Horror movies

No matter how many scary movies you’ve logged on your Letterboxd account this October, Stephen Follows has you beat.

The British film researcher has devoted his career to the quantitative study of film, using data to identify trends in the entertainment industry from a bird’s eye view. His latest work, the second edition of “The Horror Movie Report,” saw him analyzing every existing horror movie that he could identify — 27,000 by his count — with the hope of offering artists, executives, and fans some clarity about what he sees as a criminally misunderstood genre.

Follows authored the first edition of “The Horror Movie Report,” which analyzed a mere 10,000 movies, in 2017. He was recently prompted to revisit the topic by his colleagues at the Guinness Book of World Records, where he offers his services as a consultant on all things related to movie data. Internet cinephile resources have increased exponentially in those seven years time, and access to Letterboxd and other websites allowed him to nearly triple his sample size. The result is what Follows believes is one of the most comprehensive studies of horror movies ever released.

During a recent conversation with IndieWire conducted over Zoom, Follows opened up about his methodology and offered a few lessons about scary movies that he learned during the journey.

“There aren’t many people who run away to do the accounts for the circus,” Follows said when asked about how he stumbled into this unique intersection of art and science. “I can wrangle both the film industry and an Excel spreadsheet. I think that there’s a lot of areas that I look at that no one’s looked at before because no one’s looked at it, not because it’s impossible. I use the data analysis to try and understand what’s actually going on rather than what should go on.”

Follows cautioned that it would be mathematically impossible for him to watch every movie that he includes in his studies. As such, he avoids weighing in on the artistic merits of individual films. Instead, he looks at larger trends in supply, demand, and subject matter that offer insights into the media that scares us.

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“Horror operates like no other genre. The audiences act differently, the filmmakers act differently. There’s lots of things that are true for most other genres that are not the case for horror,” he said. “Even the correlation between how good it is according to critics and how much money it makes, there’s almost no correlation for horror, and there is for almost everything else.”

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“I looked at all the movie-themed podcasts, and horror is by far and away the most popular genre that people make podcasts about. You look at websites and newsletters, and you don’t find the same fanaticism for rom-coms, or westerns, or whatever,” he said. “That is, as far as I can see, a growing, thriving audience that maybe has been undersupplied.”

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One consistent source of horror’s appeal is its ability to adapt to the anxieties of a given cultural moment. Follows explained that recent years have seen a spike in films about chaos theory and the breakdown of societies — a clear sign, in his view, of the lack of control that so many people feel over their everyday lives.