Moviegoers put a nail in the coffin of a dying horror boom this weekend, as “Hostel: Part II” opened to just $8.8 million in ticket sales, far behind the crime caper “Ocean’s Thirteen” in a three-day period of relatively soft box office performance, the New york Times reports.

“Ocean’s Thirteen,” with a cast of stars led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt, ranked first with $37.1 million, slightly underperforming its predecessor, “Ocean’s Twelve.” That film took in about $39.2 million when Warner Brothers released it in December 2004 and went on to collect more than $125.5 million in domestic ticket sales.

Meanwhile “Hostel: Part II,” a torture-theme thriller from the director Eli Roth, placed No. 6 for the weekend and did less than half the opening business of the original “Hostel.” That movie made about $19.6 million in its first weekend when Lionsgate released it in January of last year and helped feed a wave of horror releases that have often come up short.

In the last few months the Weinstein Company’s “Grindhouse” failed its own hype as a hip event, Fox Atomic’s higher-browed zombie film “28 Weeks Later” undershot its predecessor, and a long string of less ambitious horror pictures sputtered as the audience for bigger, family-friendly pictures like “Spider-Man 3,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” and “Shrek the Third” led a broad surge in ticket sales.

Read the full New York Times story

.(registration required)