I’ve been getting back into horror film recently. I grew up more interested in terrifying books than films, avidly reading almost anything that Stephen King or Dean Koontz put out for years, and while I always enjoyed a good scare, I never sought out the films in any kind of systematic way. Cut to two months from now when I’ll be taking in one of the largest genre film festivals, Fantastic Fest in Austin, this September. I’ve come a long way.

And I’m not alone in this bump. Horror as a genre seems to be riding a wave, as films like M3gan, X, Pearl, Smile, Barbarian, Terrifier 2, and Evil Dead Rise became surprising box office sensations. Meanwhile more established fare like Indiana Jones, The Flash, and Fast X languish behind even their own budgets.

What can we attribute this to? Honestly, that’s going to be a theme threaded through much of what I write about in this space in the coming months. So really these are just some preliminary thoughts.

We live in horrific times, but the horror most of us in America see is abstracted and still on the horizon. Our politics, for those of us who care about other humans, is a train wreck we all clearly see coming, but we seem to be accelerating to impact for some goddamn reason. Climate catastrophe is already basically here, creeping closer and closer to our daily lives, to the moment when we can’t go outside because of fires in Canada. An entire political movement, which has gained power in the past and may well again, is structured on demonization and destruction of The Other. Horrifying shit.

But as I said, it’s abstracted. The progress we have made as a nation abuts these deeply regressive strides, leaving us in a confusing mishmash and a bifurcated America, where in some places we celebrate being loud and proud and in others we dodge modern day sundown towns. It’s hard to get a grip on our new political reality, and I think the horror genre helps us process it.

It’s often stated that in times of true horror in our daily lives and on our TV screens, horror suffers at the box office. Late 1960s and early 1970s Hollywood largely steered clear of the genre (with the exception of possession films like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby) as the charnel house of Vietnam raged every night on TV, and real innovation in horror was largely in microbudget smashes like Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In the late 1980s following the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan, Hollywood shifted to more kiddie horror like Gremlins while again the innovation was in the low-budget indies like The Evil Dead and Re-Animator.

Hollywood understands that right now we’re in a horror boom. Even Marvel has started releasing some horror content. Big stars abound in Disney’s new Haunted Mansion and last year’s The Menu, while the next generation of stars are breaking out in films like Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. And as they see the unexpected success of those smaller films, you can damn sure bet we’ll be seeing a lot more being pumped out.

These films, transgressive in many ways but also pretty familiar, allow us to put a face to the creeping horror in and around our own lives, and usually resolve it all within a tidy 95 or so minutes. Times of abstracted horror, the horror of late stage capitalism essentially, cause us to seek out the clearly-delineated horror of the big screen, with its familiar beats and pat resolutions. When we’re powerless to fight (or even sometimes name) the monsters we see increasingly dominating our lives, we crave seeing them defeated in a medium we can have some fun with but also exorcise some of our own demons.