Horror Movies US States Are Most Obsessed With: The Results Are Scary!

Halloween is my favorite holiday. Nothing beats grabbing a bowl of popcorn, dimming the lights, and settling in for a frightening film. But I’m often stumped by which scary movie to watch. I’ve always wondered what spooky flicks other people in my neighborhood are enjoying during the season.

Using a combination of information from Rotten Tomatoes and Google Trends, we partnered with Mindnet Analytics to analyze how interest in horror movies varied by people in each state and the District of Columbia (DC).

Best Horror Movies: Interesting Findings

• The Devil’s Backbone is the horror movie most places are obsessed with, appearing as the most loved in DC, Michigan, New Jersey, and Texas. Is it the best horror movie? You’ll have to watch and decide for yourself!
• Bakjwi appears twice on our list, along with Freaks.
• Some horror movie interests lie in the location they were shot or set in. For example, The Shining in Colorado.
• Oregon is the most interested in horror movies, followed by Alaska, Washington DC, Utah, and Wyoming.
• Southeastern states seem to have the least interest in scary movies. Florida is the least interested, followed by Georgia, the Carolinas, and Mississippi.

Best Horror Movies by State

A Word on Methodology

First, we used the list of the top 200 best horror movies from Rotten Tomatoes to determine a set of candidate movies that each state might be most obsessed with.

The data used to determine which movie each state is most obsessed with came from Google Trends state-wise search frequencies. For example, if you look at the relative search frequency for “The Shining” across states you see that people in Colorado have searched more for this movie than any other state.

This movie is therefore the movie that according to Google Trends data we deemed Colorado was most “obsessed” with in 2020. It is not necessarily the movie that they searched for more than all other movies, rather it is the movie that they searched for more than other states. The same procedure and logic applies to all other movie-state matches in our results.

In order to avoid counting searches for things that share the name of a movie such as “Cargo” we used the Google Trends search filter category 34 to return only counts of searches for movies. We only counted search frequencies from October 1^st, 2019 through October 1^st, 2020.

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Frank Moraes

I am a Senior Content Editor at Hotdog.com, specializing in sports streaming and regional programming issues. With a PhD in Atmospheric Physics from the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and extensive experience in remote sensing technology, including early video streaming, I bring a unique technical perspective to the streaming industry.

My expertise in sports coverage, particularly for out-of-market games and regional sports networks, stems from years of hands-on experience as an early adopter of streaming services and my work addressing fans' viewing challenges. As a longtime cord-cutter and subscriber to multiple streaming platforms, I combine my technical knowledge with practical user experience, making me a leading expert in the field of sports streaming and entertainment technology.

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