Michael Myers or Midsommar: What Kind of Horror Fan Are You?
Indie movies like Hereditary, It Follows, and The Babadook have shaken up the world of horror movies in the last ten years, thrilling both audiences and critics. Ranker data says they’ve also created a deep divide in the horror fan community.
Photo: A24
For a long time in Hollywood, horror movies weren’t seen as a mode of artistic expression — they were an easy way to make money. Budgets for scary movies are often relatively low, and they don’t rely on big-name talent to bring in audiences. Found-footage movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity took that strategy to its logical endpoint, taking in huge sums in revenue while spending virtually nothing on production. Meanwhile, big-budget franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street movies tapped into well-established fanbases to break even at the box office.
Photo: TWC
But the genre has recently seen some far riskier ventures take off. It Follows surprised audiences in 2014 with its inventive premise and artsy direction, while the Australian flick The Babadook won a cult audience in the US. Then, Jordan Peele’s politically charged Get Out did something long thought impossible for horror movies: earn an Oscar nomination for best picture. A year later, Ari Aster introduced himself to audiences with the thoroughly creepy Hereditary, produced by the respected indie studio A24.
Films like The Witch, The Lodge, and Midsommar proved that the horror genre could be far more than just a cash cow. But Ranker data suggests that these movies didn’t so much inspire old horror fans as bring in new ones. It seems like fans of more traditional horror movies — whether it’s old slashers like Halloween or newer films like The Purge that trade on that same low-budget/high-reward strategy — aren’t so hot on the kind of intellectual, provocative fare that’s come to define this genre over the last 10 years.
Photo: Warner Bros.
To represent the Old Guard in horror, we picked a sample of classic films from the Top 10 on our list of Best Horror Movies Of All Time. First, we chose Halloween — a must-watch, to be sure, but not exactly intellectually ambitious. We also selected Alien, a big-budget blockbuster that is nonetheless celebrated for deftly mixing horror and sci-fi. Then there’s the chilling crime story The Silence of the Lambs, as well as The Exorcist. Finally, there’s The Shining, an all-time great movie from one of film’s all-time great directors, Stanley Kubrick. This diverse sample ensures we’re not studying people who like one particular horror subgenre, but a more general group of fans who appreciate some of the genre’s most celebrated movies.
We took every movie on this list of classic horror films and used Ranker Insights to determine how affinity for that movie correlated with affinity for every other movie on the list — for example, how frequently people who voted up The Exorcist on a movie list also voted up Alien. On average, fans of any one movie on this list were 7.7X more likely to like any other movie on the list. That’s a strong correlation between a fairly diverse set of movies, so we can reasonably assume the people who like these films generally have a taste for classic horror films.
To represent the newer crop of horror fans, we looked at our data on Hereditary, It Follows, The Babadook, Get Out, and 2019’s Us. We also included 2018’s A Quiet Place, because although it was a big-budget movie, it was also a critical success that premiered in the last 10 years and was applauded for its originality. Insights data found that these movies shared even more fans with one another — fans of any one of these movies are 8.6X more likely to enjoy the others on the list. Again, that data would indicate fans of these movies consistently enjoy new and intellectually challenging horror films.
But when we looked at how these two groups of fans viewed one another’s favorite movies, it became clear just how strong their preferences in horror are. Those who love The Shining were only 3.4X more likely to love A Quiet Place — that’s a correlation of some kind, but a considerably weaker one than those between movies within the same group. Meanwhile, there’s actually a negative correlation between affinity for Halloween and affinity for Us, which means that if you’re a fan of one movie, it’s statistically more probable that you’ll dislike the other. On average, members of one fan group are 4.2X more likely to appreciate the movies beloved by the other group.
Photo: Warner Bros.