‘It’s like they came out of someone’s subconscious’: How horror arrived in modern cinemas | film

TWhat is the biggest, scariest jump the film industry has seen in 2025? Horror returns as a major player at the UK box office. As a genre, it has impressively outperformed previous years (22% year-on-year increase at UK and Irish box office: £83,766,086 in 2025, compared to £68,612,395 in 2024).

“Last year, no horror film reached £10 million at the box office in the UK or Ireland,” says Charles Gant, box office editor at Screen International. “This year, five films have reached that level.” The year’s hit films – Weapons (£11.4m), Sinners (£16.2m), The Last Rites of Voodoo (£14.98m) and 28 Years Later (£15.54m) – have all stuck around in multiplexes and in the public consciousness. Although much industry commentary focuses on the singular brilliance of Zac Cregger’s Arms and Ryan Coogler’s postmodern epic Sinners, their successes suggest that something is shifting between audience and genre.

“I’ve heard people say, ‘Even if you don’t like horror, this is a movie you should see,’” says Laura Wilson, head of acquisitions at distribution company Altitude. “Films like Weapons and Sinners play with genre and structure to create something completely different, that speaks to the audience in a different way.”

But beyond artistic merit, the enduring popularity of scary movies this year suggests they’re giving moviegoers something they desperately need: catharsis. “Right now, there’s a lot of anger and fear and division being reflected in cinema,” says Mike Munser, host of the podcast The Evolution of Horror.

“Horror movies are great at playing on people’s fears, while also exaggerating them,” says Christopher Frayling, author of Vampire Cinema and Frankenstein: The First 200 Years. “So you forget your everyday fears and focus on the monster on the screen.” Set against the real-life Gaza news cycle, the ice raids, the rise of the far right, climate catastrophe, witches, zombies and vengeful spirits resonate a little differently with moviegoers. “I read somewhere that the success of vampire movies is associated with times of economic recession,” says Lola Kirk, one of the stars of Sinners. “It’s the idea that capitalism is sucking people’s lives out.”

Since the early days of cinema, social upheaval has affected the genre. Frayling points to the flowering of the German Expressionist movement after World War I and the chaotic atmosphere of the early Weimar Republic, with films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, followed by the Depression of the 1930s and Frankenstein and The Wolfman from Universal Studios. “The classic example is Dracula: you get this invasion of Britain by someone from Eastern Europe who then causes this infection that spreads in all sorts of ways and threatens the Anglo-Saxon heroes,” says Frayling. “So it reflects a lot of concerns about immigration.”

The immigration bogeyman influenced the recently released popular horror film The Severed Sun. Writer-director Dean Puckett explains: “I wanted to explore ideas about the rise of populism. Firstly, slogans like ‘Let’s Make Britain Great Again’, which harkens back to an imaginary time when things were ‘better’, but only if you were a rich white man. Secondly, the idea that you could be with someone you know and then suddenly they post something at the dinner table or in a Facebook post and you say: ‘Where Which come from?

The current era of popular, socially transformative horror arguably began with Jordan Peele’s brilliant Get Out (2017), released a year into Trump’s first term. It ushered in a new wave of horror authors, including the likes of Ari Aster, Osgood Perkins, and the Filippo brothers. “It was a very exciting time,” says Alice Lowe, whose “Prevenge” (2016), about a murderous fetus, was one of the most important films of the era. “I think it was the beginning of an era where people were open to making a really crazy horror movie that had artistic aspirations.” “For 10 years, audiences’ minds have been open to more of that,” adds Lowe, who is writing new original horror adaptations.

At the same time, there has been a reconsideration of lesser-known productions of the genre. Earlier this year, the Nickel Cinema opened in Clerkenwell, London, showing underground films such as The Greasy Strangler, The Fall of the House of Usher, and the 1989 remake of Dr Caligari. A re-appreciation of the “rough and noisy” genre, according to Nickel Cinema founder Dominic Hicks, It is a direct reaction to the algorithmic content being pumped into the box office. “It’s a reaction to the sterile product that’s coming out of Hollywood. You have a cinematic landscape that’s more tepid and more predictable. A lot of Marvel and Netflix movies are very similar,” he says. “in contrast [the films shown at the Nickel Cinema] A bit broken. It’s as if it came out of someone’s subconscious and was planted there without corporate interference.

Horror movies continue to disturb the establishment. “They have this uncanny ability to look old-fashioned and on-trend, both at the same time,” says Frayling. Besides the resurgence of the mad scientist trope (there are imminent adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or a modern-day Prometheus), he predicts that we’ll see horror films in 2026 and 2027 that engage with our current fears: about artificial intelligence taking over in the near future and about “vampires living in Trump Tower.”

Meanwhile, “Jesus horror” film The Carpenter’s Son – which tells the story of Mary and Joseph’s struggle after the birth of Jesus, and stars Nicolas Cage and FKA Twigs as the holy parents – is due for release later this year, and is sure to send reverberations across the US Christian right. Puckett is already hard at work on his next film. “It’s a short horror film based on the time a reformist MP came to our door and talked to us,” he says. Her address? “It’s called a fucking face.”