Chills and Thrills: Where Horror Rules the Screen

With Halloween just around the corner and spooky content ramping up on streaming platforms as it does each fall, we decided to take a look at where it's most common for people to watch horror movies around the world.

A Statista Consumer Insights survey conducted between October 2023 and September 2024 found that in Mexico, a high 49 percent of respondents said they liked to watch horror movies or shows online or on TV. In an interview with NPR, Edwin Pagan, who runs LatinHorror.com, theorizes that a lot of Latinos watch the genre because many of the stories children hear growing up incorporate the supernatural: "Traditionally, we have always loved ghost stories and the macabre and Gothic tales," he says. "They're just sewn into the fabric of who we are as a people."

The genre also has a fairly high following in the United States, the home to Hollywood and blockbuster horror movies, with four in ten respondents there saying that they watched horror content at least occasionally.

In the ranking of film genres surveyed by Statista in 2023-2024, “horror” has the fifth-highest share of viewers in the U.S., following comedies (64 percent said they had watched it in the past year), dramas (54 percent), thrillers/mysteries/crimes (50 percent) and documentaries (48 percent).