But the gleeful demonizing of every possible aspect of online life has just gotten redundant and obsessive. In the abstract, itвЂ™s great that horror creators are constantly trying to re-invent the genre, chasing after fresh scares and novel threats. WeвЂ™re facing so many threats, as a society and a species, that the attempts to turn innovation into a threat just feel wearying. But as it has focused less on broader societal fears and more on specific tech developments, itвЂ™s become more and more rote, and less insightful about whatвЂ™s frightening.

ThereвЂ™s no fighting how the horror genre processes and reflects its audienceвЂ™s subconscious fears of change and the future, which is just another kind of fear of the unknown. The unease about every shift in culture or society has always been horrorвЂ™s bread and butter. Mainframe computers in the 1960s becoming a significant part of space flight? Well, what if computers in space wanted to kill us? News cycles in the late 2000s fussing over genetic engineering and patenting? Well, what if genetic engineering wanted to kill us? Scientists in the 2010s talking about artificial intelligence projects? Well, what if artificial intelligence wanted to kill us? Kids these days spending too much time online? Well, what if theyвЂ™re using those connections to build communities of like-minded young people with shared interests, supportive and nurturing and educational communities that no generation before them had access to? Ha ha, just kidding! What if online wanted to kill us? 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 вЂњprocessing societyвЂ™s anxietiesвЂќ 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 theyвЂ™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 AmericaвЂ™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 whateverвЂ™s weighing on peopleвЂ™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. ItвЂ™s also the reason that one of the most popular horror tropes of all time has become an exhausting bore.

ThatвЂ™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 donвЂ™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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