In a year shaped by AI, unreality and politically constructed monsters, it made sense that horror and the supernatural moved from the margins to the mainstream.
Banseka Kayembe
2025 has felt like one long jumpscare, stretched to the point of exhaustion. Maybe it isn’t even a jumpscare anymore, because that would imply we still have the energy to react when bad stuff happens.
It's easy to feel numb from living in a constant horrorscape: unregulated AI generated images and videos making us doubt what’s real any more, our conversations and thought processes increasingly filtered through the lens of Chat GPT search engines, and extractive social media platforms that seem to be disintegrating at a rapid rate, owned by comically evil tech barons. Despite these real horrors persisting, the public is being gripped by a slew of imagined monsters. Asylum seekers, muslims, trans people, people of colour and many others have been a vehicle to pour our deepest fears into instead of the real monsters: politicians in power and the insanely wealthy who’d sooner see the world burn than do a tiny bit of wealth redistribution.
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While imagined monsters dominate political rhetoric and policy, horror has also thrived on screen. From parasitic vampires, to reanimated bodies, and possession, this year we’ve been well fed stories about extraction, control and ungodly creations. In 2025 vampire movie Sinners grossed £16.2m at the UK and Irish box office and Weapons took £11.4m. In 2026 our interest in the genre is set to continue; “Bride!” a horror film focused on Frankenstein’s Bride is due to be released, as well as “Werwulf” by Robert Eggers. According to Screen International Box Office editor Charles Gant “Last year, no horror film reached £10m at the UK or Irish box office. This year, five films have.” Perhaps there was no year that made more sense than 2025 for monsters to move from the margins to the mainstream.
Horror has long been used as a tool to explore some of our deep seated anxieties about others. Bram Stoker’s original novel “Dracula” was written at a time of fear about emerging communist politics in Eastern Europe; Dracula’s looming foreign presence is a threat to the normal world order. The post World War One period saw a burst of horror films, including the silent 1922 classic Nosferatu. His visibly ugly, disturbing appearance, heavy Eastern European accent and uncontrollable lust for the female lead play into antisemitic tropes, stereotypes of foreign men as a threat to women’s safety and a distinct fear of “the other”. Similarly, a lot of the gothic horror novels of the 19th century were published during huge industrial upheavals. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (which was remade for onscreen this year by director Guillermo del Toro) suggests there are dark consequences for creating new technology for the wrong reasons. When our fears- both real and imagined- become particularly potent, Horror emerges.
Horror’s fixation on fear gives it a unique capacity for reinvention. More than most genres, it can be remade to reflect whatever a society is most anxious about at a given moment. Fear can be easily distorted into xenophobia, racism, or moral panic — but at its best, the genre doesn’t invent anxiety so much as expose it. Jordan Peele’s Get Out released one year after Trump’s first stint as US President transformed familiar horror tropes into a sharp sociological critique, making racism, and liberal hypocrisy the true sources of terror. Sinners used vampires as a metaphor for generational cycles that are seemingly impossible to unwind. There’s been a wave of socially conscious horror that treats patriarchy, migration systems, surveillance and structural violence as a literal monster.
We face an enormous top down coordinated effort to be afraid. In the UK, political rhetoric and policy on migrants, in particular asylum seekers has reached new levels of absurdity and cruelty. Keir Starmer told us we were “becoming an Island of strangers” echoing the racist politician Enoch Powell, Reform UK have announced they would abolish the right to "Indefinite Leave to Remain”. Someone’s race or culture being an explanation for possibly criminal behaviour is becoming a mainstreamed opinion, meaning the type of thing you’d easily be suspended for in a political party has now become part of many politicians' everyday rhetoric.
Trans people’s ability to exist in public without harassment or fear feels far more precarious since The Supreme Court ruled that “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 means “biological sex”. These fabricated monsters have dominated our newsfeeds, crowding out any serious discussion of the material conditions actually shaping people’s lives. Fear is doing political work, distracting people from collapsing public services, stagnant wages, and widening inequality, while legitimising ever harsher borders, policing, and social control; a politics that governs through grievance and paranoia.
Ironically, few have emulated the vampiric parasite more than 2025’s tech barons- Elon Musk, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Oracle owner Larry Ellison just to name a few- feasting on crises, polarisation, and division. They’re circling around our public infrastructure, while hollowing out the online spaces they already own. They have grown richer as their platforms become worse to use; their companies profit from surveillance, militarisation, and enclosure; and their power expands precisely because they are increasingly unavoidable. Much like a contained horror story, it often feels like there’s no way to escape.
Despite the dominance of tech, there have been small efforts to reject its horrors in real life. People are saying no to so-called “evergreen technology”, choosing to favour older ways of doing things: divesting from Whatsapp, building websites from scratch, chucking away smart phones (personally I’ve switched back to wired headphones again and it’s been pretty life changing).
Perhaps horror’s dominance on screen this year gives us some hope. The genre’s monsters at first glance, are rarely the actual monsters we should be afraid of but deflections away from what generates the conditions of real horror. Despite the discomfort, people’s fascination with staring their fears in the face, and on screen storytelling continuing to be a way for us to confront these demons, suggests that we aren’t totally apathetic. Despite the overwhelm and fatigue, we’ve still got enough energy to feel a jumpscare or two.
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