Horror movies’ endless technophobia is boring — and worse, it isn’t scary

After a while, too much of any good thing can become boring. The smell and flavor of pizza is something that many people hate after a while. If you do it enough times, even a challenging video game fetch task that is thrilling at first can become boring. And horror tropes that were effective at scaring our pants off when we were younger start to get stale if they don’t constantly update. That’s part of the reason horror is such an unusually responsive genre. It’s also the reason that one of the most popular horror tropes of all time has become an exhausting bore.

Only a handful of basic issues are frightening to humanity, so horror is merely a way for us humans to explore those concepts. But the forms constantly shift and evolve, either to reflect whatever’s weighing on people’s minds at the moment, or to imitate the last big success in the field. It’s an old pattern. It’s an old pattern. There was a boom in horror films about radiation-induced monsters in the years following the initial atomic bomb test in 1940. The space race in the 1950s turned America’s attention to the stars, which sparked a decade of horror movies about alien invaders. Horror movies depicting hippies being drug-crazed murderers inspired by Charles Manson’s murders sparked a micro-trend that glorified them. A horror film trend that was obsessed with Americans being tortured to death coincided closely with the George W. Bush torture sanction and the Abu Ghraib scandal. Fear tends to be a wave, and horror is a constant chase after whatever new fear people have.

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 they’re cheap, lightweight, ubiquitous, and capable of running for hours with minimal cost. That era seemed to mark a turning point, where miniaturization and computerization accelerated, tech innovation sped up, and the “processing society’s anxieties” subgenre of horror suddenly narrowed considerably, until it focused almost exclusively on the terrors of technology.

Nearly all emerging technologies have prompted horror films (or horror stories in other types of movies) that question whether they might be deadly or even dangerous. In the 1960s, mainframe computers were a key part of space flight. But what if the computers were trying to kill us? News stories in 2000 focused on patenting and genetic engineering. What if the genetic engineering was out to destroy us? In the 2010s, scientists were discussing artificial intelligence. What if artificial intelligence tried to kill us all? These days, kids spend too much time online. Well, what if they’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! Was it possible for online to murder us?

The unease about every shift in culture or society has always been horror’s bread and butter. There’s no fighting how the horror genre processes and reflects its audience’s subconscious fears of change and the future, which is just another kind of fear of the unknown. But as it has focused less on broader societal fears and more on specific tech developments, it’s become more and more rote, and less insightful about what’s frightening.

We’re facing so many threats, as a society and a species, that the attempts to turn innovation into a threat just feel wearying. In the abstract, it’s great that horror creators are constantly trying to re-invent the genre, chasing after fresh scares and novel threats. The obsessive and repetitive demonization of all aspects of online life has made it redundant. Just over the past few years, we’ve had horror stories about killer drones and killer laptops, killer Uber drivers and killer Uber passengers, killer hackers and killer Twitch streams, killer VR therapy and killer online persona games, killer Zoom calls and killer websites. Siri even wants control over humanity and to lure us into murder. And horror creators are convinced that killer apps aren’t just a dumb pun, they’re a huge threat, given that they come in a variety of forms, with a wide variety of deceptive lures to lead us into trouble.

Even when young people in this particular horror subgenre are facing old-school ghosts, demons, or slashers, it’s still because of the rise of social media and online communities. You can find endless films about YouTubers, influencers or Instagrammers, who allow their followers and hunger for pictures to lure them into encounters with anything from terror-happy sadists to torture-happy vloggers. It’s just one more way horror creators suggest that the internet wants to consume people’s souls, by drawing them to dangerous locales they never would have explored if they weren’t trying to please a restless, content-hungry audience.

Technology paranoia feels out of step with the times, however. Mobile phones and laptops are seamlessly integrated into our daily lives. People portraying them as evil, sentient monsters feel out of touch and quaint. The mundane and banality-of–evil dangers that social media companies pose to us are numerous. They spread misinformation, manipulate politics or simply waste our time, increasing our frustration and discontent. Reimagining social sites and group chats as portals for hungry ghosts and ancient evils feels petty, small-scale, and vaguely hilarious by comparison with the real-world ways they’ve changed society. It’s laughable to try to make online life a horror film by trying to include every aspect. YouTube might be society’s downfall, but it probably won’t be because YouTubers summoned a demon in hopes of getting more likes and shares.

Maybe the problem is that horror movies fixated on the danger of novelty and innovation don’t work particularly well in a novelty-hungry age, where people are simultaneously starved for every new convenience and entertainment, and a little jaded about taking them all in, given how fast one follows another. It’s hard to get properly worked up about the dangers of some new invention when it’ll be considered obsolete a month from now, replaced by something newer. To actually be scary, horror has to tap into some fear of the unknown — and as mysterious as we may find the inner workings of our phones or tablets or networks, we don’t really consider them unknowns anymore.

And as apps and tech-driven services and devices pile up, the horror genre’s attempt to find some form of terror in absolutely all of them just starts to feel like a boring stereotype, an “old man yells at cloud” reaction to the world, rather than a way to deal with real fears in the zeitgeist. We aren’t afraid of technology the way we used to be. It’s a frustration, sure, but it’s also a friend and confidant, more than an equivalent of yesterday’s werewolves, zombies, and giant marauding radioactive ants.

We aren’t likely to see an end to horror stories that capitalize on whatever’s new and different out there. But it’s worth wondering whether we’re going to see a strong shift in focus, away from new tech and back toward the things that actually drive conflict, anger, and fear in America. We’re already seeing more onscreen horror stories about wealth inequality and civil unrest, like the Purge movies, Jordan Peele’s Contact UsOr even Netflix’s mega-hit Squid Game. In the wake of a string of high-profile police shootings, the Black Lives Matter campaign has seen an increase in horror stories about racism and other racial conflicts, as well as the perils associated with being Black in America. Maybe it’s just a matter of time before the boring tech fears finally get buried for a while, and replaced with more stories about the kinds of societal shifts we’re struggling to face as a society. At least until Facebook introduces its augmented-reality “multiverse” where we’ll all be expected to live. Now that’s technology that actually sounds frightening.