The Social Life of Horror: Why we turn to scary stories to explain our world

We live in frightening times with a general sense that the familiar world is slipping away. Yet, in the midst of it all, we seek out horror. We read it, we watch it, we even celebrate it. Why do we seek the thrill of terror when reality itself is terrifying? What does this shared attraction to horror say about our cultural anxieties – and collective hopes – that shape our time?

by Kendall R. Phillips, Professor of Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University

31. October 2025 · 6 minute read

Let’s be honest – the world is a scary place. Climate change, economic crises, and major conflicts in every corner of the world drive many people to leave their homes and face the uncertainty and dangers of migration. The arrival of these migrants causes some people to worry about their nation’s safety and economic stability, leading to a cycle of fear and anxiety. Any sustained look at the state of the world is enough to make a person want to stay in bed and hide under the covers.

And yet, as we are watching all of these real world horrors play out in real time, fictional horror as a genre seems to be thriving. Why, we might ask, would anyone want to go searching for some fictional monster when the evening news is already filled with terrifying real horrors? Still, however paradoxical, the current moment is filled with popular horror narratives. Scary novels routinely top the bestseller lists in the United States, for example, television series like The Walking Dead and American Horror Story keep attracting viewers, and films like Sinners (2025) and Weapons (2025) top the box office. It would seem that as the world becomes more frightening, many people are turning to horror to help make sense of things.

Why do we have golden ages of horror fiction during dark eras?

This relationship between social anxiety and the popularity of horror narratives is not new. 1931 was the worst year of the Great Depression and a moment when many Americans felt their world had completely turned upside down. Yet, this was also the year that saw the birth of the horror film. There were, of course, scary films with monsters and ghosts prior to 1931, but the idea that these films constituted a type of film didn’t solidify until 1931 with the release of Dracula and Frankenstein.  For some reason, in the midst of this economic and political turmoil, Americans found themselves drawn to darkened theaters to be terrified by a blood-sucking Count and an undead corpse. In the coming years, the floodgates of Gothic ghouls would be opened, and the first Golden Age of Horror began, extending throughout the 1930s.

The pattern repeated in 1968, which many see as the birth of a second Golden Age of Horror. Horror had remained popular in the intervening decades, shifting to focus more on creatures from outer space in the 1950s, but the next period of great productivity and popularity for the horror film began 1968, with the release of Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead. In some ways, these two films are very different. Rosemary’s Baby was a big budget Hollywood production from an up-and-coming director. Night of the Living Dead was a very low budget independent film with a largely novice cast and crew. Yet both captured something of the dark mood that was circulating in the United States and around the globe during that fateful year. 1968 saw the assassinations of both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy as well as violent protests in Paris during “Mai ‘68” and Soviet tanks crushing the “Prague Spring.”

Yet, during all the violence and upheaval, people kept lining up to watch horror films.

The 1970s saw more global turbulence with the ignominious end of the war in Vietnam, political protests, and a global economy vexed with both stagnation and inflation. Yet, during all the violence and upheaval, people kept lining up to watch horror films. The era saw the launch of numerous iconic horror titles like The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Carrie (1976), Halloween (1978), Alien (1979), Friday the 13^th (1980), and The Shining (1980), to name a few.

So why are we fascinated with horror during times of trouble?

So, the current era’s fixation on horror in the midst of global tensions is not unprecedented. While this wander through history helps to establish a fairly clear correlation between the popularity of horror narratives and social turmoil, it still begs the question of why? Why do we seek out scary fiction during anxious times? Not surprisingly, many scholars have asked this question and, also not surprisingly, they’ve come up with different answers.

Some folks, like Mathias Clasen from Aarhus University, trace our pleasure at being scared back to our evolution. Over thousands of years, humans have learned to get pleasure from imagined horrors as part of learning to adapt to an uncertain and dangerous world. Others see our attraction to horror as part of deeply embedded social structures built around myths of forbidden places and “bogeymen” who reinforce cultural taboos. There are also, of course, psychoanalytic theories that see our fictional monsters as some form of repressed desire sneaking out to frighten us.

In my view, all these perspectives have value in explaining the persistent human desire to experience moments of shock and thrills. They don’t, however, necessarily explain the question I started with, which is not so much why we find pleasure in horror but why we seem drawn to that form of pleasure during times of stress and anxiety. Why do we have golden ages of horror fiction during dark eras?

To think about the social function of horror, I turn to rhetoric. While the term has its roots in the productive development of public argument, it can also be a tool for exploring the way a public construct meaning, the way these meanings get negotiated, contested, undermined, and overturned. Rhetoric, for me at least, is a useful way of exploring how a culture reasons and, importantly, our reasoning together is framed by our collective capacity to imagine together. The American rhetorical scholar, Kenneth Burke, argued that literature provides “equipment for living” in a world filled with symbols and meanings. We tell fictional stories, in other words, to help us think through various ways we might navigate the world. Thought of in this way, tales of terror also provide important equipment for reflecting on those things that frighten us and allowing us an important space to explore the nature of the things we find frightening.

Horror narratives also, at times, allow us to think not only about the monster, the embodiment of our fears, but to consider how that monster came to be.

Sometimes this rhetorical reflection comes as allegories. The invading alien pod people in Invasion of the Body (1956) can be productively understood as a stand-in for the way Communism was depicted during the Cold War, an emotionless and threatening enemy bent on taking away our individuality and society. At other times, horror may allow us to reflect more on the feelings of fear. Our sense that the world has turned upside down, that we can’t trust those around us, that we can’t trust ourselves. Horror narratives also, at times, allow us to think not only about the monster, the embodiment of our fears, but to consider how that monster came to be. And, sometimes, horror narratives remind us that the person we feared may not be a monster after all and we need to question how we decide that one person or group is frightening and why we are so quick to fear something just because it seems different.

A Third Golden Age Of Horror

By some accounts, we are now living in a Third Golden Age of Horror. At least since Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), movie theaters have been filled with provocative and often very successful horror films. So, if the above analysis has any merit, we should be able to start asking what these horror narratives say about our current global culture. While space does not permit me a deep dive into this question, there may be some trends within contemporary horror that suggest the kind of “equipment for living” we are being offered at the moment.

One notable trend in recent horror is a sense that our social institutions are not only failing but, at times, inherently corrupt. In a recent book, A Cinema of Hopelessness, I tracked this focus on ‘institutional-horror’ in films like Cabin in the Woods (2011) and The Purge (2013). In these films, the real monster is the government, and it is the official institution that unleashes the pain and suffering on our protagonists. Peele’s Get Out follows a similar logic though focused less on the government and more on the broader structures of systemic racism. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners follows this same logic of critique but focuses on the contrasting power of a community to try to stand up against the institutions that seek to exploit and terrorize it. We are, if horror films are to be believed, increasingly skeptical, if not downright fearful, of our official institutions. The recent rise in right-wing populist movements and their rejection of global cooperation and the social welfare state may provide further evidence of a growing distrust and fear of the institutions of governance.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting horror films are designed to be lessons in civic virtues or that we incorporate scary movies into our courses in social studies. I am, however, recommending that this Halloween while you are hanging the spiderwebs and carving the pumpkins and putting on your favorite frightening flick, perhaps you can step back and think about what horror has to teach us.

The author recommends:

Phillips R., Kendall (2025): Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Phillips R., Kendall (2018): A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema. University of Texas Press.

Phillips R., Kendall (2012): Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter and the Modern Horror Film. ‎Southern Illinois University Press.

Phillips R., Kendall (2025): No One Can Save Us. His debut novel blends horror and superheroes and was released in October of 2025 by Nightmare Press.