In publishing, the horror sub-genre is set to break new sales records. Readers aren’t the only ones seeking a good scare. Horror films dominated the silver screen this summer, with Backrooms and Obsession grossing more than $460 million domestically and roughly $900 million globally. Both films came from young directors who cut their teeth on YouTube, with their fingers on the pulse of this generation’s anxieties and fears. Even as major franchises like Spider-Man broke box office records, audiences turned two original horror stories into blockbuster hits.
The truth is that humans love to be scared. We spend our time sharing and consuming scary stories; we take our kids to haunted houses; we dedicate an entire season to all things spooky.
The prevailing wisdom has long suggested that our desire for a good scare comes from the adrenaline kick we get while watching a scary movie. While this does explain some of the appeal, especially among younger consumers, research shows that many people who like horror movies aren’t necessarily looking for the rush it provides.
Horror also offers a laboratory for self-learning. In my own work, I’ve found that a large portion of horror fans are “white knucklers”—people who don’t necessarily enjoy fear, but rather the opportunity to practice overcoming it. Many white knucklers report that they have learned something about themselves after a scary-play experience—for example, how they react in stressful situations, or that they should trust their instincts.
The logic begins to make sense once we work through what a horror story really is: a sandbox for a potentially dangerous situation.
The collective imagination of horror
In horror, the human capacity for imagination really shines.
In real life, an encounter with danger is a costly way to learn. Our minds long for safe ways to learn about dangerous situations.
Around the same time, paranoia was bubbling in the U.S. about surreptitious invaders, both alien and communist. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) beautifully captured these anxieties in a story about your friends and loved ones being secretly replaced by a foreign, hostile entity.
Horror in an anxious era
I would argue that the rise in interest in horror as a genre can be partly attributed to rising social anxieties. Backrooms is a masterclass in how terrifying meaninglessness can be. The endless hallways and rooms in the film are reminiscent of social media, which offers an endless tunnel of content, with mental health concerns lurking under the surface. Each room contains some variation of objects that aren’t quite right, like an AI rendering of an image. The haphazard placement gives the entire space a creepy, purposeless feel.
Over 20% of Gen-Z and Millennials in that same survey report poor or very poor social health, a topic that is explored into absurdity in Obsession. The basic plot is an old monkey’s paw-style tale: a story about a magical item granting a wish with unintended consequences. Director Curry Barker infused his story with modern anxieties about dating and social life. The main character, Bear, is a socially awkward twentysomething who can’t bring himself to tell his crush how he really feels.
In my view, this resonance is why horror has had such a good run over the past two decades. According to film producer and data maven Stephen Follows, the horror genre has grown faster in the past few decades than any other genre. While the infamous slasher era of the 1980s saw around 150 horror films per year, the 2020s have surpassed 1,500 horror films per year. Even when the film genre was suffering in 2020, horror was having a moment. As COVID-19 emptied theaters, horror held on, pushing its share of the Box Office to the highest it had ever been. Horror beat its own record for Box Office share again in 2025.
The world has always been full of things that frighten us. One way we work through these fears is by simulating scenarios. We tell stories of the things we fear and indulge in the bad outcomes that the protagonists face from the safety of our seats.
As our technological world enters a new area of artificial intelligence, we will unlock a whole new world of possible dangers and things to fear, and films like M3GAN (2022) will be there to help us process worries.
As we enter the unknown, we will try to prepare and cope with what comes our way in the same fashion as those before us: by diving into a good horror story.
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