From Jump Scares To Oozing Scars: The Changing Currency Of Horror Over The Years

At this year’s Oscars, two performances from horror films won big—Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan and Weapons’ Amy Madigan. It’s long-due vengeance wrought by the triumphs, given how other great horror film performances like Hereditary’s (2018) Toni Collette and Us’ (2019) Lupita Nyong’o were snubbed in the award season. The road to horror gaining legitimacy has been long, riding on the back of critical and commercial momentum earned over the past decade. For years, horror was seen as lowbrow, despite constant popularity. It was viewed as unintelligent and divorced from serious annual roundup. The genre did run into a slump in the 90s with the proliferation of slasher franchises. The early 2000s demonstrated a pivot to zombie films, like the cultural re-setter 28 Days Later (2002) and Resident Evil (2002). As consumerism skyrocketed, zombie mania grew rampant.

However, with recent outbreaks such as Sinners and Weapons, the gates to the cultural consecration of horror have been opened. In 2025, scary movies account for 17 percent of the North American ticket purchases, up from 11 percent in 2024 and four percent a decade ago, according to Comscore data compiled exclusively for Reuters. Horror hits right at the flight-or-fight impulse, a thrilling communal sensation. It tears through the polite veneers of society and thrusts discomfort into clear view.

Mapping Horror's History

Horror has long been a genre anchored in sociopolitical and cultural angst. It is primal and visceral, often articulating rage and paranoia of the times far more effectively than the standard drama. During a 2016 discussion at the New York Film Academy, John Carpenter said, “Horror has been with cinema since the very beginning. It grew up part and parcel with the image, with cinema. And it will always be with us. It’s one of the most popular genres of all time. And it’s an all-purpose genre because it keeps changing. Every culture, every few years, it morphs, it changes into something else. It brings the sensibilities of the age in which it’s made and that’s what’s so fabulous.”

Even a cursory skimming of horror over the decades seems to show that the genre draws on contemporary social landscapes. Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) responded to the mounting unease around the US war on Vietnam and racial/class inequities during the Civil Rights era. In Night of the Living Dead, the protagonist, a Black man, is mistaken for a zombie and killed by the law enforcement. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975) spun allegories for patriarchal oppression of female agency. The 1980s saw the suburbs as the idealisation of postwar American dream. However, slashers like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) blew up this fantasy of safe spaces, turning them into the hunting ground for serial killers and rampaging stalkers. Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, starring Julianne Moore, is pure psychological horror excavating ecological ruin and alienation, mining the eerie in the mundane. The spectre in The Babadook (2014) is a receptacle for grief, guilt and depression.

What Drives Horror's Enduring Appeal?

During a 2019 interview with the L.A. Times, author and Horror Writers Association president John Palisano proposed a theory for horror’s regenerative appeal. “Horror is speaking to all generations in a way it never has before. In the 1950s, it gave people a way to deal with atomic fears; in the ’60s, horror addressed societal change; again in the ’70s, with consumerism, and the ’80s, with AIDS. Now, the entire country is unified in a threat we’ve never had to face before: the threat from within. And it speaks to both sides [of the political divide].” Horror reshapes paranoia around government instability and environmental malaise, transforming the incomprehension into fantastical, supernatural forms. In a 2025 essay for The Atlantic, Guillermo del Toro says, “To know what we fear is to know who we are. It illuminates the negative space within us.”

In a zeitgeist where there’s a lot of repression, control and surveillance, horror helps unwind. It reads into our anxieties and fears, channelling them towards a cathartic explosion. It bounces back the real world in exaggerated, nevertheless familiar strokes. Increasingly, as we are being herded into homogeneity and submission, the genre’s thrills rip open defiant undercurrents. Filmmakers are no longer just going for ghosts in the basement or narratives of demonic possession. Yes, those remain an easy cash mill, but other subgenres like body horror have gained enormous following. It leans on the constant violence and mutilation visited on the human body in the genre, while going beyond just gory spectacles.

Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar-nominated The Substance was one of the most hotly debated films of 2024—a pungent skewering of the race to reinstate normative beauty standards. Within its swap of bodies between a senior actress and a newbie, desire for renewed popularity is encoded. The Substance stages this clash as its big dramatic reckoning, ultimately peaking in a violent, messy eruption. The ticking clock for the bodies to swap isn’t heeded, resulting in gradually gruesome consequences. The body crinkles and depletes into its worst nightmare—the celebrity becomes exactly what she dreaded. But like all fascinatingly flawed films, The Substance invites dialogue and provocation. In its upbraiding of ageism, how far does it go for shock alone? Do the juxtapositions between Sue’s svelte, hyper-sexualised projection and her eventual monstrous unravelling reaffirm or undercut the misogynistic gaze?

This draws out body horror’s inherent links between corporeality and identity, violence and agency. Other notable titles from 2024, such as Love Lies Bleeding, Tiger Stripes and I Saw The TV Glow, have also tilted into body horror. Films of the new horror auteurs like Zach Cregger, Ari Aster, Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers have been slotted as ‘elevated horror’—like a respectful mantel well above the schlocky, grisly horror. Peele, though, has denounced the term as a trap. These are far from the Blumhouse productions that dominated the 2010s, straddling Paranormal Activity, Insidious and The Conjuring franchises.

Terminologically, elevated horror is problematic and oblivious of the genre’s social history, but their connotations seem clear. These employ a sustained, slow drip of dread and unease, instead of dialling up jump scares. Horror also enables budding auteurs to go bold, dream big and take wild swings. Studios seem to reflect a keener appetite for trials in this genre than others. Within six months, Neon landed two successive titles from Osgood Perkins, churning out Longlegs and The Monkey. The fact that horror may demand relatively modest budgets encourages studios to take greater risks in this genre. So, even a marginal box office run yields decent returns. The conquest of Sinners appears as the shifting needle for the genre, wherein drama and ambition are scaled up and the terrain freshly mined for continued awe.