The internet is full of articles and social media posts assuring you that a movie cannot be successful unless it makes at least twice its budget. You can find them all over the place. This has been written about since at least 2011. 

The idea that a movie needs to double its budget to be profitable seems counter-intuitive. Common sense says that, the moment you cover your costs, everything after that is profit. How can that not be the case for movies? The answer to that lies in Hollywood accounting and the various loopholes, non-budgetary expenses and other “hidden” factors that most Hollywood movies are subject to. 

Whatever the reasons are that people say a movie needs to double its budget, the question remains – is it true?

Movie Money 101

A movie, as most of us understand it, has a fixed cost. Sometimes we hear of a movie going over budget, something Waterworld famously did. That movie is still considered a massive flop, even though it made millions in profit. The movie may have a budget of $30 million or, as in the case of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, $447 million, which stands as the highest budget of all time. 

Movie budgets cover the salaries for everyone involved. That’s the actors, director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, F/X team, sound people, lighting, construction, drivers, animal wranglers, you name it. For Iron Man 3, 3,310 people are credited as being part of the film crew. Art departments alone can have thousands of people working on them. All of those people need to get paid.

After the people are paid, money needs to be paid for actual equipment. Cameras, lights, sets, vehicles, clothes, food, everything you see on screen and also behind the scenes has a cost to buy or rent. Some cameras can cost six figures. 

Once everything is bought and paid for you can make a movie. Keep in mind, from the first day on a set to the day the movie is ready to watch, that can take between one year and two and a half years. People are working and getting paid that whole time. But that only gets you to the point where you have a film in the can. No one has seen it yet. Hell, it hasn’t even left the editing studio yet. You need to get it out in the world, right?

After a film is made, there are the P&A costs, or prints and advertising. There’s also general marketing, dubbing, shipping, subtitling and distribution fees. This is where the big secondary expense comes in because advertising a movie is not part of the budget but we all know some movies have massive ad campaigns. 

Big, tent pole release movies can have marketing budgets of around $150 million. Barbie had a $150 million marketing budget and the film’s budget was $145 million. Marvel’s marketing budget for Avengers: Endgame was $200 million.

Basically, if the studio is all in, the cost of marketing a movie can nearly, and in some cases more than double the budget. So suddenly you see how Barbie, with a $145 million budget, needs to literally make $300 million to break even. Luckily it did that and more.

Hollywood Accounting

The screenwriter of Bohemian Rhapsody sued the studio after the movie made $900 million at the global box office and he didn’t see any of it despite having a deal to receive 5% of the profits. The studio countered by claiming the movie actually lost $51 million. The budget for the movie was $55 million, for the studio’s claim to be true, there needs to be about $900 million of extra expenses they sunk into that film in order to make it somehow unprofitable. So where did that money go?

The problem with Hollywood accounting is that no one really gets to see the books. We don’t know where that money allegedly went. But there are, as we mentioned, expenses after a movie is made. 

Writer Ed Solomon wrote Charlie’s Angels, Men in Black and the Bill and Ted franchise and has gone on Twitter to complain about how Hollywood accounting works. He too had a deal to make 5% profit off of his movies and has pointed out that he has made $0 off of any of them. He also mentions how, despite studios claiming they made no money, they made three sequels to MiB, two more Charlie’s Angels and two more Bill and Teds and the box office take was over $2 billion.

The man who played Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi? Never got a penny in residuals because, despite making $475 million on a $32 million budget, it didn’t make money on paper. 

So how is any of this possible? How does Hollywood accounting work? Let’s look at the very successful Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The film cost $150 million and made $940 million but, thanks to some leaked documents, we know Warner Bros had this movie as a loss on paper.

Part of the money is lost to distribution fees. Warner claimed it cost $212 million to distribute the movie so right away you can see that $150 million budget rises to $362 million. Little by little we lose profits. Except there’s an issue here.

Warner Bros. distributed Harry Potter itself. So the $212 million they claim as an expense was paid to a different division of Warner Bros. They didn’t lose a dime doing that, but they sure called it an expense on their accounting sheets. 

Warner also claimed to have spent $130 million on advertising. Now the budget’s up to $491 million. But most of that money was paid to Warner Bros. as well. They claimed $57 million lost to interest because of financing but they financed it themselves so that was interest they paid to themselves. Now we’re over half a billion dollars that’s eating away at profits, except it’s all lies.

In the end, Warner claimed Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix somehow had a $167 million loss. Based on how the company does their accounting, the Harry Potter franchise should be considered a flop because it lost hundreds of millions. But we all know that’s not true. However, it allows Hollywood studios to get out of paying creatives and taxes as well. You can’t pay tax on a billion dollar movie if your accounting says it lost money.

Many studios can pull Hollywood accounting off, legally, by making a subsidiary company to control the production of a film. The studio, which owns the subsidiary, charges them huge fees to bulk up all of these expenses and get out of any profit sharing deals, all while never actually giving the money to anyone but themselves.

Because of all this creative accounting, or outright lying, however you want to view it, a movie will only make a profit if the studio is willing to admit it made a profit. They can work the numbers any way they want and make even the most successful film look like a dud, or vice versa. Much of it depends on the narrative they want to paint.

Incidentally, the Bohemian Rhapsody lawsuit was dismissed by the screenwriter in 2023 after two years. There was no word on what kind of settlement was reached. 

Let’s leave the studios a minute and see how movies make money in the first place.

Ticket Sales

Movies make money by selling tickets. We refer to that as “box office.” But box office isn’t 100% studio profit. There’s one more link in the chain and that’s theaters. There’s an old belief that theaters make all of their money off overpriced popcorn and soda and not ticket sales, but that’s not really true. Theaters make a ton of money off of concessions, yes, but they also make up to 50% of ticket sales. Some theaters make less than 50% of all of their revenue off of concessions, so that box office profit is not going solely to the studio by any means. 

In general, major Studios make about 40% to 45% of the box office. If a movie really takes off and becomes box office gold, they’ll end up getting a higher cut up to about 55%. Back in the day, studios used to have deals in place where they would make a higher cut for opening weekend and it would lower over time. Those deals don’t generally exist anymore, however. theaters get a standard cut across the board.

Different studios do still have different deals in place for how box office dollars are distributed. Also, domestic box office versus international box office can vary greatly based on deals as well. All of these factors that affect how much money a studio takes in help it when it comes to Hollywood accounting.

Box office can be higher overseas for some movies, you’ll often see a movie absolutely exploding in China like Avatar, for instance. However, Hollywood needs to use different distributors and subsidiaries so the profit they get in return is much lower than they would make in domestic theaters.

One side note worth remembering, as brought up by Matt Damon on Hot Ones, is how big DVD and physical media used to be for the film industry. Physical media brought in over $25 billion in 2005. Without that boost to revenue, films are riskier propositions, smaller movies don’t get made as often, and accounting has gone off the wall.

Streaming

The monkey in the wrench of how we understand movie money, box office profits, and the whole economy of filmmaking is streaming. You could make a strong argument for no one understanding how streaming works in terms of profit. That includes the people who actually make streaming movies. Streaming literally doesn’t make money for the many of the people who do it like Paramount and Disney. Netflix didn’t make a profit until 2023. 

Apple TV+ is mocked frequently for spending billions of dollars to make shows that barely anyone watches. Netflix gets the same treatment for making huge budget movies that are critically derided and even made fun of by their own actors sometimes. The company once spent $55 million on a show it never aired. 

Doug Liman, director of Amazon’s popular remake of Road House, complained about how the streamer treated the film. It was supposed to be released theatrically but ended up on Amazon Prime after the studio, MGM, was bought by Amazon. He said he made the movie as if it was going to be in theaters and he, and others, were paid accordingly. Meaning there was an expectation of a cut of box office profit. But it went to streaming, and he got nothing, even though 50 million people watched it in the first two weeks. 

On a streamer like Netflix, a movie is considered a success if a certain number of people watch it. Every so often, Netflix or Disney+ or one of the other streamers will release the viewership information to promote one of their films or TV shows.  Prime boasted that 65 million people watched Fallout in its first two weeks. There’s no doubt that’s a lot, but it’s hard to see what that means compared to box office for a movie. If those 65 million were already subscribers, did Amazon make any money? We don’t know because streamers don’t often share that kind of information. 

Subscribers is how streamers have to calculate profit, however. They produce all these new shows and movies, or buy the rights to your old favorite shows and movies, to entice you to subscribe. So every month when they get your subscription fee, that’s their box office. And to make more money if they need to produce or distribute more films and shows that other people want to watch to convince them to subscribe. 

Netflix boasted eight million new subscribers in the second quarter of 2024 for a total of 277 million worldwide. Those are good numbers. In early 2024, Prime said they had 200 million monthly viewers, so those seem like good numbers. Disney+ has about 153 million subs but they lost over 1 million in February 2024 when they raised prices.  

Studios can still make money off of the streaming model, it’s just a little different. For instance, Paramount sold Coming to America 2 to Amazon Prime for $125 million. Would it have made that much money in the theaters? This was during the height of Covid, so you can make a good argument that sending it to Prime was a better deal. Arguably it became Amazon’s problem to do marketing at that point. Paramount made double their $60 million budget without the extra fees we’ve talked about on top, so they came out ahead. 

Does a movie need to double its budget to be profitable? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes the numbers will never make enough sense for us to know one way or another. And sometimes there are other routes to making money, like streaming, that can backdoor the process entirely.

You don’t need a lot of money to scare someone, but you do need a lot of money to make a film. Today your average run-of-the-mill studio productions will typically cost millions if not tens of millions of dollars, and even B-movies will often put studios back a few hundred thousand.

Horror films have built a reputation for utilizing lower budgets to great effect. But it’s only once in a while that these films see significant returns on their comparatively modest budgets. The movies on this list are those films. And while their budgets may seem large to the average person, these movies stand as feats of frugal ingenuity that surpassed all expectations in the film world.

Related: Top 10 Lamest Horror Movies That Should Have Been Terrifying

10 Night of the Living Dead (1968)

George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead wasn’t the first zombie film ever made (that distinction most likely goes to Victor Halperin’s White Zombie), but it pretty much created the blueprint for the genre going forward. And to put it plainly, every zombie movie, game, or book of the last fifty-plus years owes it a debt.

The film proved to be a trailblazer in other ways too. It presented previously unseen levels of violence, gore, and terror to audiences, and it was one of the first horror films to cast a black lead in Duane Jones. All things that proved controversial in the eyes of some at the time.

Its towering influence aside, Night of the Living Dead also proved to be a spectacular financial success, eventually bringing in around $30 million worldwide off a modest production budget of $114,000.^[1]

9 Psycho (1960)

Another ’60s movie that presented unheard-of levels of violence (and also, in this case, semi-nudity) for a mainstream film at the time was Psycho. Again, the result changed ideas on what could and couldn’t be done on film and inspired generations of filmmakers. The 45-second shower scene pushed the censorship boundaries of the films from the age… as well as the audience’s limits. It remains one of the most famous scenes in movie history.

What’s more, it did all of this with relatively little funding. Indeed, with a budget of $800,000 ($7 million today), Psycho was the lowest-cost film of director Hitchcock’s career. But the story of a murderous man with an unhealthy attachment to his mother may well be his most iconic nonetheless.^[2]

8 Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

So an argument could certainly be made that Tetsuo: The Iron Man isn’t quite well known enough to be considered iconic. But, while it might be the least well-known film on this list, it’s also the cheapest by far. And the fact that this film was even possible on its $17,000 budget, let alone able to become a cult-classic worldwide, is a testament to its director’s fortitude.

Told by nearly everyone, including his family members, that making a film was essentially a ridiculous pipedream, Shinya Tsukamoto self-financed his film entirely from savings he made from his day job. And with little cash to go around, Tsukamoto relied upon underground theatre performers and friends to fill out his cast and crew. Luckily for him, one of his actors, Kei Fujiwara, allowed the team to use her apartment as one of the primary locations for the film.

Filming conditions were, by all accounts, both rudimentary and awful to work in. As a result, many cast and crew members abandoned the project during filming. Still, Tsukamoto got his film made, and it soon became an underground sensation that is still influencing filmmakers today.^[3]

7 Eraserhead (1977)

Much like Tetsuo, Eraserhead is another totally bizarre film, this time by the king of surrealist filmmaking, David Lynch. But while he might be an icon of the film industry today, Lynch didn’t have the easiest time getting his horror film made back in the 1970s, which had an initial budget of less than $100,000.

Lynch’s problems allegedly began due to backers’ confusion regarding what they were funding. That’s because Lynch’s original script for Eraserhead was only 21 pages long, leaving investors assuming the project would be a short 20-minute film. As a result, Lynch soon found himself constantly running out of money during filming. And things got progressively worse when Lynch split from his wife, became effectively homeless, and started illegally living on set.

The film was ultimately kept alive by loans from friends and Lynch resorting to offering cuts of the film’s profits instead of paying actors. However, it worked out for all involved in the end because the film has gone on to be a surrealist-horror classic with reported earnings of over $7 million.^[4]

6 Friday the 13th (1980)

According to writer Victor Miller, director Cunningham envisioned the original Friday the 13th as a cheap and quick cash grab designed to coattail the success of Halloween (1978). Whether or not that is true, few could have predicted that this low-budget film about a mysterious killer murdering teenagers at a holiday camp would have just as significant an effect on the genre as its apparent inspiration. And fewer still would have predicted that this $550,000 production would bring in over $59,000,000 and spawn one of the most profitable horror franchises of all time.^[5]

5 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may be decades old, but this horror flick about a chainsaw-wielding lunatic and his deranged family still looks and feels every bit as nasty today as it did in 1974. And the fact that the film was made on a measly $60,000 only shows that visceral horror will always trump CGI tricks and effects when it comes to terrifying audiences.

As impressive as that is, you have to feel for everyone who worked on making this film a reality. Because, by all accounts, filming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a miserable experience. Not only did the cast and crew have to deal with the scorching Texas heat, but they had to do so while working with the stench caused by decaying animal corpses, blood, and bones. Furthermore, the tight budget meant that the cast had to wear the same filthy clothes daily for continuity purposes, and several real-life injuries occurred on set due to faulty props. “Everyone hated me by the end of the production.” director Tobe Hooper would later reveal, “It just took years for them to kind of cool off.”^[6]

4 Evil Dead (1981)

When the trio of Bruce Campbell, Sami Raimi, and Robert Tapert put their creative minds together to start making horror shorts in the ’70s, making an entire feature-length film was more of a pipe dream than anything. Not only did they not have the money for such a venture, but they didn’t exactly have the credentials either. As Bruce Campbell would later write in If Chins Could Kill: “Three guys with no professional experience, questionable education, and a dream to make a film in Detroit wouldn’t exactly make the average investor dive into his pocketbook.”

However, after filming a $1,600 short titled Within the Woods as a proof of concept, the trio set about making their pipedream a reality, screening the short anywhere that would show it (including the soap aisle of a local supermarket) to attract investors. Eventually, they sourced enough money to start shooting a film, though filming had to stop several times so the group could obtain more cash.

The trio eventually managed to gather approximately $375,000 to make their film, Evil Dead. Undoubtedly an impressive feat but still a tight budget for a horror flick. Nonetheless, thanks to some creative ingenuity, the resulting film was a hit with horror fans and inevitably launched a franchise that continues decades later.^[7]

3 Halloween (1978)

When discussing the most famous horror film of all time, Halloween will almost always be involved in the debate. But this film that managed to bring in over $70 million worldwide and launch one of horror’s biggest franchises started with a budget of only $325,000.

Budget constraints weren’t the only challenge filmmakers had to overcome while filming Halloween. There was also an issue regarding location. That is because while the film takes place in middle America during autumn, the shooting occurred in Southern California in May. To overcome this, the team would throw bags of hand-painted leaves around before each outdoor shot. But, if you look closely, you can still identify a few tell-tale palm trees during certain scenes.^[8]

2 Paranormal Activity (2007)

In the early 2000s, soon-to-be filmmaker Oren Peli and his girlfriend had just moved into their new San Diego flat when the couple began hearing strange noises at night. These noises were so peculiar that Peli considered putting up some cameras to try and discover their source. Although he never got round to it, the thought inspired an idea for a film that would become Paranormal Activity.

With a production budget of just $15,000, Peli filmed Paranormal Activity almost entirely within his own house, working with a pair of then-unknown actors, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat. The storyline and effects were about as bare bones as you can get, but Peli used this to his advantage to create a film that felt realistic, unsettling, and novel (at the time). As such, it left audiences terrified, with even Stephen Speilberg reportedly being left genuinely spooked after watching the film.

Today, the Paranormal Activity franchise and the many copycats it inspired have arguably run out of steam. Nonetheless, Peli’s small-budget flick became one of the most profitable ever, bringing in around $200 million worldwide.^[9]

1 The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Blair Witch Project was by no means the first found footage film nor the first mockumentary. But it is nonetheless the first to popularize the genres. And, thanks to a clever online marketing campaign, it remains one of the only horror films in history to make a good go at tricking audiences into questioning whether what they saw was real.

Created by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, the film tells the story of three student filmmakers who get lost in the woods while making a documentary about a local legend, the Blair Witch. The film, shot for around $60.000 (though post-production brought that number to approximately $200,000), features little in the way of effects or gore to scare audiences. Instead, it relies on suspense and a sense of realism to get under their skin. And while modern audiences might find it a little tame, it worked just like a charm back in 1999, eventually making around $249 million globally.^[10]

In the past, we’ve covered just how expensive war can get and, as many people know, the defense budget of a country like the United States or Russia is enough to make Elon Musk break into a sweat. But not every victory has to break the bank and there is more than a little precedent to suggest some effective and devastating tactics don’t need to cost very much money at all. Let’s take a look at ten of history’s cheapest but most creative military tactics. 

10. The WWII Ghost Army

Anything known as a Ghost Army is probably going to be cool no matter what it entails, but in the case of the Ghost Army most famously deployed during the Second World War, it’s also incredibly creative and more than a little sneaky. 

Otherwise known as tactical deception, the Ghost Army was a tool meant to deceive Hitler and the German forces during the war and it relied not on the strength of soldiers and weapons so much as the creativity of artists. 

Known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, this division built fake armies. Inflatable tanks and rubber airplanes were combined with radio transmissions that were designed to be intercepted by the enemy. They featured actors playing out parts, making it seem like troop movements and deployments were happening when, in reality, everything was for show. They even set up speakers in forests to broadcast the sounds of war and make it seem convincing to those on the ground.

This army of fakers numbered around 1,100, but their work was able to create the illusion of around 30,000 soldiers. Their work was effective enough that they were able to draw German forces off and save lives as a result. Records obtained from Germany after the fact indicate the deception was a total success, meaning tens of thousands of lives and millions worth of equipment were spared. It was also kept secret from the public stateside until 1996.

9. Aerial Ramming 

The deadliest fighter pilot of all-time was Erich Hartmann, who has been credited with 352 kills in the air. Now, many of his victims were Soviet fighters, but, for the sake of argument, let’s say he took out 352 P-51 Mustangs, one of the most common US fighter planes of the war (pictured above). At a cost of about $58,000 at the time, he would have destroyed over $20 million in fighter planes. That’d work out to over $340 million today. Obviously, shooting the man down didn’t work out very well at the time, so what else could have been done? One lost cost alternative to a traditional dog fight is the extremely dangerous technique known as “air ramming.”

Like running another car off the road, air ramming involves hitting an enemy plane with your own plane. You can see why this is a tactic that isn’t done often. The goal is to not get yourself killed in the process, so it takes a steady hand, a keen eye and nerves of something a little harder than steel. And it’s a tactic about as old as flight itself. 

Rumors of the tactic date back to even before WWII, but many people considered them wholly unreliable. After all, what kind of maniac could or would do such a thing? But consider if you’re out of ammunition, head to head against an enemy in the air and fully expecting to be shot down, what do you have to lose?

Back in 1956, two Soviet fighters took on two Hungarian planes and witnesses on the ground watched one of the Soviet pilots very clearly maneuver his plane into the enemy, destroying them both in the process but allowing the Soviet, who knew when he’d need to jump ship, float safely to the ground with his parachute. The pilot denied it was intentional, but witnesses say his intent and the result were very clear. The pilot later admitted that, when his guns failed him, he rammed the plane to take it out. 

8. Quaker Guns

Sometimes your best chance for victory is just to make the enemy think you’re going to win, even if you can’t. Like the Ghost Army, you can achieve this by making them believe you have more resources than you really do. And in the American Revolutionary War, this took the form of Quaker cannons, named for the pacifist religious group.

From a distance, a Quaker cannon looks like any other cannon. But get close enough and you’ll notice it’s less a powerful piece of artillery and more of a painted log. Colonel William Washington had his men turn a pine tree into a fake cannon and threatened to take out men in a fortified barn if they didn’t surrender. They all gave up. Nearly 100 years later, the same trick was being used during the Civil War.

7. Chu Songs from Four Sides

In the year 202 in China, the Chu army had reached a place called Gaixia and were trapped in a canyon. They were surrounded by the Han army. Many of the Chu army were destroyed or captured and as night fell, only a small force remained. The leaders of the Han army had their soldiers, and the captured Chu army begin to sing traditional songs of Chu. 

The Chu army, confronted with songs of their homeland on all sides, began to fear that Chu had fallen and they were all that remained of their people. Many soldiers deserted and the leader of the Chu army is said to have taken his own life, causing the remaining forces to surrender. 

6. Hammering U-Boats

German U-Boats were a powerful force during WWI and sank upwards of 5,000 ships. Defeating them was a serious priority, and detecting them was not easy. Sonar did not exist at that time, so a vessel hidden underwater was all but invisible. Sometimes the most low-tech methods prove surprisingly effective. 

For a time, the best way to deal with a submarine was to detect and disable the periscope. At night, small boats would go out on patrol with just a couple of soldiers on board, hunting for periscopes. When they found one, they’d cover the periscope with a bag and then smash it with a hammer. If the U-Boat wanted to see anything, it had to surface, and that left it open for attack.

5. Operation Christmas

They say war is hell, so if you can make the enemy focus on something better, maybe they’ll give up the fight, right? There’s evidence it works. Just look at Operation Christmas.

In an effort to counter the guerilla forces in Colombia, the military opted to decorate some Christmas trees. Deep in the jungles where the guerilla forces were known to move about, soldiers would pick massive trees and drape them in thousands of Christmas lights. They even filmed it to make commercials. The lights would activate on a motion sensor and a banner would light up that said, “If Christmas can come to the jungle, you too can come home. Demobilize. At Christmas, everything is possible.”

The tactic resulted in about 300 guerillas, 5% of their total force, giving up and going home. They tried a similar tactic the year after and another 180 packed it in. 

4. King Harald Faked his Death

King Harald Siggurdson’s life is steeped in unbelievable tales of heroism and strength. It’s said he triumphed in countless battles against countless enemies through strength as well as intelligence and few stories exemplify that as well as the tale of his Sicilian campaign.

It’s said that he laid siege to four different towns during the campaign, often under-manned compared to his enemies. If he couldn’t starve his enemies out, he’d use some trickery to gain the upper hand, which happened during the fourth campaign. 

The town was well fortified and seemed unbeatable, so he began to spend his days in his tent. Eventually rumor spread that he was gravely ill and, finally, his men gave word to the enemy that he had died. His final wish? As a Christian man, he wanted to be laid to rest on church grounds. Inside the town.

So the town opened its gates and a coffin containing Siggurdson was brought in by his men who used it to block the gates, allowing the whole army and a very much alive Siggurdson to sack the town. 

3. Zhuge Liang’s Victory by Shame

No one likes a show off but, as it happens, showing off and rubbing someone else’s face in your greatest can apparently save lives if you do it enough. That was what happened when Zhuge Liang, military strategist and Prime Minister of the Chinese state of Shu back between 221 and 263, was tasked with defeating Meng Huo, an enemy chieftain.

The story of Meng Huo’s defeat has become the stuff of legend because it kept happening. According to those legends, Liang captured Huo on the field of battle. Instead of killing or torturing the man, he gave him a tour of his army, showing off how great it was and asked what he thought, Meng Huo was not impressed, so Liang released him. They did this a total of seven times. 

After seven captures, Meng Huo realized that Zhuge Liang’s forces were superior, and he voluntarily surrendered himself and ended up joining the other side.

2. The Battle of Pelusium 

Getting into your enemy’s head can be invaluable and turn the tide of any battle. But what does that mean in a practical sense, and how could it best be exploited? Arguably one of the greatest examples of this occurred when Cambyses II, a Persian king, met the Egyptians during the Battle of Pelusium. This was a major battle that essentially put Egypt in the hands of Persia and started Egypt’s 27th Dynasty. 

Cambyses II was taking on the forces of Pharaoh Psametik III, and he was an experienced tactician. He was also aware of the Egyptians’ beliefs and, in particular, their reverence for all forms of life, in particular those creatures that they viewed as earthly representations of their gods. 

For Egyptians, cats were associated with the goddess Bastet. The goddess was both nurturer and fighter and had a prominent cult of followers. Few Egyptians would dare harm a cat lest they earn the goddesses ire. So Cambyses littered the battlefield with them and painted their images on the shields of his men. 

The Persians carried cats into battle, which caused the Egyptians to fear loosing arrows against them. Cambyses let loose dogs, ibises, sheep and any other animals he thought the Egyptians would be too afraid to harm. The tactic worked, and the Egyptians either fled or were slaughtered.

1. The Whistling Sound of Falling Bombs

Psychology has a lot of impact in war as we’ve seen. Dive bombers used to mount Jericho trumpets on the front of their planes so that when they went into a dive, the plane would blare out that iconic wailing sound we associate with them and cause panic. Likewise, most of us recognize the high pitched whistling sound of a bomb being dropped if from nowhere else than old movies and even cartoons. It’s even the sound a cartoon will use for a character falling.

If you’ve watched any modern footage of war zones as bombs are deployed, you would not have heard that telltale whistle. Like the dive bombers of WWII, only certain bombs made that sound because an actual whistle was attached to the casing. 

The sound and pitch change as the bomb drops, thanks to the Doppler effect. This meant that, on the ground, you had an audio warning of the speed and distance to the bomb, which you have to assume played havoc with a lot of people’s minds. Knowing your potential destruction is closing in fast would have chilled even the hardest soldier and severely shaken the nerves of all who survived. All that for the cost of a whistle.