box office charts, to date pulling in just under $100,000,000 at the domestic box office. I think it’s pretty safe to say that nobody expected the film, made for just $9 million, to be the money-making powerhouse that it’s proven to be, but one thing is now more certain than ever: Shyamalan is back, and he’s back in a big way. Split is his first film since The Sixth Sense to top the charts three weeks in a row, and we couldn’t be happier to see the twist-master back in top form.

But Split isn’t the only horror movie success story of 2017.

Out of the 10 films with the highest domestic grosses in 2017 so far, HALF of them are horror movies. Split is of course leading the pack with $98,700,950, and it’s joined by Underworld: Blood Wars in 5th place ($29,928,535), The Bye Bye Man in 6th ($22,044,416), Resident Evil: The Final Chapter in 7th ($21,851,775) and this past weekend’s Rings in 9th ($13,000,000).

Now before you go and try to take this victory away from the horror genre by bashing one or maybe even all of these movies, keep this in mind: when even one horror film does well at the box office, it’s a good thing for the entire horror genre at large. When horror does well in theaters, studios make and release more horror movies in theaters, and that is a victory for us all.

The Bye Bye Man may be bad, but like Split, it’s successful (and original) horror all the same.

And that’s the most important thing here. While horror sequels may not be performing all that well this year, original horror movies are killing it; something we can all be happy about.

Another cool thing to point out is that both Underworld: Blood Wars (Anna Foerster) and The Bye Bye Man (Stacy Title) were directed by women. Yes, two of the top 10 highest grossing movies of 2017, at the time of writing this post, are horror movies directed by women. Fittingly, February is Women in Horror Month, but that’d be damn good to see any time of the year.

Keep on kicking ass, 2017 horror!

Here’s the chart, via Box Office Mojo…