The COVID-19 pandemic has upended everything about the entertainment industry. Combining this ongoing global health crisis with the way massive corporations refuse to pay artists proper wages, instability has gripped the modern world of film. Everybody is looking for a “surefire thing” in the middle of a hurricane of uncertainty. In the middle of all this chaos, one genre has emerged as a rare source of reliable box office success: horror. Scary films have often been a go-to domain for revenue in the history of Hollywood, but the genre has proven especially lucrative in the wake of everything that happened in March 2020.
With unlikely box-office successes like M3GAN and Smile, why is horror doing so well in the COVID era?