Why Horror Still Haunts Us

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 678 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Horror movies are big business: this year, they’ve accounted for more ticket sales in the U.S. than comedies and dramas combined, bringing in over a billion dollars at the box office. And the phenomenon goes beyond a hunger for cheap thrills and slasher flicks; artists have been using horror to explore deep-seated communal and personal anxieties for centuries. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz, along with the New Yorker culture editor Alex Barasch, use three contemporary entries—“The Babadook,” “Saint Maud,” and “Weapons”—to illustrate the inventive filmmaking and sharp social commentary that have become hallmarks of modern horror. “In the past, the horror would be something external that’s disrupting a previously idyllic town or life. Now there's a lot more of: the bad thing has already happened to you,” Barasch says. “You already have a trauma at the beginning of the film—or even before the film begins—and then that is eating you from the inside, or trying to kill you, and you have to grapple with that.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“The Babadook” (2014)
“Rosemary’s Baby” (1968)
“Scream with Me,” by Eleanor Johnson
“Hereditary” (2018)
“The Substance” (2024)
“Saint Maud” (2020)
The “Saw” franchise (2004—)
“The Exorcist” (1973)
“The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” by Parul Sehgal (The New Yorker)
“Weapons” (2025)
“Barbarian” (2022)
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974)
“Get Out” (2017)
“Alien” (1979)
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
“Talk to Me” (2022)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker.
0:10.3	I'm Vincent Cunningham.
0:11.2	I'm Alex Schwartz.
0:12.3	And I'm Nomi Fry.
0:13.7	Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here.
0:19.8	Hello, fellow critics. Hello. What's up? It's been a long weekend. It's been festival weekend. It's been New Yorker Festival weekend. Alex, you are a bit hoarse, are you not? We're just warning our listeners. I might get hoarse. I'm doctoring. We're going to make it through. We're going to do it. I believe.
0:38.5	I mean, it is getting a little bit colder, a little chillier. Night is falling earlier and earlier.
0:45.8	October is careening towards its inevitable end. And with that inevitable end, Halloween. What a buildup. Just love it. I know.
0:57.0	Amazing. Are you guys dressing up as anything this year? Any costumes in the works?
1:01.0	We're trying to do matching butterflies in my household. That is adorable.
1:06.0	My little daughter loves butterflies, but we'll see. I've done, I mean, I've done nothing, to be clear, and that's usually not good. Week of Halloween, not a great time to shop for Halloween. Right. Well, luckily, your daughter is quite young, so she won't know the difference. Yes, but then she'll look back and be like, you guys. Right. Right. Alex, how about yourself? My son is the first year he's year he wanted to choose his own costume, and he immediately said pumpkin.
1:31.2	Okay, that is adorable.
1:32.2	That we should all be pumpkins.
1:33.1	So I think we're going to be pumpkins.
1:34.8	Okay. Well, these...
1:36.3	No.
1:37.2	Okay.
1:37.9	I'm not planning anything, but I have to say, you guys, your costumes are sounding pretty darn wholesome, which is lovely because you have young kids.
1:48.4	But when we usually think of Halloween, we sometimes think of something slightly less, you know, heartwarming.
1:55.9	We might think, in fact, of horror.
2:00.4	Oh, okay. Exactly.
2:04.2	You guys, what has your engagement been with horror genre, horror movies in particular?
	...

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