Horror films are a cultural barometer: capturing, distorting, and projecting collective fears back to us. Using Netflix’s Engagement Report for January to June 2025, this project examines what the platform’s most-watched horror titles reveal about the anxieties shaping contemporary popular culture.
Live demoNetflix's Engagement Report (Jan–Jun 2025) captures aggregate viewing across the entire platform. This project moves beyond that broad distribution to surface more specific, interpretable patterns in what kinds of narratives and themes dominate attention.
Horror is the entry point. From a cultural perspective, it translates diffuse tensions and anxieties into recognizable narrative forms, making it well suited to structured analysis. Commercially, it has grown from a niche genre into one of the most significant categories in contemporary film, accounting for a record 17% of North American ticket sales in 2025.
The project approaches horror as a cultural barometer, treating a large set of popular titles as a corpus through which contemporary fears can be mapped, compared, and grouped. At its core is a classification system that assigns each film a primary fear category, moving the analysis from individual titles to a broader structure of recurring themes.
Film metadata was compiled from Netflix’s Engagement Report and enriched through OMDb, IMDb, and TMDB APIs. Each title was then classified by core fear using a hybrid workflow: a local LLaMA-3 8B model run via Ollama, prompted with the film’s title, synopsis, and keywords, and guided by a manually designed taxonomy.
Model outputs were then reviewed and refined. Categories were consolidated into three higher-order supergroups reflecting broader dimensions of recurring fears.
The narrative opens with a "hit matrix" comparing all genres by total views and IMDb rating, situating horror within a larger field of popular film consumption. It then narrows to horror itself, showing which fear categories dominate the genre, which patterns recur across subgroups, and how titles are distributed geographically.
