October 17th, 2023, Clifton Mark
With Halloween just two weeks away, America is thinking of ways to scare itself. The horror movie is a dependable method of giving oneself the spookies, so which titles does America most want to watch?
The chart below comes from YouGov Signal, a social listening tool that tracks the performance of TV programs, movies and brands. Appetite Score is a value from 0-100 that measures the demand for given titles by combining web searches and Wikipedia lookups. Here are the horror titles with the highest average Appetite Scores among US audiences in the past 30 days:
The most in-demand horror movie this spooky season is the 2021 The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Signal shows that only 28% of sentiment expressed about this title is positive, so why is it the top horror this year? Interest is likely being driven by a recent Netflix documentary The Devil on Trial about the 1981 murder that originally inspired the film, which was the first in which demonic possession was used a legal defence.
No One Will Save You is the second most in-demand film in the past thirty days. Released by Hulu in late September, the movie only has five words of dialogue in its entire runtime. Will the buzz over this film suggest a strategy to producers for dealing with the Hollywood writers’ strike?
The Scream reboot has the third highest appetite score of any horror title in the past 30 days. Set 25 years after the first movie, the sequel reunites stars of the original cast with a new set of teenage victims. The 2022 release is the fifth film in the series and the first not directed by Wes Craven.
The Ring was released over twenty years ago, but it still has Americans talking. With an Appetite Score of 94.94, the American remake of a Japanese horror film is the tenth most in-demand horror title in the lead up to Halloween. It centers on a journalist attempting to escape death after watching a haunted videotape.
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