The Business of Hollywood Is Horror (and Faith-Based) (Joseph Holmes, October 7, 2025, Religion & Liberty)
You see, movies have always relied to some degree on “awe,” and the further filmmakers leaned into awing their audience, the more successful they became. This is why, throughout film history, short films gave way to features, which gave way to epics, which gave way to blockbusters, which gave way to the mega-blockbusters. But this “awe effect” comes with a big price tag. We have to see Spider-Man swing, Superman fly, and Batman punch people throughout the film or we feel unsatisfied. And this costs a lot of money to do over and over again.
But this isn’t true of horror and faith-based films, where the biggest awe factor is the thing we don’t see. In faith-based films, that’s God. You can have a faith-based film that deals simply with ordinary people doing normal things, but as they get closer to God or God acts dramatically in their lives, fans of the genre feel the same elation as they do when seeing the Millennium Falcon shoot into hyperspace. Likewise, in horror films, we are often there to see the monster. But we also expect—and want—to not see the monster most of the time, because a lot of the entertainment is in the fear of anticipation that the monster’s hiddenness brings. So again, it’s much cheaper to make a monster in a horror film because we don’t expect to see it throughout most of the movie.
The other thing that gives faith-based films and horror films an advantage is that they resist the erosion of monoculture, as both genres lean heavily on religious narratives and religious communities that involve people meeting every week and listening to the same stories together. Haidt notes this in The Anxious Generation as well. Religious services bind people together under a shared system of values and experiences. This creates a common culture of tastes and values that movies can then appeal to. As secular culture continues to subdivide into smaller and smaller subcultures, religious communities will stand out as the biggest and least divided of the subcultures, making it easier for studios to identify and reach out to.