When it comes to Hollywood, it might seem inappropriate to bring out Charles Dickens’ famous line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The combination of COVID, strikes, an underwhelming streaming model, and typical corporate reliance on stereotyped storylines has vampirically sucked the blood out of the American film industry. Making matters worse, superhero and action movies have leveled off in popularity and can no longer carry a studio’s bottom line. All these factors have resulted in North American box office revenue in 2024 being $8.6 billion, 23 percent lower than in the golden film days of 2019. In addition, ticket sales dropped from approximately 1.2 billion in 2019 to fewer than 0.7 billion in 2022, which means attendance has nearly halved within just a few years. Closer to the present, the first quarter of 2025 saw earnings in the U.S. and Canada at $1.34 billion, a seven percent decline from the same period in 2024 (March 2025 specifically was down 50 percent year-over-year).
Back to Dickens, one may wonder what the “best of times” is.
The answer is the horror genre.
From The Conjuring: Last Rights to Weapons to Final Destination Bloodlines, horror movies have dominated the box office recently and secured hallowed places in Rotten Tomatoes scores. The category’s share of North American ticket sales reached a record 17 percent in 2025, much higher than the 11 percent in 2024. That’s the highest market share for any genre in at least 30 years! When movies like The Conjuring: Last Rights are close to hitting half a billion dollars globally in revenue, you know the genre is officially in the big leagues.
It really is the best of times for scary movies, and that has extended to Black and other minority representation. As an example, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners remains one of the highest-grossing and critically acclaimed films of 2025, and is likely an Oscar contender. Black-created movies like Opus and The Woman in the Yard may not have been commercial monsters, but they were solid niche films that are popular today (the arthouse “A24 vibe” the public loves).
Why are horror African American filmmakers and horror films overall striking gold? What demographics are driving the horror renaissance, and is this a broader cultural shift? What lessons are there for Hollywood in general?
It’s no secret that the horror genre was broken in the early 2000s. The category had exhausted its various tropes: serial killers, haunted locations, supernatural villains, and so on. It lost so much gravitas that it became caricaturized, from the Scary Movie franchise to Rick & Morty to parody Halloween costumes. Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger have become humorous memes, rather than representing our collective analytical Shadow. The genre should have gone the way of the Western and other movie niches. That didn’t happen. Filmmakers became responsible with budgets, took narrative risks, got creative with plots, and expanded their source material. The results have been rewarding.
And demographics have mainly supported the rejuvenated genre?
Gen Z and people of color.
Today, Zoomers comprise about a third of horror movie audiences, and 91 percent admit to enjoying scary flicks. Gender interest is balanced; however, the horror genre attracts greater racial and ethnic diversity than most. African American attendance is more than double the overall moviegoing benchmark (30.4% vs. 13%). Fourteen of the top twenty theatrical films in 2024 ranked by Black audience share were horror movies. Hispanic audiences have reached over 40 percent for particular horror titles, significantly exceeding the genre’s benchmark of 22 percent.
The horror genre is where both movie success and representation are happening in Hollywood. And this includes filmmakers. Ever since Jordan Peele’s Get Out took the world by storm in 2017, Black and other minority led horror films have been an essential part of the genre’s revival. Directors like Nia DaCosta and Ryan Coogler have become exemplars in the industry. I Saw the TV Glow (2024), directed by trans woman Jane Flannery Schoenbrun, enjoyed the kind of critical success typically reserved for avant-garde filmmakers like David Lynch. The HBO series Lovecraft Country was well-received and even reoriented some of the genre’s racist past while still tapping into the primordial essence of horror fiction. Again, Sinners might be the most talked-about box office behemoth of this year.
It really is the best of times for scary times, and it’s only getting better.
The horror genre has not only provided opportunities and interest for people of color and younger audiences, but also for women. Thanks to Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Ripley in the Alien franchise, the cliche of the hysterical, meek, and brutalized female lead has gradually eroded in movie plots. Complex and dynamic female protagonists dominate today’s lucrative horror movies, like Smile, Ready or Not, and The Substance. Forty-three percent of horror films featured female leads in 2023, the highest of any genre. This trend gave the character 53 percent of screen time and 47 percent of dialogue, matching or exceeding men in visibility and voice.
African American representation has undergone a much longer trajectory than that of women.
Son of Ingagi (1940) was the first horror film to have an all-Black cast. It was later followed by The Blood of Jesus (1941). Black actors occasionally appeared in horror movies, but often in marginal roles or race stereotypes like the plantation owner’s mistress or the Magical Negro.
There just wasn’t much, but a desert for representation in horror, until 1968, when Night of the Living Dead featured African American actor Duane Jones as the lead. Black horror films surged in the 1970s with Blacula, Ganja and Hesse, and others that also fell within the blaxploitation genre. African Americans widely appeared in mainstream horror movies, but unfortunately, they received the same fate as your average Star Trek nameless henchmen: an early death. This tropology is parodied brilliantly by LL Cool in the 1999 horror film Deep Blue Sea when his character, Preacher, has a semi-fourth wall moment and states, “Brothers never make it out of situations like this. Not ever!”
Spoiler: Preacher survives until the end of the film.
In the nineties, Black-centric horror movies like Candyman and Tales from the Hood brought African American themes to the forefront, made money, were widely embraced by all demographics, and became cult classics. However, it wasn’t until Peele and the overall reinvention of the horror genre that inclusivity truly took hold and proved profitable at the same time.
One would think that Hollywood executives would be salivating at the opportunity to ape horror’s runaway success in other parts of its crumbling empire. That pivot would also be beneficial for an industry that claims it promotes diversity and inclusivity.
The issue is that much of the horror genre, especially minority-driven, cannot be replicated on a spreadsheet or connect-the-dots screenplays.
Why is that?
First, good horror filmmaking is not only about gore or special effects, but also covers these elements:
The last element is key. In engaging horror movies, the supernatural trappings often conceal powerful cultural issues that the general public must face. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a masked tale about the fear of immigrants in the Victorian era. Zombie flicks are allegories about a terror of disease in a time of crowded cities and neighborhoods (reminds me of the skit in Key & Peele where two African Americans during a zombie apocalypse are avoided by suburban undead because of the color of their skin). The fierce Xenomorph of the Alien films, with its phallic head and pharyngeal jaw, is a metaphor for male sexual violence and dominance. I Saw the TV Glow is a symbolic account about transitioning within a nineties-era nostalgic, surreal horror drama.
Thus, impactful horror movies are not only about creating trauma, but also about facing and overcoming it, as an individual or a people. Horror filmmakers understand that lived experiences and cultural critiques are as crucial as latex and buckets of red dye.
And who better to tap into trauma, both collective and personal, than African Americans and other marginalized groups?
Black filmmakers have drawn upon personal, cultural, and historical themes with universal messages. These themes are skillfully presented symbolically and allegorically, often in a blood-soaked manner, which sometimes makes the film seem like just spooky entertainment to the general public. Take Sinners, which was marketed as a thrilling vampire fare. Yet at its heart, it centers on the plight of Blacks in Depression era America and the smuggled African traditions like voodoo and the blues that shaped the very identity of the country. The storyline also adds subjects of alcoholism, family dynamics, and religion that are archetypal to all people.
Look at Get Out. Beneath this tense psychological thriller driven by speculative technology and its nefarious creators, we have a powerful metaphor about the white liberal paradox of resenting Blacks while being embracing of African American culture. This attitude relates to Malcolm X and his comparison of white liberals to foxes, who show their teeth to Blacks but pretend it’s only a friendly smile (in Get Out, the villains, before being exposed, are sure to claim they are allies to the Black protagonist, like saying they voted for Obama).
Take Night of the Living Dead. On the surface, it’s George Romero’s masterpiece that officially launched the modern zombie genre. But underneath the undead hood, the movie symbolizes the horrors a Black person must endure in a world of (morally) dead majorities. The protagonist’s greatest threat wasn’t the zombies but those attempting to wipe out the zombies for a better world (and there’s always that collateral damage, a tale as old as racist time).
In Candyman, Tony Todd plays the vengeful spirit of a horribly executed slave who dared fall in love with a white woman. However, a deeper subtext of the film is the horror of the urban blights of the eighties, like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, that robbed the hopes and very lives of millions of African Americans across the country.
The examples are legion, even for other demographics. The main point is that for the horror genre to continue thriving, it has to tap into honest and difficult-to-face themes and the experiences from filmmakers and screenwriters who lived and understand them (Clive Barker was the imagination behind Candyman; he is white, but he is also a gay man, so he understands systemic injustice). You can’t be the next Nia DaCosta or Jordan Peele by leveraging a connect-the-dots formulation. You become these directors because you or your people have experienced the horrors of modern life on a personal level and know how to disguise them with the plot of an entertaining horror movie. Hopefully, all this will scare people into improving human conditions for everyone.
