After a decade of perpetual, looming, often existential threats – pandemics, wars, genocides, environmental decline, poverty, fascism – horror film and TV fan Anna Bogutskaya asks in her latest book, Feeding The Monster: what can the genre do to truly scare us anymore?

The question is more pertinent with her introductory explanation that a very bad decade (2014-now) in human history coincides with a very good decade or so for horror, commercially and critically. Starting with breakout hits like The Babadook and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Bogutakaya argues that a renewed interest in the making and consumption of horror marks it as the only dominant genre in this period besides superheroes, and certainly the most bankable in an era where studios themselves are terrified of pouring money into anything that doesn’t come from an existing IP, costs and generates record-breaking amounts and kickstarts multimedia empires.

When she contextualises this in every prior decade of cinema, a pattern emerges: horror always tells us what we’re afraid of even if we don’t consciously acknowledge it, whether it’s the occult in the 1960s or teenagers in the 90s. Rooted in very personal taste-making tales as a woman horror fan, a label that’s become less taboo but still forces constant, exhaustive defence, she shapes her analysis of what ‘feeds’ our inner monster into fear, hunger, anxiety, pain and power, primal urges that very effectively lay bare her core thesis: horror is the genre of empathy. And, as the late Roger Ebert defined cinema so beautifully as a “machine that generates empathy”, horror by this metric is perhaps its beating, undead heart.

Incredibly well-sourced and pleasingly accessible, Feeding The Monster is at its best when it strips away its defensiveness (‘What’s wrong with you?’), and cuts to the core of how a new crop of creators – Jennifer Kent, Jordan Peele, Mike Flanagan, Jason Blumhouse and more – have reinvented haunted houses, vampires, cannibals, zombies, demons and more spooky staples (‘What’s wrong with us?’) for commentary on the multitude of pervading evils in our lives: generational trauma, economic insecurity, social division and environmental catastrophe. This is all especially compacted for generations like mine and the author’s, weaned on social media and 24-hour news cycles which keep us gripped by panic so intently that we’re almost numb to it.

So, to answer the question at the start, what truly scares is everything, and when fear is everywhere, Feeding The Monster proves horror has its most fertile ground in years to leech off of. More positively, it’s the perfect antidote to that numbness we’ve succumbed to. We don’t buy a ticket to the newest scary film to sign up for the next long-haul multiverse (though they do happen in horror, of course). We buy one to feel something, Bogutakaya says, and that makes horror not only ever profitable, relevant and emotion-driven but also the last genre of authenticity: “Monsters used to demand awe. Now they demand honesty.”