A century of fear

What replaced the slasher?

For a generation of viewers, horror meant a masked man with a knife: Halloween and Friday the 13th set off a cycle of slasher films that defined the genre in the 1980s.^4,5 Horror today looks different. Different how, and since when?

Ghosts, mostly, and slowly: the change took four decades. In 1975–84, at the height of the slasher boom, 23% of horror films were about killers and 9% about ghosts. By 2015–24, killers were down to 15% and ghosts up to 16%.

But the two trends didn’t move together. Killer films have declined steadily since the early 1980s, from 26% of horror films to 14% today. Ghost stories rose in two waves: first in the early 1980s, led by The Shining and Poltergeist, then in the early 2000s, led by Ringu, Ju-on and their Hollywood remakes⁶. The pattern holds for big hits and obscure releases alike, in Hollywood and abroad.

Behind those two numbers is a wider change. What shrank was killers, mutants, killer animals and witches. What grew was dread closer to home: ghosts, psychological horror, demons and home invasion, what critics have since called ‘elevated horror’ or ‘post-horror’⁷.

Do the famous films tell the whole story?

Histories of horror are written from the films people remember: the hits, the classics, the films that get remade and taught. If those films are a fair sample, the histories hold. If not, whole trends can go unnoticed.

They are not a fair sample. Take the 1,106 horror films with Wikipedia articles in at least 20 languages, the ones historians write about and everyone has heard of. Compared with all horror films from the same decades, they hold a third fewer ghost stories (9% instead of 13%) and fewer killers, but far more spectacle than horror as a whole: 2.7 times the share of giant monsters, 74% more aliens and 45% more vampires. The rise of the ghost story happened mostly in films that never became famous.

Fame and quality only loosely go together. Films with articles in 40 or more languages average 6.8 on TMDB, against 6.2 for all films with 300+ ratings, but Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) has articles in 42 languages at a rating of 4.2.

Does horror mirror the news?

Horror is often read as a barometer: each era’s monsters stand for what that era feared.^1,2 If that is right, the genre is a record of a century’s anxieties. If not, it is a story critics tell after the fact.

Up to 1990, the data backs the historians. After that, the story changes. In 1989 the sociologist Andrew Tudor studied nearly 1,000 horror films released in Britain⁸ and found fear moving closer to home over the century: away from gothic monsters and mad laboratories, towards the disturbed human mind.

Across all the films, the first half of that story holds. In the 1950s, the decade of H-bomb tests and Sputnik, science gone wrong peaked.¹ Around 1956 it accounted for nearly half of the horror films whose threat is clear (48%), from Them! to The Fly, against 10% today. From the 1960s through the 1980s, after Psycho, human killers and disturbed minds led, just as Tudor found.

Then the pendulum swung back. Since the 1990s, the supernatural has been behind at least 40% of horror films in every decade. The post-9/11 years are often remembered for ‘torture porn’,^9,10 because Saw and Hostel were hits. Across the thousands of other horror films made in the 2000s, killer films held steady at 21%; the growth was in ghosts.

How much of cinema is horror?

Every few years, horror is said to be having a boom. Is it a bigger part of cinema than it used to be?

Not among the films people watch: it was one film in five in the 1970s and 80s, and is one in seven now. Among films with at least 20 ratings on TMDB, which leaves out the truly obscure, horror made up about 20% of releases from 1970 to 1990 and has hovered around 13% since 1995. Count every film in the database and horror’s share jumps from 4% in 1975 to 14% in 2020: a flood of micro-budget films that almost no one has seen. Much of that flood is ghost stories: since 2010, 18% of the films too obscure to have 20 ratings are about ghosts, against 14% of the rest.

Do horror sequels hold up?

Horror is the genre of the franchise: few others turn one hit into ten films. Are the sequels worth watching?

Rarely. In 32 of the 40 most-rated horror franchises, the original is still the best-rated film, and the films that follow score a full point lower on average on TMDB’s 10-point scale, with the same drop on MovieLens. Waiting ten years or more is a coin toss: of 24 such films, 13 beat the one before them. Halloween (2018) climbed to 6.6 after Halloween: Resurrection scored 4.6; Psycho II (1983) fell to 6.5 from the original’s 8.4. The hardest falls came after the greatest originals: Jaws (7.7, then 4.9 on average), Psycho (8.4, then 6.0 on average) and The Exorcist (7.7, then 5.5 on average). Of the 8 franchises whose best film came later, 5 owe it to a film from the last five years, whose ratings are still settling, such as The Forever Purge.

Which stories keep coming back?

Remakes are as old as horror itself, and some stories have been filmed again in nearly every decade since the silent era. Which ones?

Two nineteenth-century novels above all. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been filmed again in 8 decades since its first adaptation in 1910, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starting with the unauthorised Nosferatu in 1922, in 7. The Fall of the House of Usher and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde share third place, with 5 decades each.

Where is horror made?

Horror is often treated as a Hollywood genre, but every film industry has its own monsters. How American is it, and what does everyone else fear?

More American than anything else: the United States made between 32% and 56% of each decade’s horror films since 1950. Elsewhere, horror came in national waves: Japan in the 1950s, the decade of Godzilla (17%); Britain in the 1960s, the heyday of Hammer¹¹ (12%); Hong Kong in the 1950s (10%); Italy in the 1970s, during the giallo boom¹² (10%).

Each country also has its own signature nightmare: the theme it makes far more often than the world does. Japan, the home of Godzilla, makes giant monsters 7 times as often as the world; Australia, killer animals 3.1 times; Italy, cannibals 2.5 times. Ghost stories make up 60% of India’s horror films, 59% of Thailand’s, 41% of South Korea’s and 40% of Hong Kong’s, against 14% worldwide. Witchcraft makes up 14% of Indonesia’s horror films and 7% of Mexico’s, against 3% worldwide.

How do people describe each decade?

How viewers talk about horror changes too, and the words they reach for say what they remember about each era.

Every era has its own buzzwords. On TMDB, users tag films with keywords, and some tags turn up far more often in one decade than in any other. ‘Mad scientist’ peaks in the 1940s and fades by the 1960s; ‘slasher’ defines the 1980s and remains a staple; ‘found footage’ takes over in the 2010s.