Virtually every emergent technology has prompted horror movies (or horror scenarios in other genres of movies) about whether it might be dangerous and even murderous. That era seemed to mark a turning point, where miniaturization and computerization accelerated, tech innovation sped up, and the “processing society’s anxieties” subgenre of horror suddenly narrowed considerably, until it focused almost exclusively on the terrors of technology. In the 2000s, the rise of digital cameras helped prompt the found-footage trend in horror, which often focuses on the horrible otherwise-unseen things cameras might catch, now that they’re cheap, lightweight, ubiquitous, and capable of running for hours with minimal cost. Horror tends to come in waves, chasing whatever people might be freshly afraid of. Bush sanctioning torture closely coincided with a trend of horror films obsessed with Americans being tortured in excruciating detail. The Charles Manson murders inspired a micro-trend of horror movies that villainized hippies as drug-crazed, murderous cultists. The space race in the 1950s turned America’s attention to the stars, which sparked a decade of horror movies about alien invaders. The years after the first atomic bomb tests in the 1940s saw a surge in horror movies about monsters spawned by radiation. But the forms constantly shift and evolve, either to reflect whatever’s weighing on people’s minds at the moment, or to imitate the last big success in the field.
Humanity is only afraid of a couple of really basic things, and horror explores those ideas over and over. It’s also the reason that one of the most popular horror tropes of all time has become an exhausting bore. That’s part of the reason horror is such an unusually responsive genre. And horror tropes that were effective at scaring our pants off when we were younger start to get stale if they don’t constantly update. A video game fetch quest that was challenging and thrilling the first time around becomes rote after enough repetition. People who work at pizza places eventually start to hate the smell and taste of pizza. Too much of anything good gets boring after a while.
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