With Halloween just around the corner and spooky content ramping up on TV and streaming platforms, which nations are most likely to watch horror movies or shows?
A Statista Consumer Insights survey conducted between October 2025 and September 2026 found that in Mexico, almost half of respondents say they like to watch horror movies or shows, around as many as in India, Malaysia and the Philippines.
In an interview with NPR, Edwin Pagan, who runs LatinHorror.com, theorizes that a lot of Latinos watch the genre because many of the stories children hear growing up incorporate the supernatural: "Traditionally, we have always loved ghost stories and the macabre and Gothic tales," he says. "They're just sewn into the fabric of who we are as a people."
The genre also has a big following in the United States, the home of Hollywood and blockbuster horror movies, with 48 percent of respondents there saying that they watch horror content at least occasionally. Fewer people are fond of scary entertainment in China and France as well as Japan, South Korea and Italy.
In the ranking of film genres surveyed by Statista, horror has the fifth-highest share of viewers in the U.S., behind action and adventures (65 percent said they had watched it in the past year), comedies (59 percent), thrillers/mysteries/crimes (51 percent) and dramas (50 percent).
