Add the Bafta Film Awards to your watchlist

As a reporter on the horror fantasy genre for over four decades now, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard film industry movers and shakers exclaim that the scary movie has roared back when yet another no-budget shocker appears from nowhere to become an unexpected box office success. Only to be told, usually a few weeks later when a highly anticipated chiller has crashed and burned, “Oh well, the genre bubble has burst. Again.” Once more proving screenwriter William Goldman’s adage about the film industry, “Nobody knows anything”.

Except, now things are looking markedly different. At a time when experts in this global multi-billion-dollar, high-stakes business are concerned about the future of the big screen experience – after the pandemic made staying in watching increasingly bloody streamer content the preferred method of accessing adult entertainment – the horror fantasy movie has repeatedly become the most trustworthy cash cow. It consistently out-performs expectations, garners unusually high levels of critical approbation and recently cut a historic swathe through the usually staid Bafta and Oscar nominations.

In any other year, the nods for Weapons, 28 Years Later and Frankenstein would be truly remarkable, but add in the surprise supernatural blockbuster Sinners, setting a new record for the most Oscar nominations ever (16), plus 13 Bafta nominations, including best film, and the horror’s latest ascendance is extra significant.

Clearly the tense racial satire Get Out (2017) and body horror hit The Substance (2024) paved the way with their multiple Oscar nominations. Although they won for original screenplay, and make-up and hairstyling respectively, both inclusions represented a major triumph for the maligned genre that few took seriously despite the occasional breakthrough, including Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), Misery (1990) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), pointedly all major studio offerings.

If you want to know where the cutting edge of horror truly lies, look to the independent arena where budgets and stars don’t matter, only ideas, imagination and creativity. Where the best special effect is cleverly wrenching fear out of mere shadow play, and the greatest advertising is word of mouth, both at no cost whatsoever. Because the horror fan is a die-hard aficionado, forever chasing the demented dragon of that original spine-tingling frisson that made them a genre celebrant in the first place.

Sinners cleverly mixes horror with masterful allegory

From Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978) and Re-Animator (1985) to latter-day cult items The Blair Witch Project, (1999), Saw (2004), Paranormal Activity (2007) and Terrifier (2016), sniff-of-a-shoestring-budget – often self-funded – enterprises used to be cinema’s bread-and-butter.

The initial change towards respectability happened during the stalk-and-slash era when Hollywood heavy Paramount decided to distribute the indie pick-up Friday the 13th (1980) because they wanted their share of the extraordinary amounts of cash such upstart exploiters were making. Contemporary critics and pundits were horrified by such a cynically venal approach to the celluloid art.

Things shifted noticeably again when fledgling film-makers like Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, 2002), James Wan (The Conjuring, 2013), Jordan Peele (Get Out) and Ari Aster (Hereditary, 2018) made it their mission to replicate the extreme brand of splatter and eye-grazing imagery they grew up with during the self-defining “video nasty” era, giving it a fresh narrative perspective. This time critics did pay attention, and while grudgingly cloaking their disconcerted admiration with the phrases “elevated” or “post-horror” to preserve their elitist reputations, they accidentally fuelled the mainstream genre crossover.

Social media and influencers giving voice to underrated and misunderstood titles also helped enormously, as did the sudden flurry of genre film festivals globally catering to an ever-increasing and gender-diverse demographic. And the most important fact: anyone can now make a movie using just an iPhone.

In my role as artistic director of London’s FrightFest and Italy’s Trieste Science+Fiction events, I watch a staggering number of film submissions on a weekly basis in order to cherry-pick the best titles to showcase. I cannot tell you how many amateur zombie productions I have viewed starring the director’s embarrassed friends and family, but when you see that one incredible entry by a clearly talented individual who just needs a little help to reach a willing audience, it makes the hours of inept boredom completely worthwhile.

Believe me when I say director Zach Cregger was on most festival programmers’ radars way before his Barbarian (2022) break-out. Now his 2025 film Weapons was long-listed for three Baftas for original screenplay, supporting actress (Amy Madigan), and editing. The point being, it’s not just savvy horror audiences setting the current taste-making agenda. The “everything, everywhere all at once” zeitgeist operating on every conceivable cultural, personal, professional and obsessional level is giving horror its currently envied maximum accessibility.

Cinema is a safe environment in which to feel fear

But why exactly are we entering a gloriously gory golden age of horror? Why do we relish sitting in a darkened auditorium with like-minded punters eager to scream, jump and nervously laugh collectively? Easy. Cinema is a safe environment in which to feel the adrenaline-pumping power of fear while experiencing the vicarious thrill of the communal sharing of extreme emotions with those probably suffering from exactly the same feel-bad anxieties.

At this particular time, in a world dominated by the gloom of ongoing wars, out-of-control climate change, rampant artificial intelligence and clueless politicians overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of these global crises, the more recent crop of horrors also seem duty-bound to explore such once taboo complex themes as dementia (Relic, 2020), racial issues (The Blackening, 2022), trauma (The Woman in the Yard, 2025) and religious division (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, 2026).

Thanks to last year’s high-quality horrors, the floodgates – or blood gates? – are now open with an alarming number of new releases coming down the shiver-inducing pike. Scream 7, Hokum, Obsession, Evil Dead Burn, Clayface, Insidious 6, Werwulf, Spider Island and Other Mommy are just the tip of a future tense iceberg hoping to satiate our need for more exciting cathartic impulses.

Bafta and Oscar wins would cement that pinnacle position. My money is on multiple victories for Sinners, because it cleverly mixes arthouse with grindhouse, traditional horror with masterful allegory, and it’s precisely that commercially driven experimentalism that will make it appealing to both Bafta and Academy Award members. Of Sinners’ monumental Oscars achievement, John Squires, editor-in-chief of horror magazine Bloody Disgusting, posted online, “The thing about horror movies getting Oscar nominations is that it’s the exact moment they turn into supernatural thrillers.” So, let’s call it what it is: a horror, and hopefully soon, an award-winning one.