Horror films used to be paired with Halloween – and summer – for teen moviegoers. But here we are in the middle of January and horror films abound: Primate, We Bury the Dead, Sleepwalker, Iron Lung, The Bone Temple, and the list goes on... What's up with that? Are there fewer fun movies than there used to be?

Sam Raimi's Send Help is the new genre of boss-revenge taken to the extreme.

Espresso-dark post-apocalyptic seems popular. Honestly, aside from fashion trends and still paying taxes, we are kind of living the "Bone Temple" life right now across America.

I decided to gather a bit of data from BoxOfficeMojo.com – a sampling of movies released in January, every five years since 2000, just to see if my hunch was correct – and it was! Darker films have increased 27% → 53% over 25 years while lighter fare has decreased from 46% → 38%.

Nice job of charting by Claude.ai and a public link to the chart is available.