Spooky season isn’t here quite yet, but you’d never know looking at the box office. The Conjuring: Last Rites, the latest installment about a (problematic) real-life couple who investigated the paranormal, had a massive $84 million domestic opening weekend. That’s just the latest success for horror films. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Zach Cregger’s Weapons, and Final Destination Bloodlines also had surprising success in theaters this year.
According to Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketing at the media analytics company Comscore, horror movies have already surpassed $1 billion at the domestic box office. The last time that happened was 2017, when It and Get Out took theaters by storm.
Horror films have always been an easy way to make money in movies because their budgets tend to be low. “Even back in the day, you would have a movie like the original Halloween, which had a very modest budget and then just became this box office juggernaut,” Dergarabedian told Vox.
But until recently, that financial success didn’t always come with critical appreciation. Horror, Dergarabedian told Vox, has been “the Rodney Dangerfield of genres. It can’t get no respect.”
What’s striking about 2025’s horror hits is not only their ability to sell tickets at a time when many other movies are struggling. It’s also the critical consensus that these are truly great films. Sinners and Weapons in particular could contend for major Oscar nominations. It’s a swing toward respectability for a genre that encompasses both The Exorcist (a Best Picture nominee) and Friday the 13th (the guiltiest of pleasures).
“If you go through the history of the genre, there’s sort of these peaks and valleys in terms of critical appreciation,” filmmaker and DePaul University film professor Andrew Stasiulis told Vox. “But we now have swung back into a phase of people really respecting horror, respecting its traditions, and you see that in some of the most popular and well-respected directors of today: Jordan Peele with Get Out, Ari Aster with Hereditary and Midsommar, Robert Eggers, and Zach Cregger.”
One counterintuitive trait many of those creators share: They got their start in comedy. “I think that comedy is always paired really naturally with horror,” Vulture film critic Alison Willmore said.
Why is it that those genres pair so well? And what does our love of horror movies say about us? That’s the subject of this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Willmore, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
What is a horror comedy? Are they truly scary movies with some comedic elements?
The best horror comedies are both scary and funny. Even in movies that are pretty straightforwardly horror, I think there’s usually some room for intentional comedy or, sometimes, if the movie’s not going well, unintentional comedy.
“There is definitely a real trend there in terms of the comedy to horror pathway.”
The one I always think about in terms of an early horror comedy is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. That was back in the 1940s. Even back then, you’ve got a classic comedy duo meeting a classic movie monster. Since then you’ve got things like the Evil Dead movies, which are funny as well as very creepy. Or Shaun of the Dead, a zombie movie that is clearly made for and by people who actually have seen zombie movies — including the characters within it.
Why do horror and comedy go so well together? It feels like such an odd combination.
They do feel like they should be opposites, but I think they’re both genres that have been considered a little disreputable; we don’t treat them as seriously as drama. A lot of the same elements that go into making a bit work or a joke work are what makes a scare work. It’s a question of timing. It’s a question of craft. It’s a question of landing that punchline or landing that jump scare.
I think that that speaks to a certain kind of shared spirit in both of those genres. That’s one of the reasons I think they fit so well together and people move back and forth between them.
They both thrive on the unexpected. There’s a sense of surprise with both comedy and horror.
Absolutely. We think a lot about jump scares as trademark experiences of watching a horror movie, but what do you do when you get a really good jump scare? You laugh a bit, right? You build up tension and then there’s a release, and I think that same thing happens with a joke as well.
Some of our most buzziest horror creators right now — Jordan Peele of Get Out, and Zach Cregger of Weapons — they’re comedians. I’m curious what you think about that crossover.
I think that it goes back to that shared DNA of how you set up a scare and how you set up a joke being very similar, even if your aims are different in terms of the response you want from an audience.
The director of Heart Eyes, which is a movie that is both a riff on slasher movies and romantic comedies, was directed by Josh Ruben, who worked at CollegeHumor. The Philippou brothers who directed the 2022 movie Talk to Me got started on YouTube making goofy sketches. There is definitely a real trend there in terms of the comedy to horror pathway.
One of my favorite things about horror is that it can accommodate so many mixes of tones, I think maybe more so than any other genre. It’s just this incredible container for things that can be really weirdly touching, and then on the other side, outrageous and funny and shocking and grotesque.
It almost seems like it’s the tofu of movie genres.
Absolutely. It picks up the flavors of whatever it’s cooked with.
The main focus of practically every horror movie is escaping death. I wonder what that says about us, the fact that this can be funny, the fact that this can be cathartic in a way.
We want to be able to sample the darkness, to sample the danger. But it has to be in a controlled environment, in a way where you know that the credits are going to roll and then you get to go home. I think that it does offer this safe space in which to explore these dark, really exciting, tense experiences.
