Why is the Horror Genre So Popular Right Now?

From bestselling novels to record-breaking adaptations in film and television, horror is enjoying a remarkable resurgence—but why? The answer lies not only in chills and thrills, but in the way this genre speaks to the anxieties of the moment.

In a world shaped by constant uncertainty, shifting politics, and rapid change, horror allows readers to explore what scares us most while safely contained within narrative boundaries. For writers, it’s a fertile landscape for bold ideas and depth, gripping tension, and inventive storytelling. For publishers, it’s a category that consistently captivates audiences who are willing to confront fear head-on (and close the book when necessary).

In this article, writing coach Katalina Watt takes a look at why the horror genre is so popular right now, how it mirrors the current zeitgeist, and what fiction writers can learn from its rising influence.

A Hugo Award finalist with a decade of experience in the book industry, Katalina’s debut novel, Saltswept, will be published by Hodderscape in early 2026 and is available for preorder. Writers of speculative fiction, gothic, and horror fiction can book in for coaching sessions with Katalina at The Novelry now!

The concept of fear being a gift is a psychological phenomenon that directly inspired Zach Cregger’s 2022 horror movie Barbarian, and Gavin de Becker’s non-fiction book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, describes the role of intuition as a survival tool for recognizing, understanding, and preventing violence. So, does this explain why we enjoy being scared?

I think it might.

Horror can be a ritual to ward off evil; a protective spell. Entertaining the thrill and excitement of a controlled fear can be a cathartic process—because if we can acknowledge and confront our fears, we believe we can overcome or defeat them.

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Fear pays: horror movies at the box office

Horror movies have experienced a recent surge in popularity, with films like The Substance (2024) garnering nominations and wins at both the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, and Sinners (2025) breaking records at the international and domestic box offices.

Both of these films are passion-driven projects that are deeply personal to their creators:

• Coralie Fargeat, whose debut feature film Revenge (2017) is a female-fronted revenge thriller, wrote and directed The Substance as a view on the patriarchal pressures on women in the beauty and celebrity industries taken to a grotesque extreme.
• Ryan Coogler’s Sinners was inspired by his relationship with his beloved Uncle James, his love of blues music, and his family ties to Mississippi and the deep colonial history of the U.S.A.

Simultaneously, there has been a noticeable page-to-screen boost in horror consumption lately, with an influx of sales for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the wake of Guillermo del Toro’s lifelong dream realized: a star-studded Netflix adaptation in 2025. We have also had a bumper crop of Stephen King adaptations, with no less than five this year—three movie productions (The Monkey, The Long Walk, and The Running Man) and two TV series launches (The Institute and It: Welcome to Derry).

This rise in popularity is also reflected in more contemporary horror novels, with adaptations such as Nightbitch (2024), directed by Marielle Heller and based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name. Screen versions are also forthcoming for multiple recently published horror novels, including Whalefall by Daniel Kraus, Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, and Cold Storage by David Koepp.

Publishers turn to the dark side: horror novels

Book sales data company NielsenIQ BookData recorded the best year to date for the horror subcategory in 2024, with just over £8m in spending and almost £7m in 2025. The popularity of horror is measured at all stages of a book’s life cycle, with literary programs such as Penguin Michael Joseph’s Undiscovered Writers’ Prize focusing on horror in 2026.

Several publishers now have dedicated horror lists, including Orbit’s Run For It imprint and Macmillan’s Tor Nightfire, while independent publishers focusing on horror include Titan Books, Solaris, Luna Press, Clash Books, and Shortwave Publishing, as well as newcomers like Black Crow Books.

The publishing industry has reported an increase in the appearance of horror on literary agents’ manuscript wishlists, and new portmanteau subcategories are becoming common parlance. For example:

• Sporror (a combination of spore and horror)
• Horrormantasy (a blend of horror, romance, and fantasy)
• Weird girl fiction or femgore (a more nebulous umbrella term covering books that often have a messy female protagonist and address tropes and themes around the patriarchy and gender performance)

In April 2024, Yassine Belkacemi, editorial director at John Murray and Baskerville, told the Bookseller she was:

...definitely seeing a lot more submissions in this space. Not just UK submissions, but also from the US, and in translated fiction as well. In fact, looking through my notes from my London Book Fair meetings, horror was the genre that kept coming up as a genre that was growing a lot in different markets, so it is definitely something that is on the rise in my submissions and I know I’ll be getting more as the year goes on.
—Yassine Belkacemi, editorial director at John Murray and Baskerville

The trend was also spotted a year later by literary agent Cathryn Summerhayes of Curtis Brown, who said in April 2025:

I think horror hasn’t necessarily changed but our openness to reading stark horror about environmental meltdown, the isolation and devastation of people and places and the reality of monsters in our midst has grown hugely now we are away from the real life horror of the pandemic and lockdown. So reader openness plays a huge part – and BookTok is really making these authors and books pop.
—Cathryn Summerhayes, Curtis Brown

Summerhayes went on to note that she was continuing to receive “definitely a tonne more” submissions with horror themes and that many of them are “coming from younger female voices, queer authors and, interestingly, from up and down the country [...] I’ve seen a lot of horror from Scottish, Welsh and northern writers of late.”

Books that go bump in the night

According to Nielsen BookScan, sales of horror and ghost stories in the U.K. rose by 54% in value to £7.7m between 2022 and 2023—the biggest year for the genre since accurate records began. In the first three months of 2024, sales were 34% higher in value than in the same period the previous year.

Linked to this is the rise in “cozy horror,” a term for spooky or creepy stories that are lighter on terror and gore. Film examples might include perennial fall favorites Practical Magic (1998), based on the 1995 Alice Hoffman novel of the same name, or Hocus Pocus (1993), both of which have received recent and rather long-awaited sequels.

But cozy horror isn’t just a nostalgia callback to the Gen X teen era—when it comes to publishing, this subgenre is thriving with readers. A commonly cited example is What Moves the Dead (2018) by T. Kingfisher, an LGBTQ+ reimagining of Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” with plenty of mycelial horror and likable characters. Other titles are genre-blending, with many top-selling contemporary romances featuring supernatural elements, such as Best Hex Ever by Nadia El-Fassi, Cackle by Rachel Harrison, and Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper. (For more on supernatural and speculative romance, try this wonderful guest blog from Ashley Poston.)

The publishing industry has reported an increase in the appearance of horror on literary agents’ manuscript wishlists, and new portmanteau subcategories are becoming common parlance.
—Katalina Watt

The best horror is horror for all

The horror genre is and continues to be diverse, with an international milieu that includes everything from someone who believes their destiny is to “marry” a plane in Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, a conniving plant entity called Baby in Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin, and the existential crisis of what it means to be human in Earthlings by Sakaya Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori).

It’s encouraging to see a diverse range of authors writing in this intersection of genres, including those who are traditionally underrepresented in publishing, such as Black and Asian, LGBTQ+, and disabled authors.

Bunny by Mona Awad and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia are just two excellent recent examples that demonstrate how diverse the genre can and should be. This is further supported by industry data, with Kylie Lee Baker being the biggest new entrant to the horror category, thanks to her adult debut, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, which was the 23rd bestselling title of 2025.

Translated horror fiction is also on the rise, with notable examples including the award-winning Butter by Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton) and Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz (translated by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff). The latter is currently re-entering the culture with a 2025 film adaptation directed by Lynne Ramsay, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. 

The horror genre is inherently political, and it is positive to see it embracing nuanced approaches to mental health and disability, as well as challenging the ongoing misconception that the genre only vilifies the “other.” Instead, it gives them voice and space.

Horror movies like Talk To Me (2022) subvert tropes around possession, addiction, and grief through a fresh directorial voice, and His House (2020) explores the manifestation of colonial horrors and guilt as literal monsters, reinventing the haunted house trope in a subversive way. The horror in His House is rooted in the hostilities of the U.K. immigration system and the prejudice faced by outsiders in a suspicious community.

The haunted house is again reimagined through the suffocation of inner-city living and the rise of anti-trans sentiment in the novel Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt, while Rivers Solomon explores the response to “white flight,” the pressures of Black excellence, and genderqueer parenting in Model Home.

There is even space for nuanced takes in big-screen horror franchises. Take Prey (2022), for example—the fifth installment in the Predator series. This movie demonstrated groundbreaking Native American representation through its Sioux lead, Amber Midthunder, and producer Jhane Myers, a member of both the Comanche Nation and the Blackfeet Nation. Care was taken to work with the Indigenous leaders of the Stoney Nakoda Nation, whose lands were used for filming Prey.

In the book sphere, Bad Cree by Jessica Johns is an award-winning and conversation-starting novel about transplantation and expectations around womanhood and sisterhood, while authors like Stephen Graham Jones continue to produce prolific Indigenous horror narratives.

A light in the dark: horror as catharsis

Horror can be cathartic, with the 2020s witnessing a pattern where the genre moved to focus on themes of grief, trauma, and the human condition. With the seismic global event of the Covid-19 pandemic, many readers began to choose escapism through cozy, comforting reads as well as, by contrast, those that confronted turbulent times with a sense of dread.

A surprising anchor during troubled times (which often explains its popularity with teens), horror can be a safe space to explore our deepest fears, as well as difficult themes and topics. Time and again, the genre has been shown to be potentially therapeutic for those who have experienced trauma, as they empathize with a final girl protagonist, say, and see evil defeated (at least until the sequel). 

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield explores the relationship between a married lesbian couple who become distant after one of them returns from a disastrous deep-sea dive. The supernatural elements serve as a catalyst for the heart-achingly beautiful attempt to preserve and rebuild the love that has changed since the dive.

Supernatural horror novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson was adapted into a popular Netflix TV series by Mike Flanagan in 2018, as was The Haunting of Bly Manor in 2020 (based on two Henry James publications: his 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw, and the 1868 short story, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”). Both stories include gothic romantic elements, with the endings emphasizing the tragedy of unresolved and cyclical trauma as well as the bittersweet potential for happiness and fulfillment.

This type of catharsis can work for younger readers, too. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, adapted for the screen in 2016 and directed by J.A. Bayona, is a children’s novel that explores the death of a parent and the myriad stages of grief through the eyes of its young protagonist.

The horror genre is inherently political, and it is positive to see it embracing nuanced approaches to mental health and disability, as well as challenging the ongoing misconception that the genre only vilifies the “other.” Instead, it gives them voice and space.
—Katalina Watt

The scope of horror for readers and writers

What makes horror films or books cathartic or not is entirely subjective, with one person’s comfort read being something a little too intense for another. For many readers, horror novels (and other forms of horror entertainment) are a safe and manageable way to test the fight-or-flight response—to experience fear without the terror of losing all control.

The beauty of horror’s increasing popularity and evergreen appeal is that the genre is so vibrant and vast, there is always something for everyone. And if you don’t find quite what you’re looking for to whet the appetite of your own thrills and chills, there’s plenty of space and opportunity to write it—and to find a readership who has been looking for it too.

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