As much as many of us love to bash Hollywood, moviemakers do tell us something about our collective psyche—if not with their specific films, then with the types of movies they keep putting into production. That’s what Fortune discovered when we broke down each year’s crop of films by genre, as defined by IMDb. The lonesome, yearning Westerns of the 1920s gave way to musicals and war sagas in the ’40s, film noir in the ’50s, skin flicks in the ’80s, and high-power action movies in the ’90s. So what does Tinseltown’s output say about us now? Both thrillers and horror flicks reached their production peak during the past two years. Something out there, it seems, has got us running scared.
A version of this article appears in the July 2019 issue of Fortune with the headline “Screen Shots.”
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