Horror by decade, and what each one was afraid of

Horror stops being about a castle and starts being about a house. Three films in this index and between them they relocate the genre into the ordinary world — a motel, a farmhouse, an apartment building — and hand it to people with no supernatural standing at all.

The decade the genre stops asking permission. Studio money, serious direction and no censor left to speak of, and the result is the broadest decade we hold: a shark, a demon, a family with a chainsaw, a pagan island and a coven on the Upper West Side, all inside six years.

Practical effects arrive and the genre turns on the body. Latex, airbladders and corn syrup made it possible to show transformation rather than imply it, and almost everybody did. This is the decade horror found out what it looked like under the skin.

A thin decade in the middle and a loud one at the end. The American cycle collapses under its own sequels, the interesting work moves to Japan, and then two films — one self-aware, one pretending to be a tape — restart the genre from opposite directions within three years of each other.

The hard decade. Post-9/11 American horror gets punitive, the French get philosophical about it, and found footage turns a camcorder into a budget. If you remember the 2000s as the decade horror stopped offering anybody a way out, the numbers agree with you.

Two things at once: the shared-universe haunting franchise, built fast and repeatable, and the arthouse horror that got reviewed in broadsheets. They look nothing alike and they share a decade, which is why this is the largest and least coherent group here.

Too few to generalise from and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What they do have in common is that the no-budget end and the extreme end both got distribution, and the four of them disagree about almost everything else.

The 1980s are the most explicit decade and it is not close. They average 071 on viscera against 049 across all 61 films, while the 2010s are the most restrained at 041. Latex and airbladders are a technology, and the decade that got them used them.

The 2000s are the bleakest. 017 on tone against 025, and the only decade here that reliably refuses relief. The warmest is the 1980s at 036 — still well below the midpoint, because a warm decade of horror is not a cheerful one.

The 1990s are the most human and the 2010s the most supernatural — 056 against 034 on the threat axis. The decade means do alternate rather than trend (1960s 064, 1970s 046, 1980s 035, 1990s 056, 2000s 048, 2010s 034, 2020s 043), which is the kind of pattern seven points can show and cannot establish. We are not going to call it a cycle on this much data.

Two decades are too thin to generalise from and we are not going to: the 1960s (three films) and the 2020s (four films). The profile line in those sections says so rather than reading a trend out of a handful of titles.