From TikTok to the box office, fear is selling better than ever

Are you horrified yet?

Horror has always been the genre of uneasy times, and 2025 is no exception. Once dismissed as schlock or teenage thrills, it has gone prestige, mainstream, and viral all at once. 

Since its Sept. 5 release, The Conjuring: Last Rites has grossed more than $400 million. TikTok teems with horror-core aesthetics. Horror novels from Silvia Moreno-Garcia to Rachel Harrison and Grady Hendrix routinely make bestseller lists. Meanwhile, Frankenstein itself still sells about 40,000 copies a year, more than two centuries after its debut.

Why? The world feels scarier, and audiences want a way to process their fears. Psychologists say scary movies offer a form of controlled exposure therapy: You rehearse your dread in the theater so you can live with it outside. Plus, horror has one of the best risk-reward ratios in the entertainment industry — cheap to make, easy to market, and capable of creating a global sensation overnight. 

To learn more, scroll down below — if you dare.

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By the digits

40,000: Copies of Frankenstein sold annually in English alone — which is not to count the millions of copies already in print.

$4.25 million: Budget for Talk to Me, prestige horror house A24’s best-returning film so far, which earned more than $100 million. That’s a return of 2,200%+ against budget.

350-400 million: Total books Stephen King is estimated to have sold throughout his career.

$402 million: Global box office haul for The Conjuring: Last Rites, made on a $55 million budget. Less than a month after its release, it’s the highest-grossing film of the whole franchise.

Why horror feels good when the world doesn’t

One paradox of horror’s popularity is that people turn to it for comfort. Yes, really. Research suggests that watching scary movies helps people practice emotional regulation, testing out how they cope with fear and stress in a controlled environment. The terror comes with an off switch: You can leave the theater, close the book, swipe away.

This partly explains why horror thrives in eras of instability — the Great Depression (which gave us Universal’s iconic monsters), the Cold War (Godzilla, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the 1970s malaise (Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and now our own age of plagues, climate change, AI anxiety, and political battles.

“I think the immediate answer is the ever-applicable ‘gestures to everything happening all around us’ moment we currently find ourselves in,” the horror novelist Clay McLeod Chapman told Quartz when asked to explain the category’s exponential growth. “As real-world fears integrate themselves into our daily fabric, directly or indirectly, the escape into metaphorical horrors seems to offer a necessary salve.” Chapman added that the diversity of the genre is contributing to growth, too. “Horror has always been a big umbrella of subgenres,” he said. “Now those stories are being told by a wider range of storytellers.”

The other explanation is commercial. Horror consistently delivers the best returns in Hollywood. Studios like Blumhouse and even more recently A24 have built empires on micro-budgets and viral marketing. Publishers have taken note, too, reviving classics while promoting a new wave of horror that blurs into literary fiction. 

In other words, fear sells. But in selling, it also soothes.

News. Without Motives. That’s 1440

Quotable

“When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.”

Pop quiz

What does the horror subgenre “sporror” focus on?

Check out the answer at the bottom of this email.

Brief history

1931: Frankenstein premieres, launching Universal’s monster era.

1968: Night of the Living Dead debuts, inventing the modern zombie.

1973: The Exorcist becomes the first horror film nominated for Best Picture.

2017: Get Out wins an Oscar, sparking the “elevated horror” conversation.

Fun fact

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Poll

Why do you think horror is booming?

1. It’s cheap and profitable
2. It’s cathartic
3. It’s trendy on TikTok
4. The world feels scary