I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the assignment.

For the last decade of so, we've basically moved out of the kind of torture porn era of the horror genre to this prestige-adjacent thing, right?

These films that are winning over mainstream audiences, hardcore fans, and investors.

It's cheap to make, which often it is.

It can have very spare settings like a cabin in the woods or an empty road is your setting.

You can star unknown actors because it's not celebrity driven.

It is more plot driven.

So it literally doesn't matter who a lot of the actors are in horror movies.

As long as you have a clever idea, and you can get

even a little bit of money. And the result has been a run of horror films selling more than

scares. You can make something really, really special and impactful. And I think there will

always be those creators, no matter what happens on the corporate level,

indie horror will shine,

and corporate horror will follow the money.

Horror writer and Bram Stoker Award winner,

Tanana Reeve Do,

is here to help us figure out what it is about this moment,

this decade that's turned horror

into the most daring, diverse, and revealing genre on screen.

What does the box office renaissance of fear say about how we feel about the world we're living in right now?

A conversation for people who watch through their fingers. That's next.

Thanks to Ryan Cougler's Jim Crow vampire gothic sinners

...