If you’ve seen enough horror movies, then you should know that these movies have a familiar taste. Not just the jump-out-of-your-seat frightening moments, but also a dark atmosphere that envelops you as you’re watching. 

Horror movies have evolved since they first reached the big screen and have skyrocketed in popularity. Horror movie enthusiast, senior Jackson Haigood, has a theory on why that’s happened. 

“The reason why they could be so popular is because horror movies could definitely be real,” Haigood said. “If the character is able to be related to, then that only improves how you watch the movie.” 

While opinions on movies are almost always subjective, these kinds of movies definitely have a certain formula that is followed to the letter. 

“When a horror movie is more real, it tends to be scarier,” Junior Emry Costilla said. 

“There’s a movie called ‘Prisoners’ that I really like, but it’s not visually scary. It’s more psychologically scary because it’s about a kidnapping,” 

Moviemakers have pushed to become more creative on how they’ve told stories and how they make things scary. One of the most important parts of this is to question what exactly makes a horror movie.

“It could definitely be a number of things,” Haigood said. “Sometimes it could just be the feeling of being completely alone, or if it’s more suspenseful, it could feel like someone’s after you.” 

Costilla added: “I think it’s not about what you do know as much as what you don’t. It’s that kind of feeling of not knowing what’s behind the door or hiding in the darkness.”

Despite the genre’s popularity, there are still those who dislike horror movies. 

“I’m not a super big horror guy,” videography teacher Kenneth Linn. “While I have been trying to watch one scary movie every day for the month of October, I have a wide definition of what constitutes a horror movie, which (is) essentially any movie that makes me uncomfortable.”

When thinking of horror movies, many focus on the classics, such as “Scream,” “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street.” 

But there is an obscure vein of horror that holds good pieces of art. 

“I watched a couple recently that were kind of off my radar,” Linn said. “I watched ‘The Witch’ and ‘Midsommar,’ and I liked both of them because they were just bizarre and creepy-toned and uncomfortable instead of having the slasher feel with the buckets of blood.” 

One of the more modern themes of horror movies is the realistic slasher with more gore and blood. Some more classical horror movie fans dislike this new, bloody attraction. 

“There are definitely movies that are just straight up gruesome,” Costilla said. “With practical and visual effects getting better, everything in movies seems more real, and this could mess with people’s minds. When I make movies, at least more recently, I try to make death feel more sad than what slashers make you feel about death.” 

Haigood added: “Sometimes students can tend to like it too much, they say and do weird things when they watch it.” 

There does seem to be a general agreement that horror has definitely taken a darker turn. In the making of professional films, producers and directors are given large budgets to make their vision. 

Horror movies tend to cost between $500,000-$5 million and generate on average 8 times the cost of making it. Horror movies have taken hold of this generation of movies.

“There were big differences with social standards between now and then,” senior Lennon Williams said. “Back in the ’60s everything was very censored and people didn’t really want anything particularly gory on screen. Whereas now social standards have shifted and people are definitely more open to seeing that stuff on screen.” 

There also seems to be a split in the culture of the horror fanbase over whether they do or don’t want new films to be slashers. 

“I don’t think there is really a negative effect on students seeing gore and slashers on screen,” Williams said. “Eventually, you don’t really see it as gore, you see it as it is, like ‘this is a movie device to make it look better’ and it can help tell the story, which I don’t think a lot of people understand.” 

There is, however, a concern about the kids who watch these horror movies. 

“If you meet a lifelong horror movie fan, they’ll usually tell you it’s from when they watched a movie that they probably watched when they were probably a little too young,” Linn said. “That kind of impacted them and imprinted itself onto their memory.”