Hollywood has always relied on horror movies. In an industry that churns in a constant cycle of fads and trends, horror has reliably been the safest bet, with decades of box-office returns definitively proving that audiences will pay money to get the shit scared out of them.

Of course, relying on something isn’t the same as respecting it. Hollywood has long had a kind of reflective snobbishness about horror movies—a self-perpetuating cycle in which studios, largely writing horror movies off as cheap and lazy, would race to the bottom with cheap, lazy horror movies. “When I first started out and would go on pitch meetings, there was always this kind of eye-roll that would come with pitching a horror movie when you were dealing with the studios,” says horror director Mike Flanagan, whose recent movies include Hush and Gerald’s Game. “Unless it was viewed as a cheap product that could turn a lot of profit, there wasn’t a lot of interest in making it good. It was like fast food. 'We can make this cheap, on a grand scale, and people will consume it. It doesn’t matter if it’s empty calories.'”

Those awful studio movies still exist, as anyone who saw the Flatliners remake can tell you—but over the past decade or so, they’ve rapidly been outpaced by an explosion of fresh horror talent, championed by critics and (generally) embraced by audiences who are hungry for unapologetically adult-oriented fare.

What's the single trend that unifies all the horror movies being released right now? The answer: they're all so damn good. Horror movies, which were snobbishly dismissed for so long, are now routinely better-reviewed than your average "prestige" movie. And this year—for the first time ever—the most critically lauded movie released to date is a horror movie. For the first time, cinema’s most commercially viable genre is also its most acclaimed.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 Movies of 2017, ranked by Adjusted Scores; Box Office Mojo 2017 Domestic Grosses.

What spawned this horror renaissance? It starts with the talent making it. Horror is the ideal genre for an up-and-coming filmmaker to cut his or her teeth—just ask James Cameron or Steven Spielberg—and the film industry has been injected with a slew of young producers and filmmakers who are passionately committed to telling horror stories. "It’s an even battleground with low expectations," says director Adam Wingard, the man behind movies like You’re Next, The Guest, and Netflix’s adaptation of Death Note. "If you come in there and show that you have an eye for something different, and a point of view, you can stand out immediately."