By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows, author of The Horror Movie Report.

Stephen and I go back a ways, he’s a pop culture data journalist I really respect and you’ve seen him in the newsletter lately based on his great work on stuff like Hallmark movies. He’s out with a really fun new book diving into horror movies, one of the more exciting genres in the film industry these days.

We spoke about the rise of horror as a genre, its unique relationship with audiences, and how certain trends have evolved over time.

Follows can be found at his website, and the book can be found at HorrorMovieReport.com.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Stephen, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for inviting me. It's always a joy to have a chat with a fellow nerd who likes to go as deep as we do on this stuff.

You have this really interesting new book out called The Horror Movie Report: The Ultimate Data Analysis of Horror Films. This thing's amazing. We're going to get into it. But before we dive in, I'd love to start off by hearing about how you'd describe the work you do. Can you tell folks a little about your history as a writer, blogger and analyst?

Definitely. I kind of came to this in a strange way. I always knew I wanted to do film and thinking, but I didn't know what that meant. I was a teenager, and everyone told me to go and study thinking, study science and do film on the side. So I did the opposite, because I'm a contrarian. I went to film school and went down a path of writer/producer, and I set up a production company. It still runs, but is now doing more advertising for the charity sector in the UK.

I'm still involved with that, but it meant that as my stuff moved away from film, I missed being connected to the film industry. I started to use my thinking principles and maybe 15 years ago I started studying film through the lens of data. I have no training in data. I stopped studying math at about 15, but I have an aptitude for it, and I enjoy it. Not many people do in film. I thought, oh, this is fun. This is a place for me. I started blogging about that, and some in the film industry like it. Not many people run away to do the accounts for the circus. It's nice to have a place.

Then that evolved. I've done stuff within gender and other forms of inequality, and things within business to help filmmakers' profitability — but also crazy things, like looking at which Bond film mentions its own title most frequently in the dialogue. Which I don't think you're going to guess.

GoldenEye is my only guess.

It's a good guess, and you're on the right path, but it's the wrong answer. The answer is Moonraker. You were right to think object instead of character.

But that led me on, and I now work for Guinness World Records as a side gig, finding out movie records. That's the sum total of 20 years of numbers and film fun.

I love your work. I've always enjoyed your work quite a bit, and I've done a lot of work myself in the pop culture data space and there's not a lot of folks in here. Particularly back in the day, there weren't many folks at all, so it was always really cool to see your stuff. It definitely always got me thinking and is really one-of-a-kind.

That's nice to say. And I agree; I would often think of an idea, or someone would ask me about an idea, and I'd be like, I wonder if anyone's done that. Then I'd Google it and it would either be you, me and I'd forgotten, or no one's done it. That's great. What a privilege to have a space to actually make some progress in.

It's good. Again, I admire your stuff so much, and this is why when you hit me up and mentioned you were working on this project, I was so excited. Horror movies have been one of the biggest success stories of the past couple of years, particularly in the postpandemic box office. They tend to overperform; they tend to get good ROI. We've seen a surge in horror film production and we've seen the market share increase.

Can you talk a little bit about why this is historically anomalous? We've always had horror movies, since the beginning of the invention of the medium, but why are we now seeing a bit of an uptick?

You're absolutely right. It's way more than an uptick. If we were looking at how many horror films were made last year worldwide, it was over 1,500, whereas around 2000, it was 500-something, and in the 1980s it was below 200. It's really transformed. As you said, not only have the raw numbers gone up, but also has the market share. Now about 12 percent of movies are horror films. That's a large percentage.

It's a number of factors. Certainly all genres have grown in raw numbers, because it's easier and cheaper to make a film than ever before. Every device I own has some sort of HD camera on it — you can do it on a doorbell. It's possible to do that. You also have the ubiquity of information. I went to film school in 2001 and there was education from tutors, there were a few hardback books, but that was how you learned how to do stuff. Now there's so much content online telling you amazing stuff from awesome people for free. That has an effect.

But that's across all films. With horror itself, the market share growth is, as you said, the more interesting part of it. There are a few factors. One, we're more accepting that a film is a horror film. A film that we might think of as horror now, if it had been made in the '80s, it might've been pitched as a psychological thriller. There's more acceptance; there's no shame in it. People are like, yeah, it's a horror film, whereas in the past they might not have done.

There's also that generation that grew up with VHS horror films, The Evil Dead generation — and maybe even the generation after that, when it comes to executives — where people have grown up loving horror, but also knowing that it does well. Therefore, if there's no business shame and there's no art shame and there's no personal shame, why not say, yeah, I'm making a horror.

There's still a bit of way to go. The awards are pretty poor for horror, and the trade press doesn't cover it properly. It's still not as fully accepted as other genres, but production-wise and audience-wise, it's really evolved and grown and, in the last 20 years, really matured.

It's so funny that you mentioned the award stuff. I remember when Jamie Lee Curtis won her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, I thought it was actually really special that she took a moment and shouted out the horror fans. That's a constituency in movies that does not get a lot of shout-outs from award stages, but nevertheless really did keep her in business for a few years.

And it was keeping her in business because it was delivering to audiences. There's no hiding from that. It's the most audience-connected genre, in my opinion.

All my stuff is from raw data and from doing my own research, but sometimes I'll do a bit of Googling around to get a context before or after I do the work. With the awards, I found a few blog articles about how horror does at the Oscars, and all the numbers were wrong. They were all different, and they were different from mine. I was like, what is going on?

It turns out there is a very, very small number of horror films that do well at the Oscars. Most of them are quite questionable horrors, as in, is it a horror or not? Silence of the Lambs. Jaws. Those are two films that IMDB says are not horror films. You can argue either way, and it doesn't matter what my opinion is, but there are a few like that. Or Black Swan, which is very much a horror film, but because it's female led and about a female perspective, people often go, “Ah, it's a psychological thriller,” in a very misogynistic way.

A small number of films that have outperformed have really changed that data. You end up almost immediately talking about existential questions of what horror is. I love that. That's what the data immediately suggests we should chat about.

I want to talk a little more about that audience for horror. You had a stat in here that was really interesting to me about how horror is the only genre where the audiences that actually go to the cinema to watch it are direct reflections of the actual national audience. I know you write about the UK in there, but also in general, one really interesting thing about the cinema is that you do have quote-unquote “four quadrants” for movies. For the most part, you're going to see a gender skew or an age skew in terms of who attends a film. But I'd love to hear you speak to how horror is really one of the most universal genres.

It really is. It's interesting, because as you've mentioned, there are a few different ways we can cut up the data. The one way that horror is not like the population is age. It has the largest percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds. If you split them into the different buckets, as they often do, horror has the lowest percentage of people under 18 and the lowest percentage of people over 45, which is fascinating. It's really condensed within your 20s. However, it's a good gender split, and also...

Numlock Sunday: Stephen Follows on the horror movie boom