Mainstreaming
It occurred to me sometime in the past couple months (and I was reminded of it by Tim's mentioning that A Certain Magazine is doing a horror issue) that although I keep hearing that horror as a written genre (or perhaps I mean marketing category) is dead, horror has become a very viable part of mainstream media. (Perhaps this is obvious to everyone but me, and perhaps it's widely understood in the horror world; I should probably run this by Nick before posting. But what the hell, it's a journal entry, not an essay.) (Note for people uninterested in horror: I mix in other topics down below.)
For example, Buffy is a horror series. I don't particularly like most horror, which is one of the several reasons why I didn't get into Buffy until recently, and it's sometimes easy to forget that under all the humor and interesting characters and relationships and literalization of metaphors, it's still a horror show. Vampires, people with eyes stitched closed, heads exploding, murder, ancient evil, people coming back from the dead, etc.
But okay, it's not a big surprise that something with the words "vampire" and "slayer" in the title is horror. Besides, that's TV, not books.
So look at another major phenomenon: Harry Potter. The Harry Potter books (and movies) have giant spiders lurking in a creepy forest, enormous evil, various creatures being brutally slaughtered, mysterious catacombs, a headless ghost, soul-sucking prison guards. People talk about the series as kids' fantasy, but I would argue that there are a fair number of pretty strong horror elements, though it's not as gory and not as focused on traditional horror monsters as you'd expect if you called it kids' horror. (Interesting: for years now, I've thought that the series was originally billed as kids' horror, but now I can't find any evidence of that; I wonder if I just made it up.) And it's getting darker as it goes on.
I gather there was a big boom in kids' horror a few years ago, driven partly by the success of the Goosebumps series, but I'm not sure whether that collapsed along with the adult-horror publishing industry or not.
And of course that's not even counting the popularity of slasher movies and their parodies. And Stephen King. And so on.
So it seems to me that horror is alive and well and has become part of mainstream cultural sensibilities. (I gather that there's also a lot of good stuff in the small presses and small magazines, but that's not so much what I'm talking about at the moment.)
One of the things that interests me about all this is that I see something similar going on with science fiction and fantasy. There's lots of lamenting and gnashing of teeth over declining readership of speculative fiction, and lots of ideas about what to do about it. But it seems to me that sfnal tropes and themes are doing extremely well in pop culture. Movies especially: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, etc. There are only four non-speculative movies in the top 25 on the all-time box-office domestic grosses list. (To be fair, that's not true of the inflation-adjusted list; but perhaps that makes my point even more strongly, that recently speculative fiction has been incredibly popular.) But I think movies and TV have paved the way: mainstream audiences are now familiar with a lot of the basic genre tropes and ideas.
Where's all this heading? I don't know, but one possibility is that even if speculative fiction doesn't make it as a fiction marketing category in the long term, it will be because it's no longer seen as a separate category. Speculative fiction movies aren't marketed in their own little corner of the theatres; they're thrown all together, and audiences still manage to figure out which ones they want to see. In video stores there's usually a separate area for "sci-fi" movies, but does Spider-Man get filed there? (I honestly don't know; the question just occurred to me.)
The usual counter-argument is "Yes, but what people are getting in the movies is pap; not real speculative fiction." But I would disagree with that. Yes, there's plenty of fluff, but I think there've also been plenty of solid and unabashedly speculative fiction movies over the past couple decades. Some examples off the top of my head: Blade Runner, Terminator, Brazil, Men in Black (the early '90s are apparently a blur to me, movie-wise), Dark City, Pitch Black (also horror), Monsters, Inc., Lord of the Rings. (I admit to being not fond of most High Fantasy movies; I know some people would put Willow and Legend on the list, for example, but I couldn't stand what I saw of those.)
Anyway, I'm sure there are all sorts of holes in the above; I'm mostly just musing.