1968 to 1980 · The devil comes home
Possession goes mainstream
Modern horror starts with the devil moving into respectable homes. Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) trapped Mia Farrow in a New York apartment building full of smiling neighbours with sinister plans. Then William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, became a cultural earthquake. It was nominated for Best Picture and audiences queued around the block in winter.
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) finished the decade's work. Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and young Danny Lloyd spend a winter at the Overlook Hotel, and the horror is as much about a father losing his grip as it is about ghosts. Its symmetrical corridors and the twins in blue dresses are burned into film culture.
1998 to 1999 · Tape and camcorder
Seven days and a pile of sticks
Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) adapted Koji Suzuki's novel about a videotape that kills whoever watches it within a week. Sadako crawling out of a television is one of the defining images of modern horror, and the film launched a wave of Japanese and Korean horror, from Ju-on: The Grudge to A Tale of Two Sisters.
A year later Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez released The Blair Witch Project (1999). Shot on handheld cameras in the Maryland woods and marketed with a website that treated the story as real, it made a fortune on a tiny budget and made found footage a genre of its own, leading to Paranormal Activity (2007) and many more.
2014 to 2019 · Grief and folklore
The so-called elevated era
In the 2010s, a wave of filmmakers used horror to explore grief, trauma and family. Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) gave a worn-out mother a pop-up book monster that became a metaphor for depression. David Robert Mitchell's It Follows (2014) turned a curse into a slow, walking figure only the victim can see. Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015) recreated a 1630s New England farm in archaic English, with a goat named Black Phillip.
Studio A24 became synonymous with this mood, releasing Ari Aster's Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). Critics argued about the label "elevated horror," but the films themselves were undeniable.
2017 to now · Social nightmares
Get Out and the horror of the dinner table
Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) followed Chris, a young Black photographer, on a weekend with his white girlfriend's liberal family. It became a box-office phenomenon and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The "Sunken Place" entered everyday language. Peele followed with Us (2019) and Nope (2022).
The fire keeps burning: Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan (2016) brought zombies to a high-speed rail line, Zach Cregger's Barbarian (2022) twisted an Airbnb booking into a labyrinth, and Danny and Michael Philippou's Talk to Me showed that a severed, embalmed hand could be the scariest party game alive. Modern watchlist: The Exorcist, The Shining, Ringu, The Babadook, The Witch, Get Out, Hereditary and Talk to Me.
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