Why Are Movies So Scary?

By Patrick Ingold

This summer, Disney released Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (Jon Favreau, 2026) in theaters. Normally, a Star Wars film would be a financially safe bet, especially when the last theatrical release for the franchise was seven years ago. However, instead of being a box office hit, the film was a whimper, just barely making back its budget of $165 million. It would seem that audiences were more interested in the two franchiseless (web series notwithstanding) horror films: Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026) and Obsession (Curry Barker, 2026). This is not an entirely new trend. For much of the 2020s, horror films have been dominating the cultural landscape. Many of the new and popular filmmakers on the scene, such as Zach Cregger, Robert Eggers, Jane Schoenbrun, Jordan Peele, and, of course, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, are horror directors. Horror has never been an unpopular genre, but why does it seem to resonate so heavily now with younger generations? Why are box office juggernauts failing to keep up with unknown directors’ debut features? 

The fears and anxieties portrayed in horror films have long been reflective of the time in which they were made: the spread of communism in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), child predators in IT (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1990), loss of identity in Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), or the sexual revolution in countless classic slashers. Whatever the culture is lying awake thinking about at night is what horror is reflecting. So, what are the current cultural fears? It’s hard to pinpoint. We’ve just come out of a pandemic that we’ve yet to economically or socially recover from. We’ve found ourselves in multiple geopolitical conflicts, each one feeling as if it could blossom into another world war. Technology and the state have converged to create a surveillance apparatus that is as invasive as it is shameless. The prevalence of social media has turned any social event into a virtual panopticon in which we are all prisoners and wardens. Essentially, young people have a lot to be afraid of. 

It should then be no wonder that horror movies have become so popular among such a neurotic and anxious generation. And it would seem that the anxieties many directors are most interested in exploring are our social ones. There isn’t exactly an “other” for us to be afraid of anymore. Communism isn’t the same scary buzzword that it used to be, the War on Terror has more or less fizzled out to the point that the mayor of New York is Muslim (something that would make even the most progressive Democrat sweat back in the late ‘00s), and genuine homophobia has been out of fashion for some time now. Without a strong outsider to project our fears onto, they’ve instead turned inward as we have begun to examine what about ourselves scares us. 

I mentioned Obsession earlier, so let’s take a closer look at it as an example. I would say that Obsession is one of the few films in recent memory to have so accurately and so thoroughly captured the Gen Z zeitgeist, which is probably why so many people in the older generations seem to dislike it. You see, perhaps the most worrying social divide that is currently apparent, even more so than political or religious ones, is the divide among the genders. Men, women, and enbies are all terrified of each other. I think most people walk away from Obsession thinking, “Poor Nikki. Bear is such a piece of shit.” And while that is a fundamentally correct view of the characters, it neglects the broader themes of the film. Why does Bear make his wish in the first place? Because, consciously or not, he wants a shortcut to love without any of the pain that it takes to get there. He fears vulnerability, so he doesn’t tell his friends about his cat dying, and even when he does, he tries to pass it off as no big deal. He doesn’t tell Nikki about his feelings for her because he fears not only the vulnerability, but what she’ll think of him. From the male perspective, the horror of Obsession comes from this culture of post-irony and hyper-awareness we’ve made for ourselves; one where men fear that they come across as creeps or predators simply for finding someone attractive. Because social media has given us a window into what everyone thinks about at any given moment, we’ve started to think about ourselves too much. We worry about every interaction and mannerism. Bear is the result of this ecosystem. 

Of course, Obsession also accurately depicts this kind of modern horror from the female perspective, in which they are forced into a relationship that they do not want by an outside actor. Something I personally love about Obsession is that before the wish, Nikki is kind of an asshole. She mocks Bear (albeit in jest) for ordering a piña colada, ignores the fact that he’s upset about something, and then takes her friend’s money to give to a homeless man so she can act like she’s kind. The point of this is twofold: firstly, it shows that Bear has created an idealized version of Nikki in his head that the real Nikki does not and cannot live up to. Secondly, it establishes that even if Nikki isn’t that great a person, she still doesn’t deserve what happens to her. The rape allegory in the film is obvious, but Nikki’s autonomy isn’t violated just once; it’s violated continually and constantly. For much of the film, she has none at all. This horror is sadly far less abstract than the male perspective. Nikki’s ordeal in the film is a microcosm of the rape culture that women around the world live in, and while its ending isn’t exactly what one would describe as happy, it only becomes worse when you imagine what happens after the credits roll. From an outside perspective, it will seem that Nikki went crazy and killed three of her friends, and she will only trade one prison for another. The culture of rape and imprisonment will be inescapable to her. 

I would be remiss if I wrote an article about horror movies in the modern cultural landscape and didn’t talk about the one that brought home a few awards: Sinners (Coogler, 2025). Although once Sinners entered the conversation in awards season, it suddenly became a “Supernatural Thriller” rather than a horror film, but my gripes with the academy’s treatment of the genre is an essay for another day. The horror in Sinners is rooted in racism. More specifically, assimilation. The question the film presents to its audience is this: Is the acceptance from the dominant culture worth the subjugation of the subculture? From this angle, I would argue the film’s villain, Remmick, while hostile to the main cast, is not an antagonist as much as he is a foil. An antagonist would want to stop the party and shut down the juke joint. Remmick wants to be part of the party, or rather, he wants the party to be part of him. Remmick is the end point of assimilation. Nothing about him resembles an Irish Celt. His cultural identity has been erased and absorbed into the dominant culture. The worst part of that is that he’s embraced it and is even happy with it. Sure, he’ll do an Irish jig, or say The Lord’s Prayer in an Irish accent, but even these artifacts came into existence a few hundred years after he was supposedly turned into a vampire. The threat he represents is not death, or even racism in its base form, but cultural defanging. While the themes of the film are firmly rooted in race, I believe that they can be applied to a broader generational anxiety: Does counter-culture exist anymore? 

That might seem like a strange question, especially on this campus, but consider that I can walk into any mall in this country and buy a mass-produced, made-in-China Green Day T-shirt. Consider that goth culture has been reduced and fetishized into a porn category. Consider that hip-hop has become one of the most popular genres in the country, at the cost of anything that once made it subversive. Once capital finds a way to market a subculture, it strips it of meaning and value until it becomes a parody of itself. 

As a young person, it is hard to feel as if things will get better. Men and women can’t get along, nothing is subversive, and a failing economy has set us on course for war. Our government is filled with people who are either incompetent or evil or both. In such times, a usual comfort would be to say that we’ll at least get some good protest art, but even that hasn’t been true. However, there is some small consolation in getting together, going to the theater, and agreeing, “Yeah, man. Shit’s fucked.”