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Interestingly, the article doesn’t really answer the question it poses. That’s been done here in the posts of January 30 and July 11, 2005 and various issues of The Elliott Wave Theorist and The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast beginning with “Pop Culture and the Stock Market” in 1985. It does say it appears to be cyclical, but it misidentifies the cycle as a 10-year rhythm. This is wrong. There were only a few not very scary horror movies back in 1996, and even fewer 10 years before that. Ten years before that, however, social mood was in a bear market of higher degree (in inflation-adjusted terms) and there were lots of them on both sides of 1976. The emerging bear market and its very high degree is the real reason, “This latest shockwave, though, is larger—and much more grotesque.” The latest issue of Newsweek also notes, “It's not jokey violence, either.” In certain phases, audiences seem to crave horror spoofs almost exclusively; EWI has explained the cyclicality of the horror spoof also. “Shortly after the bull market in stocks resumed in 1942 films abandoned dark, foreboding horror in the most sure-fire way: by laughing at it. When Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein, horror had no power.”  This comment is from page 10 of Pioneering Studies in Socionomics.

When Newsweek asks longtime horror show creator Wes Craven why “sadism is in vogue, he laughs and says, ‘Because we're living in a horror show. The post-9/11 period, all politics aside, has been extremely difficult for the average American. We all know what's floating around out there. That's big stuff, and it comes out in a million ways, from people drinking a bit more to kids going to hard-core movies.’” I.e. it’s a bear market, and a not just any bear. A whole new bear with its own approach to shocking the masses.

Interestingly, Newsweek’s own forecast is the opposite of the “bull market for horror”  the EWI’s been broadcasting since Blair Witch Project came out in July 1999. The magazine says, “There may not be many more,” and quotes Craven, who says, “The impulse to make these films gets less and less pure as the box office goes up. That's the pattern. A series of original films comes out, often quite furious in their energy, and they find a big audience. Then suddenly everyone wants to make one." “And ingenuity takes a nosedive,” Newsweek then adds. "Like anything else," says another horror show producer, "this will run its course." In time, he’s right. But don’t forget about the quote above and that EWT called for “new ground” before any of the “innovative” new horror movies mentioned in this Newsweek article were probably even on the drawing board. Subscribers know the potential for even more heights in fright, even if the horror show impresarios do not.