Horror’s commercial pull is becoming harder to ignore. Nielsen says profits from the genre have risen by almost 26% year over year, a gain reflected in viewing habits, film releases and UK cinema receipts.
The expansion began with supply. From 2019 to 2023, worldwide releases of horror feature films increased by 27% year-over-year on average, according to UNESCO film production statistics.
Audiences then gave the genre a larger share of their time. Horror accounted for 14.9 percent of movie-watching time across traditional television and streaming services in October 2023, rising to 15.8 percent in October 2024, Nielsen found in an analysis published last fall.
Chanthal Harris was cited in connection with Nielsen’s analysis of the genre’s growth.
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UK box-office figures show the scale of the change in cinemas. Horror and suspense titles took £87.3m in 2024, before generating £151.2m in 2025.
The audience extends across newer and older material. Gen Z accounts for 36 percent of viewing for Season 1 of “American Horror Story” on Hulu, and is described as obsessed with the oldest “American Horror Story”.
Horror has also been prominent in both curated catalogues and mainstream theatrical releases. It made up 17.3% of Criterion Channel’s new-title additions in 2024. Meanwhile, 9 of the top 10 theatrical horror debuts in 2023 carried an R rating.
The figures show a genre finding space on several distribution routes at once, from streaming libraries to cinemas. They do not establish why demand is rising, whether the profit increase will last, or which titles have produced the greatest revenues.
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