Horror Is Becoming Our Favorite Entertainment
March 4, 2026
The masochism of it never sat well with me. Watch, on a screen, your nightmares acted out? Fix your eyes on that screen while your heart pounds faster and faster, your breathing shallows, your guts clench, and the worst possible things happen? It sounded like a mad scientist’s torture experiment.
Yet people rush to participate.
Horror is the fastest-rising film genre. Its market share was more than 10 percent in 2023, twice as high as its 4.87 percent a decade earlier. There are sequels, reboots, and franchises. And there is a future, because the most devoted watchers are Gen Z. (On the other hand, they may outgrow it. Horror has always been more attractive to the young. Either they have not yet experienced it in real life, or they have felt it all too well.)
Even horror fiction in book form, where I first noticed this trend, is increasingly popular; Nielsen data reported a 54 percent increase between 2022 and 2023, and 2024 was horror’s best year ever. Back to film: last year, Substance was nominated for Academy Awards in the Best Original Screenplay, Best Achievement in Directing, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, and Best Motion Picture of the Year categories. Sinners broke box office records around the world.
This makes a certain sense. We are all horrified. Political anxiety, environmental anxiety, economic anxiety, AI anxiety, contagion anxiety, sexual anxiety, and warring factions in one’s own country, all in a world where power and wealth are concentrating fast…. Finding entertainment in horror might be homeopathic. And because we are all desensitized, the horror has to ramp up.
Halloween is for grownups now, a perhaps related development. And category lines are blurring, so there is room for techno-horror and horror-comedy and nostalgia-horror and even short-form horror on TikTok. These are mere details, though, next to the angst. Uncertain times have always triggered an interest in horror; when the world was raw from the shock of the Great Depression, Dracula and Frankenstein showed up.
They look quaint now, the black-and-white film drained of blood, the pacing slow and theatrical. But they were deep-down serious. The slashers and monsters that followed, in happier times, were less so.
Today, we want more intense, faster-paced, more graphic psychological and supernatural horror. Also folk horror, which reflects our loss of tradition and community and a connection to nature. Or body horror, which channels anxieties about technology and societal beauty standards. Or tech horror. Or eco-horror.
Why can I take no comfort in any of them? I skip past the psychiatrists who explain how adrenaline stimulates dopamine, exciting and rewarding us. Fear has never felt like a carnival prize to me. But this explanation from British film scholar Steven Gerrard does make sense: “Horror allows us to confront our anxieties in a controlled space, where the boundaries between reality and fiction are firmly drawn.” Not only can we tell ourselves this is make-believe, but we know it will end.
Still, when I enter a film or book, I am in it. The three ways people can tolerate horror: by feeling safe because they keep a frame around the make-believe, by staying detached, and by feeling confident that they could triumph in that situation, outrun those zombies, escape the alien—none of those works for me. Nor do I want to rehearse new coping skills for zombies and aliens.
And so, this hunger for horror mystified me. Until I read the plots. In Blood Barn, “strange and violent events erupt without warning, turning the peaceful escape into chaos when a malevolent force awakens and begins to tear the group apart.” Sounds like the 2024 election. In Companion, a couple takes a vacation with friends and learns that one of them is actually an AI companion robot.In Substance, Demi Moore injects herself with a mysterious new serum that promises to erase the wear and tear of age. In another—I will leave out the title for fear of spoiling the fear—a couple trying to figure out whether they are meant to be together, and what being a couple even means today, find themselves literally fused. In 28 Years Later, a rage virus has escaped from a biological weapons laboratory (I love the way we credit viruses with agency, saying that one escapes rather than “was inadvertently released”) and people must live amongst the infected.
Aristotle would be amused; horror is proving the catharsis he attributed to tragedy. Instead of watching someone learn that he has married his own mother and gouge his eyes out in remorse, or a woman give her brother an honorable burial in defiance of the state and be sentenced to death, we conjure up monsters, human and inhuman. It is less complicated.
Yet here, perversely, is the hope. At least, it seemed hopeful at first—until I realized that it might be an indication of just how anxious we really are. The best new horror is complicated; it is serious again, not silly or cartoonish. Its effects might be lurid, but the issues are grittily realistic, the terror more subtly delivered. Villains are complex, caught up in moral dilemmas of their own. Threats are recognizable; issues are drawn straight from life.
We need less imagination to be scared.
