We live in a world where horror is all too real. So why are horror movies breaking box office records?

55 horror movies came out last year -  more than one a week - the most of any year this century.

But why would make-believe horror double its box office share in a decade which has seen real existential fear: wars, pandemics, and natural disasters.

And what do movies that scare us have to do with religions that comfort us?

Well, they’re both interested in what you believe, ask questions about evil, and want your attendance on a Sunday morning.

GUESTS:

• BARBARA CREED Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. Author of Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny and The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis
• Fr RICHARD LEONARD a parish priest and film scholar. Author of The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema: The Films of Peter Weir and Movies That Matter: Reading Film through the Lens of Faith 
• COLTAN SCRIVNER, research fellow at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University and psychologist at Arizona State University and author of Morbidly Curious: A scientist explains why we can’t look away.

This program is made on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and in Naarm