Why Hollywood Loves Horror Movies, in Four Charts

In the past decade, horror movies have captured a growing share of the North American box office and now regularly account for about $1 billion worth of annual ticket sales, or 10% of moviegoing in the US and Canada. This year, more than a month before Halloween, the genre has already grossed $587 million, boosted by hits including A Quiet Place: Day One, Alien: Romulus and Longlegs, the breakout indie film. (That’s roughly on par with last year but high relative to years prior.) Even as the wider box office struggles to return to pre-pandemic levels, horror has become a relatively dependable genre for theaters. “The communal experience of watching a horror film in the cinema is unmatched,” says Anthony LaVerde, chief executive officer of the Emagine Entertainment Inc. chain, which has 330 screens throughout the Midwest. “There’s a unique energy that comes from sharing the suspense, the screams and the thrill with others.”

That adrenaline rush differentiates horror from genres such as comedy and drama, which over the past decade have seen their box-office hauls shrink as streaming platforms including Netflix and Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video have trained audiences to expect such movies to premiere on their phones or in their homes rather than in cinemas. This shift has resulted in a flight to fright for producers and moviegoers, with horror pulling in 70% more box-office dollars in 2023 than the genre did in 2013.

That financial model has remained unchanged over the past decade, from The Conjuring, which grossed more than $316 million on a budget of $20 million in 2013, to M3GAN, which grossed $181 million on a $12 million budget in 2022. M3GAN, a movie about an artificially intelligent doll on a murderous rampage, appealed to younger audiences thanks, in part, to a creepy dance she does that went viral on TikTok. Such material has been crucial in building the appeal of horror for Generation Z, which since the pandemic has been the genre’s most fervent customer base. A survey in October 2022 found that 66% of Gen Z respondents had watched a horror film in theaters in the prior 12 months, compared with 42% of millennials, 23% of Gen Xers and 6% of baby boomers.

For studios, the horror genre also benefits from an enviably low bar for financial success. Unlike, say, action movies, which usually have a high cost of production because of special effects and multimillion-dollar paydays for actors, horror films often cast unknown performers. In recent years, successful films including Barbarian, Smile and The Black Phone each grossed 10 times their budget at the box office, making them among the most profitable initiatives in modern moviemaking. The $217 million in global ticket sales for Smile, the most successful horror picture in 2022, is less than the production budget for a typical Marvel Studios superhero film, which has a much higher breakeven threshold.

If you’re intrigued by the horror genre but too frightened to watch alone at home, fear not. Several movies arriving later this year could provide motivation to get to the theater. There’s a mix of ghoulish sequels and remakes on the way, from Smile 2 (Oct. 18) to Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (Dec. 25), which has cinephiles on the community website Letterboxd ready, as the trailer says, to succumb to the darkness.