Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely noticed that this has been a pretty good year for horror. Get Out was the talk of Tinseltown as awards season began to ramp up, all leading to the two Golden Globe nominations it racked up Monday morning. This fall, It obliterated the box office with numbers not seen for a horror debut in decades. Several indie darlings, including the gruesome Raw and the tense psychological thriller It Comes at Night, have also made big debuts, becoming zeitgeisty hits. But why, exactly, was this year such a fertile horror show—so to speak?

Horror films doing particularly well at the box office isn’t exactly a new phenomenon; last year saw The Conjuring 2 clear the $100 million mark, while The Purge: Election Year did stunning numbers relative to its budget and Don’t Breathe, an indie film that premiered at South by Southwest, brought home nearly $90 million. But even considering that, this year has outpaced those numbers, and box-office takes from years before, by a long shot; in fact, this year set a record for horror at the box office, thanks largely to It. The Stephen King adaptation earned over $327 million—a staggering number for any film, not least one that premiered as a summer of blockbuster flops was drawing to a close. At $175 million, Get Out’s box-office performance was equally remarkable—especially because, unlike It, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut was an original film, rather than a reboot. And let’s not forget about James McAvoy and M. Night Shyamalan’s Split from earlier in the year, as well as the critically praised Annabelle: Creation, both of which cleared the $100 million mark as well.

Combined, these films and others have contributed to horror’s record-setting year—which, The New York Times noted in October, continues a decades-long upwards performance trend for the genre. But the trend goes beyond box-office takes: Get Out also seems poised to be nominated for prizes even beyond the Golden Globes (where, lest we forget, it’s also competing in the slightly less competitive comedy/musical category). Meanwhile, seven separate projects adapted from Stephen King debuted in the span of just a few months in 2017. King himself was modest about the phenomenon, telling V.F. this summer, “In a way, yeah, it does feel like I’m having a moment, but not anything that I’m trying to get a puffy head about. It’s just the way things happen. You sow your seeds, and sometimes they all come up at the same time, and that’s a great thing.”

Even so, the increasingly voracious market for King’s work implies more than the popularity of one author. Instead, as Dana Schwartz noted then, it speaks to a world that’s finally caught up with King’s eye for character-driven horror—dark works that explore the nature of evil beings, rather than focusing only on the terrifying atrocities they commit. In It, for example, Pennywise the Clown is simply a physical manifestation of the kids’ fears; defeating him, as seen at the end of the film, requires each kid to confront whatever it is that haunts them most. Get Out put a more explicitly villainous face on the white-supremacist ideologies that can lurk in even the most outwardly progressive of places, as a black man realizes that his girlfriend and her family are part of a cult that injects the minds of white people into black bodies to prolong their lifespans. And Split, for all of its exploitative flaws, did also create a compelling, detailed villain whose motivations were consistently clear, regardless of which personality took over his mind; only by understanding all of them did Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) stand a chance of defeating him.