In a moment marked by economic anxiety, concerns over artificial intelligence, and geopolitical instability, frightening fiction is thriving. From the page to the big screen, horror has had a massive year.
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.
What is it about a horror story that allows it to latch its claws into our minds and pull us in? Why would we seek out an experience that produces in us a feeling of fear and anxiety? After all, we spend most of our lives trying to avoid these emotions.
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.
Understanding why we crave fear helps explain more than horror’s hold on Hollywood: It reveals how we confront uncertainty, test our limits, and find a sense of control when the world feels frightening enough already.
Who loves horror
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.
Curiosity, specifically about situations that can cause injury or death, is perfectly normal and common. Morbid curiosity motivates us to learn about dangers, something that all animals can benefit from.
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.
Another group of horror fans seems to enjoy scary stories because they offer a safe opportunity to work through feelings of dread, anxiety, and other difficult thoughts. We called this group the “dark copers.” While this may sound odd at first, horror fans and morbidly curious individuals reported higher levels of psychological resilience during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, even when controlling for other personality traits and demographic factors.
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
Many animals show some curiosity for things that might be dangerous. Zebras will cautiously observe lions as they lounge, and minnows will swim up to a pike to keep an eye on it. However, humans are the most morbidly curious creatures of all because of our ability to ask “What if?”
In horror, the human capacity for imagination really shines.
We concoct detailed stories of possible encounters with all sorts of beings, some of which we know well, and others that live only in the darkest recesses of our minds. We play out scenarios imagining what might happen if we, or someone like us, encountered a terrible situation.
In real life, an encounter with danger is a costly way to learn. Our minds long for safe ways to learn about dangerous situations.
Because of horror’s position as a sandbox for misfortune, consumers tend to reward horror films that reflect their generation’s anxieties. For instance, the unbelievably destructive ability of atomic bombs captured the imagination of those living in the late 1940s and 1950s. Anxiety about the future of this new atomic age spawned several radiation-borne monsters, the most famous of which was the Japanese film Godzilla (1954).
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.
In the 21st century, “elevated horror” has taken hold, with films like The Babadook (2014) and Hereditary (2018) portraying anxieties about trauma and mental health. And then there are films like Get Out (2017) and Parasite (2019), which took on the tense social issues of race and class. While the 2026 hits Backrooms and Obsession may seem to touch on fairly unrelated topics, each has a foothold in the minds of modern consumers.
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.
Meaninglessness is on the minds of this generation, too. A 2025 Gallup poll reports that 39% of Gen-Z adults feel like their life mostly lacks meaning, with slightly more saying they lack a sense of purpose. Mental health outlooks are similar, with a 2024 McKinsey survey reporting that nearly 1 in 3 Gen-Z respondents in the U.S. report poor mental health.
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 many ways, Bear’s situation resembles men of this generation more than previous generations. One survey found that 44% of Gen-Z men did not date at all as teens, compared to 32% of Millennials and 23% of Gen-X. This may be due to a lack of confidence. A 2026 study by the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies found that only about 1 in 3 young men express confidence in their ability to approach a potential romantic partner.
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.
To be sure, scary stories have been with us as long as any other type of story, but we seem to be in a golden age of horror, and cultural institutions are taking note. From The Substance (2024) and Sinners (2025) to Bugonia (2025) and Frankenstein (2025), dark films with horror themes are now consistently receiving critical acclaim from the Academy.
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.
Humans learn quite well from the mistakes of others, and horror stories trade in poor choices. In this way, horror offers us a uniquely powerful tool to process social concerns.
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.
