“What’s your favorite scary movie?”
That question became famous because of 1996’s hit horror movie Scream. It was posed to Drew Barrymore’s ill-fated character, who hesitated before answering, and the question has only become harder since. Today, in 2026, there is just so much good stuff to choose from. We are living in a new Golden Age of horror. Hundreds of new horror movies come out each year, and while far from all of them are worth your time, the top-shelf stuff alone is incredibly abundant.
Just within the last couple of years, we have seen a crop of well-made and genuinely frightening horror movies draw huge audiences, such as Sinners (2025), Weapons (2025), Backrooms (2026), and Obsession (2026). Obsession, made for a measly million dollars at most, garnered more than $500 million in revenue. Both Sinners and Weapons won Oscars, a pretty rare event for a horror movie, and Sinners did so after a record 16 nominations. And Backrooms as well as Obsession were, surprisingly, directed by industry outsiders who had cut their cinematic teeth creating YouTube content.
Why Horror Is Booming
There are many reasons for the current boom. With streaming, even the weirdest horror movie finds its audience. Horror is cheap to make and needs neither stars nor a familiar franchise, so a hit pays back many times over. It is also one of the few genres that still gets young people into theaters at a time when superhero sequels are faltering. And after centuries of suspicion—frightening entertainment has been accused of being morally corrosive, psychologically harmful, and symptomatic of a sick society, none of which is true—horror is finally climbing the cultural hierarchy.
Scary Times, Scary Movies
The one factor I want to zoom in on, however, is psychological, and perhaps a little paradoxical. I think a major reason for the current abundance (and box office success) of horror is that the appetite for horror increases with society-level anxiety.
Many people feel that we are living in unprecedentedly frightening times; that the world is scarier than it used to be, with war, political unrest and extreme polarization, shifting geopolitical tectonics, climate change fostering a helpless sort of dread, and so on. It makes intuitive sense that a frightening world would produce frightening fiction. But why would people want more of it?
We have discussed this in the Recreational Fear Lab, because that’s the sort of thing we discuss when we meet for lunch. Our ambition, after all, is to chart the psychological engine room of people’s tendency to wring pleasure from frightening activities. One compelling hypothesis comes from the master of horror, Stephen King, who in his 1981 nonfiction book about horror, Danse Macabre, suggested that “we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” He went on to explain that the horror genre seems to achieve extraordinary popularity at certain historical moments that “almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and/or political strain.” The horror books and films that become popular during such times, said King, “seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties (for want of a better term) which accompany such serious but not mortal dislocations.”
Evidence From the Pandemic
Could King be right? There is some indirect evidence.
First, consider Contagion, a 2011 movie about a deadly new virus. It did respectable business when it came out, then shot up the rental and streaming charts in the early days of the COVID pandemic. The scenario depicted in the film suddenly seemed terribly relevant, and people were looking for ways to understand their unsettling reality. Fiction provided a map for the uncharted territory in which they found themselves.
Second, consider a study conducted in our lab (Scrivner et al., 2021) during the darkest days of pandemic lockdown, in the spring of 2020. Societies were closing down, the streets were as empty as the supermarket shelves, the news showed footage of overflowing morgues—it all seemed like something out of a zombie movie, sans zombies.
We set out to investigate whether horror fans were more psychologically resilient during those frightening times, on the premise that when you watch a horror movie, you practice emotion regulation. You suppress fear and anxiety in order to not be overwhelmed, and to hit that sweet spot of fear (Andersen et al., 2020). And horror fans did turn out to be more resilient. Moreover, fans of prepper movies—movies about the end of the world, zombie apocalypses, alien invasions, and so on—felt better prepared for whatever the immediate future might throw at them. That’s why we called the article “Pandemic Practice.” We also found that morbidly curious people were more interested in pandemic movies during the pandemic: Their appetite rose with the threat. The study was correlational, so it may simply be that resilient people are drawn to horror. But the pattern fits King’s idea.
Horror stories may help us imaginatively prep. They allow us to rehearse, in the safety of our imaginations, worst-case scenarios, and in the process build coping capacity. In a sense, it’s not that different from soldiers spending thousands of hours simulating combat so that they are ready for the real thing. Horror, likewise, can function as a form of threat simulation (Clasen et al., 2020).
Symptom and Cure
The current boom in horror movies may thus tell us something about our culture—it may be a symptom of a frightened society. But curiously, it may also be the cure. By imaginatively exposing ourselves to fictional depictions of our darkest fears—the fear that we are failing to protect our children in Weapons, say, or the fear of what loneliness and romantic entitlement can turn into in Obsession, or the unease of a life lived online in Backrooms—we improve our coping capacity. Those movies convert our “free-floating anxieties” into tangible fear, which can be resolved. This idea is speculative for now, but it is a thesis that we are hoping to investigate scientifically in the Lab.
So the next time someone asks about your favorite scary movie, take your time. There has never been more to choose from, and watching may do you some good.
