Horror Has More Creators Than Ever — So Why Does Everyone Feel Invisible?

1 day ago

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How Horror Journalists, Influencers and Creators Are Reshaping Horror Media

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what exactly a horror media outlet is supposed to be in 2026. For years, the structure made sense. A filmmaker made a movie. A publicist contacted the press. A writer reviewed it, interviewed somebody involved or published the announcement. Readers visited the website or bought the magazine, and maybe they discovered something they otherwise never would have heard about. Horror had magazines, zines, websites, message boards, blogs, convention coverage and all the other little ecosystems that grew around people who loved this stuff enough to spend ridiculous amounts of time talking about it.

A lot of that still exists, but something else has grown around it. The horror journalist has increasingly become the horror creator, and there are now thousands of us.

When the Outlet Was the Destination

I’ve been running More Horror in one form or another since 2008. I remember when the primary goal of social media was fairly simple: get somebody to click the link. You posted something on Facebook, Twitter or whatever platform mattered at the moment, and ideally the person ended up on your website. The site was the destination. Social media functioned as the road leading there.

That arrangement has almost completely inverted. More Horror now has around 65,000 followers on Instagram, along with audiences across Facebook, Threads, X, TikTok and YouTube. We built much of that Instagram audience organically over years, including during a period when growing a page through consistent posting felt considerably more achievable than it does now. Today I can put a piece of horror news on Instagram and thousands of people may see it without ever visiting MoreHorror.com.

They’ll comment on the movie, tag somebody, argue about whether the remake sucks, tell me the original is better and inevitably declare that horror died sometime in the 1980s. They are clearly engaging with horror media. They simply never left Instagram.

That dynamic has changed the job.

The Person Became the Publication

Traditional horror journalism usually separated the publication from the personality. You knew Fangoria. You knew Rue Morgue. You knew Bloody Disgusting. Writers certainly developed recognizable voices, and horror journalism has always had personalities, but the masthead carried enormous weight. Social media pushed the individual forward and made the person increasingly inseparable from the publication.

Now somebody can build a horror audience entirely around themselves. They review movies on TikTok, tour conventions with a phone and microphone, post horror trivia, show off VHS collections, rank slashers, interview filmmakers on YouTube, photograph haunted attractions, cosplay, react to trailers and report from premieres. Some creators make short-form videos that reach more people in six hours than a traditional horror article may reach during its entire lifespan.

At some point, we have to acknowledge that many of these people are performing functions that once belonged almost exclusively to horror publications. The vocabulary gets messy. Are they journalists, influencers, creators, critics, correspondents or simply horror fans who figured out how to build an audience around what they love?

I find that less interesting than the work itself. If somebody attends a film festival, interviews a director, provides accurate information about the movie and gives an audience useful context, I care far more about the quality of what they produced than whether their press badge says JOURNALIST in sufficiently serious capital letters.

Everyone Has a Broadcasting Station Now

There is something genuinely exciting about this. Horror no longer needs permission from a handful of gatekeepers to exist publicly. A filmmaker in rural Illinois can release a trailer tonight and have someone in Los Angeles talking about it tomorrow. A horror fan in Dallas can build an audience around obscure slashers. Someone in New York can walk out of an advance screening and immediately tell thousands of people what they thought. A creator can cover a convention that a traditional outlet lacks the budget or staff to attend.

That democratization fits horror especially well because this genre has always grown through outsiders. Fanzines, tape trading, convention tables, independent video stores, late-night television and message boards all gave people ways to tell each other about strange things they had discovered. Horror has always spread sideways, through people who found something cool and felt compelled to pass it along.

Now everybody carries the distribution system in their pocket.

That creates another problem, because everybody else carries one too.

The Feed Is Getting Loud

Spend fifteen minutes looking through horror Instagram or TikTok and the sheer volume becomes obvious. There are horror reviewers, collectors, actors, filmmakers, makeup artists, haunt performers, monster kids, poster collectors, Halloween historians, physical-media obsessives, cosplayers, podcasters, convention personalities and theme park creators. There are true-crime creators who wander into horror, horror creators who wander into true crime, and people opening mystery boxes while dressed like Ghostface.

Some of these people are exceptionally good at what they do, and there are a lot of them. This creates a strange contradiction where horror may have more people creating horror-related media than at any point in its history while individual creators can simultaneously feel harder to discover.

I’ve watched this happen beyond More Horror too. People who built audiences five or ten years ago sometimes become frustrated when growth slows dramatically. They still make content. Their existing audience may still enjoy it. New followers arrive much more slowly, and eventually the creator starts wondering whether anybody is listening.

“Shouting into the void” has become one of those exhausted internet phrases, but it describes the sensation pretty well. You spend an hour putting something together, post it and watch the algorithm stare back at you like a dead-eyed studio executive who has already moved on to the next pitch.

Followers Don’t Mean What They Used To

Follower counts once represented something much closer to distribution. Someone followed your page, and there was a reasonably good chance they would see what you posted. Modern social platforms increasingly function as recommendation engines where following an account becomes one signal among many, and the platform decides what it believes somebody wants to see at that particular moment.

That creates situations that would have seemed absurd years ago. Someone with 100,000 followers can publish something that barely moves, while somebody with 1,500 followers can post the right video at the right time and reach a million people. That unpredictability creates opportunity, but it also turns content creation into something resembling a slot machine where everybody keeps pulling the lever.

Post another Reel. Try a shorter caption. Use trending audio. Post at 7:00. Apparently 11:30 works better now. Make a carousel. Upload the same thing as a Short. Put it on TikTok. Maybe Threads wants it. Check the analytics. Check them again. Apparently fourteen people unfollowed because you posted about a movie they don’t like.

This is a very strange way to participate in culture.

Horror Has Always Had a Favor Economy

Horror operates heavily through relationships, especially at the independent level. A website shares somebody’s Kickstarter. A podcaster interviews a director. A reviewer covers an independent film. A filmmaker sends a screener. A creator posts a trailer. Somebody reposts somebody else’s Reel. A convention provides access. A publicist connects a journalist with talent.

The entire underground horror ecosystem survives partly because people amplify one another. I like that about horror, and I’ve participated in it for years. Some of the best opportunities I’ve had came through people helping each other, passing along contacts, sharing work or simply saying, “You should talk to this person.”

The Favor Starts Becoming Labor

This is where the old favor economy starts to get tricky. Writing an article takes time, as does editing a video or creating graphics. Watching a movie eats up a couple of hours before anyone has even written a word about it. And conducting an interview means scheduling, preparing, recording, editing, and promoting.

Independent horror media often performs all of this work with very small staffs. Sometimes one person does everything: writer, editor, graphic designer, social media manager, video editor, photographer and then, after all that, publicist for the thing they just spent several hours creating.

I know that job pretty well.

At some point the line between supporting the horror community and becoming an unpaid marketing department gets blurry. Collaboration is still enormously important, but the sheer volume of requests changes the nature of the relationship. Reciprocity starts to become even more important.

Maybe We Don’t Need Another Megaphone

All of this started changing how I think about More Horror. For years, growing a media outlet meant accumulating a bigger audience. More followers, more traffic and more reach were the obvious goals, and they still matter. I want More Horror to grow. I want our articles to get read. I want our posts to reach people. If we cover an independent film I believe deserves attention, I want that filmmaker to feel an actual effect from the coverage.

Lately, though, I’ve become increasingly interested in another idea. Maybe the next useful step involves connecting audiences rather than endlessly trying to collect them.

That thinking eventually became the More Horror Network.

The idea started fairly simply. There are already talented horror creators everywhere. Some live in Los Angeles and regularly attend premieres. Some live in New York. Others are in Texas, Nashville, Las Vegas or places we haven’t reached yet. Some are excellent on camera. Some write. Some photograph events. Some make strange, funny horror videos. Some have large audiences. Some have smaller audiences with incredibly strong engagement.

What happens when those people start connecting?

Building Connective Tissue

Instead of treating every horror creator like another competitor for the same limited pile of attention, I started wondering what happens when the infrastructure begins linking them together. A correspondent attends an event. More Horror amplifies their coverage. They introduce their audience to us. Our audience discovers them. A filmmaker gets additional visibility. Another creator discovers the filmmaker.

Something moves sideways through the community instead of waiting for an algorithm to randomly bless it from above.

That interests me much more than building another isolated social media kingdom. Horror already has plenty of people holding megaphones. What it increasingly needs is connective tissue.

That is also where I think the distinction between journalist, influencer and creator becomes less useful. A person can wear several of those hats depending on what they are doing that day. Someone might write a review in the morning, shoot convention footage that afternoon and post a ridiculous horror meme that night. The work has become hybrid because the media environment itself has become hybrid.

The person doing the work has adapted along with it.

A Network of Microphones

I think that may be where horror media heads next. Traditional publications will continue to be important.Websites still have a role. Long-form criticism gives ideas room to breathe. Journalists document, investigate and preserve. Creators bring personality and immediacy. Influencers can move attention quickly. Podcasts build intimacy. YouTube gives horror coverage a visual life. And yes, that quirky person on Instagram who’s seen every direct-to-video slasher from 1987 to 1994 probably knows things the rest of us don’t.

Each reaches people differently, and the challenge increasingly involves connecting those points. One person covering Los Angeles cannot cover everything happening there. One website cannot watch every independent movie. One creator cannot attend every convention. No single audience will ever see everything.

A network changes the equation.

Instead of everybody screaming louder, you build a network of microphones.

Horror Never Really Worked Alone Anyway

The funny thing is that none of this feels particularly new when I look at horror history. The technology changes constantly, but the behavior underneath it has remained remarkably familiar. Someone discovered a strange movie and told their friends. Someone made a fanzine. Someone mailed a VHS tape across the country. Someone recommended a bootleg at a convention. Someone posted about a movie on a message board. Someone embedded a trailer on MySpace. Someone tweeted about it. Someone made a TikTok. Someone posted a Reel.

The transmission method keeps mutating, but the impulse remains almost primitive.

Horror people find strange things in the dark, then turn toward somebody else and say, “You need to see this.”