What Do This Year's Horror Movies Tell Us About Gen Z Spirituality?

Religion is everywhere across the horror genre, but religious people continue to have varying views on the value of these stories.

Just last week, prominent conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey argued that Christians should not be fans of horror—emphasizing that christians should avoid making themselves scared unnecessarily. She received significant pushback online from fellow Christians who urged her to see all the ways horror movies with demonic elements often demonstrate God’s power over the devil.

Whether or not the films are healthy, they are often revelatory, just as fiction always has been.

The ghost stories and villains of any era can tell us much about what a past society feared.

From the Ancient Greek myths which depicted the sea as strange and full of terrors, to the work of Edgar Allen Poe whose stories featured debilitating illness, to the Dark Knight trilogy, which presents The Joker and Bane as domestic terrorists, the things that make us feel unsafe in our real lives, wriggle their way into our fiction.

When fiction shows our fears it also tends to reveal what we think is best at fighting those fears—and what we think is not. And often an era rejects the solutions of its past—with regard to faith in particular. So just as religion is the best weapon against evil in “The Exorcist,” it is the weapon of evil-doers in The “Handmaid’s Tale.”

So how will this upcoming generation reveal its fears and faiths through story?

In 2026, Gen Z has finally grown up enough to make their own movies. This year’s biggest horror films were both spearheaded by Gen Z directors, with Curry Barker and Kane Parsons making “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” respectively.

This week, Religion Unplugged’s culture writers Joseph Holmes and Jillian Cheney sat down together to explore how Gen Z thinking is changing the horror genre.