The Deeper Reasons Behind the Recent Success of Horror Films

Terrifying Sinners, Zombie Hordes, and Religious Longing

Slide into a dark theater to take in one of the more popular films of the year, and odds are you’ll be surrounded by people who paid good money to be terrified.

Not mildly spooked. Not edge-of-your-seat thriller vibes. We’re talking full-blown, blood-splattered horror—Sinners and the much-anticipated 28 Years Later, a sequel whose apocalyptic dread may even exceed its cult-classic predecessor.

But why do these two films seem to be carrying the most cultural gravitas this year? And better yet, why do we do this to ourselves?

Why, when our headlines and social feeds are filled with fears of perpetual economic instability, political unrest, and WWIII memes, are we so eager to inject our nervous systems with even more panic…albeit in Dolby surround sound?

Is there something fundamentally twisted about us a species that would cause us continue to subject ourselves to such horrifying nightmares? Yes, there’s certainly something to that theory. But there are other reasons that are simultaneously deeper, darker and yet strangely more hopeful.

We go to horror films because we want to be haunted.

The Fear We Choose

Psychologists have long noted the strange paradox of “recreational fear.” We choose to immerse ourselves in stories of death, dread, and dismemberment, but only under certain conditions. The haunted house has an exit. The theater scream has a popcorn chaser. In other words, it’s controlled fear.

According to research in affective neuroscience, this controlled fear stimulates a physiological cocktail of dopamine and endorphins if the environment is safe enough to frame the experience as a thrilling challenge instead of traumatic threat. You get the sympathetic nervous system jolt—your heart races, your pupils dilate—but it’s followed by a parasympathetic release. A return to calm, relief, and even euphoria.

When we understand that our willing exposure to our deepest fears in a controlled environment is a pathway to triumphing over them, we can see how horror performs a special role in the development of psychological resilience and increased aptitude for confronting the common fears of real life.

I’ve been writing and speaking for the last couple years on a cultural pivot towards a more aspirational outlook and a post-cynical sincerity, and the popularity of horror does not run contrary to that shift. Our ability to appropriately respond to our fears and overcome them is highly aspirational. In fact, fear of social rejection, appearing as naive or gullible has kept us from the risk of sincerity. There can be no pathway to personal reconstruction or cultural renewal without confronting our fear of risking and failing.

In recent years, one genre of horror has reigned supreme in our cultural imagination, and it discloses a deep insight about the tensions in our zeitgeist.

Enter 28 Years Later.

The Age of the Undead

28 Years Later isn’t the zombie flick of our parent’s generation. Like its predecessors (28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later), this franchise doesn’t rely on slow-moving corpses groaning for brains. It’s not campy. It’s dystopian rage-contagion.

It symbolically displays the horror of social breakdown—of our neighbors, loved ones, even ourselves, being consumed by something that strips away humanity but leaves the body standing.

This is where cognitive scientist John Vervaeke’s insights are incredibly illuminating. In his analysis of zombie symbolism, Vervaeke argues that zombies are the symbolic monsters of our modern meaning crisis in the West. Unlike vampires who seduce; or werewolves who symbolize our primal rage, zombies are the walking dead—soulless automatons whose represent the pervasive feeling that we have lost the meaning that animates our living, and yet we lifelessly linger on.

Zombies terrify us not just because they want to eat us, but because they feel like us—depersonalized, disenchanted, and walking as dead.

Our culture endured an intense period of deconstruction where our shared religious framework, our shared myths, and shared values were discarded. Our connection to the sacred was sterilized and we were left without a guiding story to anchor our own narrative identity. We’ve traded enchanted wonder for mindless machinization. But as Vervaeke suggests, the rise of the zombie genre is a symbolic cry from the collective cultural voice that we are spiritually starving for meaning to vitally animate us again.

Zombies are a parable of modern life devoid of transcendent meaning and purpose.

The Return of the Haunting

Why do we long to be more than just frightened but haunted?

Why are horror films that displays exorcisms or other signs of the supernatural perennially popular, even in an era that saw decades-long decline in traditional religious belief? Why does a film like Sinners–which, for all its gore and sex, ultimately revolves around biblical themes like sin, judgment, and the possibility of cosmic justice—resonate with so many?

Perhaps it’s because there is a far more frightening notion than dark supernatural powers being real: the idea that all we are is mindless matter in motion heading toward an inevitable and meaningless demise.

The idea that reality is indifferent to us is far more terrifying than vampires and demons. If justice is merely whoever holds the keys to power that day executing their subjective whims, if love is just a chemical illusion, and if we’re all just heading toward the heat death of the universe, then that nihilistic abyss is a much deeper nightmare.

We go to horror films to play around the edge of that abyss and pray that there is something beyond the void. Even if it’s terrifying–even if it demands something from us–that’s better than living as the walking dead.

That’s why horror may be the most religious genre in cinema. It refuses to let us stay in the flattened, materialist map of reality. It reintroduces the sacred, the demonic, and the possibility of divine judgment. It reminds us, sometimes through screams and nightmarish visions, that the veil is thin.

In a way, horror is a kind confession booth for a Secular Age. It’s the one of the few cultural spaces left where we’re given permission to process our sins, shame, and fears of what we will become if our souls are not set right.

Cracks in the Map

In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the elder demon advises his apprentice to keep humans from reflecting on their mortality. To be mindlessly enslaved to our unexamined daily habits and driven by reflexive anxieties about the future is far worse torture to the human soul than to stare death in the face. Awareness of our finitude puts the daily anxieties and unexamined patterns of our life into eternal perspective.

Horror makes us consider death—not abstractly, but viscerally. It reminds us that we are fragile, that evil is real, and there something more to the story than the unexamined life driven to collect paychecks and temporary status.

Maybe we willingly scare ourselves because we suspect our cultural story we’ve been given where life is nothing more than a closed system of atoms and algorithms isn’t big enough to hold our deepest longings. Horror creates a liminal space where the Transcendent becomes imaginable again.

And oddly, that gives us hope. Because if the world is haunted, it might also be holy.

Haunted by Hope

Philosopher Charles Taylor called our modern condition being trapped in the “immanent frame”—a closed system of belief where everything must have a material explanation, and the possibility transcendence has been banished to the margins of irrelevance in our daily lives. But in the experience of horror, the possibility of transcendence comes creeping in through the cracks of our closed cosmology.

And that crack in the immanent frame is precisely what horror exposes.

The terror isn’t just in the ghost or the demon or the viral zombie outbreak—it’s in the implication that there’s more to reality than we can measure. That the world is not flat but thick with a spiritual weightiness. Matter and spirit are not separate realities, but an integrated whole that is far more haunting, and frankly more frightening, then a world we can perfectly map and control with the scientific method.

What horror films offer, beneath the surface, is not nihilism. It’s metaphysical possibility. It gives us a picture of the the world where the veil between sacred and profane can tear. Its world where judgment beyond human powers of government and rulers exists. It forces us to confront that evil is not just a matter of relativistic opinion, but a spiritual force to be reckoned with.

And that’s why horror may be a strange agent of reenchantment.

Not in the sentimental, new-age sense with a soft, amorphous spiritualism that makes everything harmless and vague. But in the older, deeper recognition that the world is charged with magic with powers of light and darkness.

When a ghost story unsettles us or when we see vampires revolt at the sign of the Cross, it causes us to question whether our materialist myths are the whole story. When zombie hordes threaten to consume all life and turn human civilization back over to the state of nature, we see what will come of us if our meaning-crisis is not addressed at its core spiritual level.

What if our culture-wide confrontation of these terrible visions is a sign that we are ready to come face to face with our fears so that we can overcome them?

What if its a sign that we are opening up to a reenchanted world filled with meaning, and that something in our souls is ready for the risk of faith in hope that there is something beyond the abyss?

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