There is a defining trait shared by most of the standout horror films of the 2010s: they take place in the home. The home is the site of fear, threats, violence, and invasions – both supernatural and otherwise. This isn’t a coincidence but the result of a deliberate strategy by a particular production company, a strategy that would go on to influence the entire industry. And even today, despite the rise of folk horror, haunted and besieged houses remain the dominant setting for scary movies. The latest example is Heretic, where Hugh Grant plays a man who imprisons two young Mormon missionaries, drawing them deeper and deeper into his basement.

Of course, horror has long found terror in the home. The Shining, Poltergeist, and the 1963 classic The Haunting prove that. But something shifted with Paranormal Activity. Before, when horror played out inside homes or other confined spaces, the architecture itself became a source of fear. Gothic mansions dripped with eerie atmosphere, while vast, empty spaces seemed primed for demons to lurk. And when the house was just an ordinary one, the horror often latched onto objects of mass consumption – like the haunted television in Poltergeist.

With Paranormal Activity (2007), however, the nature of the horror setting changed. Houses of all kinds – ordinary or distinctive, hypermodern or traditional, suburban homes or city apartments – became central to the genre. Style no longer mattered. These homes didn’t need to be inherently frightening; what mattered was that they were enclosed, self-contained spaces.

Paranormal Activity’s influence came down to one thing: its success. Shot on a shoestring budget, it pulled in a fortune with a simple but terrifying premise – a couple haunted night after night by a demon that grows more and more present until it finally takes over one of them. The real game changer wasn’t just the use of surveillance footage for the film’s scariest scenes. One of the characters sets up infrared cameras to catch whatever’s happening at night – since during the day, they only see the aftermath but have no clue what caused it. Slowly, the recordings reveal tiny, unexplainable movements, subtle shifts from the ordinary, each one more unsettling than the last. At the time, people thought the revolution was in the use of security cameras. But in reality, its most influential aspect was something else: the fact that the characters were trapped inside their home.

The film was produced by Jason Blum, then a young and resourceful producer with limited financial backing. But Paranormal Activity’s unexpected success allowed him to refine an entire production model: spend very little, work with fresh talent, craft low-cost stories, and aim for high box office returns. It sounds simple – perhaps even unrealistic – but he made it work. By keeping production costs extraordinarily low, every film had a strong chance of being profitable, allowing room for creative risks and, at times, massive rewards. One of the key strategies for keeping budgets down? Filming in enclosed, controlled settings. Thus, Blumhouse Productions was born, a studio whose very name encapsulates its defining feature: the house.

From Insidious to Sinister, from Dark Skies, The Purge and Ouija to Oculus, from Unfriended – which plays out entirely over a video call, with each character isolated in their own home – to Martyrs, Blumhouse films are, more often than not, domestic nightmares. And this approach isn’t just a Blumhouse thing. The Babadook and The Conjuring follow the same core principles. Even The Visit, another Blumhouse production directed by M. Night Shyamalan, keeps its horror locked inside a house. Jordan Peele’s Get Out takes place largely within the walls of a home. This trend runs deep, shaping not only the most well-known horror hits of the 2010s but also an ocean of lesser-known films that follow the same formula.

If the 2010s were a golden age for horror – and the genre is still going strong today – it is largely thanks to these films. They didn’t just reignite mainstream interest; they built an entirely new audience. Blumhouse, in particular, has mastered the art of home-bound terror, turning ordinary houses into nightmares. In The Visit, fear comes from two grandchildren staying with grandparents they’ve never met, trapped in a creaky old country home filled with eerie surprises – one of the most unsettling being when the grandmother asks her granddaughter to crawl inside an enormous oven. In Get Out, horror lurks within the pristine walls of a progressive white family’s house. In Us, it’s a sleek, ultramodern home that becomes a battleground. In The Purge, a high-tech fortress designed to keep out the chaos of an annual night of legal anarchy proves anything but safe. Meanwhile, Sinister, Dark Skies, and Insidious take a different approach: their homes are painfully normal, driving home the idea that horror can strike anywhere.

These films no longer rely on gothic aesthetics to instill fear. Instead, they take the ordinary and twist it into something terrifying. Rather than transporting audiences to eerie corridors and towering mansions, they bring the horror into spaces that feel eerily close to home. Even classic horror tales have been reshaped to fit this mold – Blumhouse’s remake of The Invisible Man and its upcoming Wolf Man both reimagine these stories within domestic settings.

In many of these films, the house becomes a reflection of the human mind. The basement hides the unconscious, the attic stores memories, bedrooms expose vulnerability, the kitchen embodies primal instincts, and the living room mirrors the social self. By confining their stories to a single home, Blumhouse films create a world in miniature, where each room serves a distinct purpose – almost like a town or community in itself. Even the furniture plays a role: deep, oversized chairs and couches turn into traps. Think of Get Out, where the protagonist is hypnotized and sinks helplessly into the Sunken Place, or Insidious, where characters slip into another dimension without ever physically leaving their home.

Over the past decade, American horror films have captured a shift in collective fears: the fear of invasion, of security breaches, of threats lurking not in the outside world, but inside the home.

As governments, right-wing groups, and conspiracy theorists stoke fears of outsiders  –  immigrants, foreign governments, supranational organizations like NATO or the European Union  –  and as homegrown terrorism fuels anxieties that the real danger might already be among us, these films reflect that paranoia. In modern horror, terror doesn’t come from stepping into the unknown; it comes from realizing that the unknown is already inside the house.

None of this, of course, is necessarily deliberate. The filmmakers behind these movies aren’t setting out to craft social allegories; they’re making cost-effective horror films that capitalize on a winning formula. But whether intentional or not, these stories resonate because they tap into a deeper, unspoken fear. That is the secret to their success: they work because they reflect something their audience already feels creeping in the shadows of their own homes.