Numlock Sunday: Stephen Follows on the horror movie boom

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows, author of The Horror Movie Report.

Stephen and I go back a ways, he’s a pop culture data journalist I really respect and you’ve seen him in the newsletter lately based on his great work on stuff like Hallmark movies. He’s out with a really fun new book diving into horror movies, one of the more exciting genres in the film industry these days.

We spoke about the rise of horror as a genre, its unique relationship with audiences, and how certain trends have evolved over time.

Follows can be found at his website, and the book can be found at HorrorMovieReport.com.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Stephen, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for inviting me. It's always a joy to have a chat with a fellow nerd who likes to go as deep as we do on this stuff.

You have this really interesting new book out called The Horror Movie Report: The Ultimate Data Analysis of Horror Films. This thing's amazing. We're going to get into it. But before we dive in, I'd love to start off by hearing about how you'd describe the work you do. Can you tell folks a little about your history as a writer, blogger and analyst?

Definitely. I kind of came to this in a strange way. I always knew I wanted to do film and thinking, but I didn't know what that meant. I was a teenager, and everyone told me to go and study thinking, study science and do film on the side. So I did the opposite, because I'm a contrarian. I went to film school and went down a path of writer/producer, and I set up a production company. It still runs, but is now doing more advertising for the charity sector in the UK.

I'm still involved with that, but it meant that as my stuff moved away from film, I missed being connected to the film industry. I started to use my thinking principles and maybe 15 years ago I started studying film through the lens of data. I have no training in data. I stopped studying math at about 15, but I have an aptitude for it, and I enjoy it. Not many people do in film. I thought, oh, this is fun. This is a place for me. I started blogging about that, and some in the film industry like it. Not many people run away to do the accounts for the circus. It's nice to have a place.

Then that evolved. I've done stuff within gender and other forms of inequality, and things within business to help filmmakers' profitability — but also crazy things, like looking at which Bond film mentions its own title most frequently in the dialogue. Which I don't think you're going to guess.

GoldenEye is my only guess.

It's a good guess, and you're on the right path, but it's the wrong answer. The answer is Moonraker. You were right to think object instead of character.

But that led me on, and I now work for Guinness World Records as a side gig, finding out movie records. That's the sum total of 20 years of numbers and film fun.

I love your work. I've always enjoyed your work quite a bit, and I've done a lot of work myself in the pop culture data space and there's not a lot of folks in here. Particularly back in the day, there weren't many folks at all, so it was always really cool to see your stuff. It definitely always got me thinking and is really one-of-a-kind.

That's nice to say. And I agree; I would often think of an idea, or someone would ask me about an idea, and I'd be like, I wonder if anyone's done that. Then I'd Google