Nollywood horror did not fade because we lost interest. It died because we became afraid of what it showed us. And more importantly, what it made us confront. Our belief in unseen forces. Our obsession with morality. Our willingness to punish what we cannot explain. At some point, the screen became a mirror, and we did not like the reflection.

There was a time when Karishika walked through living rooms like an uninvited spirit. Her name alone sent children ducking behind sofas, eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the screen to stop flickering. In those days, the fear was real. It lived in the tape. It breathed in the soundtracks. It clung to the sweat-soaked shirts of those who dared to keep watching.

Today, that fear has been reduced to grainy YouTube clips. Split into ten parts, sometimes eleven, pixelated beyond reason. Comments below read like ghost stories of their own  “Who else is watching this in 2025?” “This movie traumatised me when I was five.” We are still looking, still watching, but mostly through the glass of nostalgia. The terror, once urgent, is now kitsch.

A Season of Witches

Before Nollywood found weddings, influencers and comic relief, it found the devil.

It began in the 1990s, without glamour, but with grainy footage, haunted voiceovers and VHS tapes passed from house to house like cursed objects. The early horror films were unapologetically primitive, and perhaps for that very reason, deeply unsettling. There was Living in Bondage, where wealth came at the price of a soul. There was Sakobi: The Snake Girl, where a man’s ambition found serpentine consequence. And there was Karishika, whose mere entrance in a nightclub, heels clicking and wind blowing from nowhere, was enough to send a chill through the spine of a generation.

These were not just films. They were warnings. They were sermons in disguise. They were folklore turned cinematic. In a society where dreams are decoded, where illness could be spiritual, and where wealth without explanation is always suspect, horror found a natural home. It did not need jump scares. It needed only to echo what many Nigerians already believed: that the spirit world was watching, and sometimes, intervening.

These films carried the weight of communal fears. The fear of witchcraft, especially as it hides in plain sight. The fear of child witches, often blamed for misfortune and poverty. The fear of night journeys, ancestral debts, and shapeshifters in human skin. To the outside eye, it may have looked like melodrama. But to local audiences, it was prophecy and possibility.

There was also something else. A tragic irony. The same genre that warned against superstition also deepened it. Films like End of the Wicked did more than terrify; they ignited a cultural panic. Children accused of witchcraft were beaten, exorcised, or abandoned. Ageing women, too eccentric or too poor, became suspects. Nollywood did not invent these fears, but it gave them names, faces and, unfortunately, cinematic proof.

It is no coincidence that around this time, certain pastors rose in prominence, preaching about demonic attacks, evil dreams and spiritual battles. Nollywood horror and Nigerian Pentecostalism were locked in a dance, feeding off each other’s energy, each confirming the other’s claims. When churchgoers saw cats, bats or owls in films behaving strangely, they saw confirmation of what was already being said on pulpits. Film as evidence. Sermon as sequel.

This was the golden age. It was messy, imperfect, and sometimes dangerous. But it was also bold, deeply Nigerian, and shockingly honest.

We were watching our fears on screen, not through the lens of Hollywood slashers, but through juju priests, village shrines, and familiar city streets where evil wore suits and drove tinted cars.

This was horror born from belief, and it thrived because the line between fiction and reality was never quite clear.

The Exorcism

At first, the protests came in whispers, sermons, and side-eyes. A pastor warning his congregation not to let demons through their televisions. A mother hiding the family’s horror cassettes before evening devotion. A growing discomfort, not just with the films, but with the permission they gave — to name the devil, to visualise evil, to speak the unspeakable.

Then the whispers became doctrine.By the mid-2000s, a quiet purge had begun. Pentecostal Christianity was on the rise, rebranding Nigeria’s spiritual narrative. It had no room for ambiguity, no tolerance for juju priests as protagonists or shape-shifting women as metaphors. Anything that hinted at traditional spirituality was reclassified as witchcraft. Anything that explored the supernatural without a salvation arc was labelled demonic. Horror, once a mirror, became a threat.

Films that had once been played on loop during holiday seasons were now frowned upon.  Pastors warned against “movies that open spiritual doors”, and horror quickly became the genre most likely to be accused of letting demons in.

But religion did not kill horror by banning it. It killed it by replacing it.

Enter the Mount Zion era. Christian film ministries with low budgets and high conviction. Their films were just as dramatic, just as saturated in spiritual warfare, but with a new agenda. Demons still attacked, witches still plotted, but there was always a moral at the end. Sin was now the monster, and redemption the only escape.

In this version of horror, there were no morally complex characters. No ambiguous hauntings. No folklore, no trickster spirits. Everything had an answer, and every demon had a name recognisable from a Sunday service. It was horror without doubt. Without folklore.

It was also, ironically, still terrifying.

Young audiences raised on Captives of the Mighty or Ultimate Power, 666, will remember the dream sequences, the demonic faces, the scenes where someone vomits a snake after being prayed for. These were Christian horrors — still unsettling, but now wrapped in righteousness. The horror had not disappeared. It had simply found sanctuary.

At the same time, the mainstream industry began shifting toward lighter genres. Romantic comedies, family dramas, stories of success and redemption. Filmmakers, eager to please a newly global audience, distanced themselves from anything too dark, too spiritual, too Nigerian. Horror no longer fit the market profile. It was unsellable, uncomfortable, and too easily misunderstood.

And so it faded, with forgetting because they became inconvenient. In the process, something was lost, not just a genre, but a way of seeing the world. Horror had once given us a language for our fears. Now, those fears were either sanitised or ignored.

The Hollowing Out

Take Ms Kanyin (2025), a sleek, supernatural thriller set in an elite boarding school. It flirts with the uncanny but the execution is too neat, the scares too polite. The fear is distant, filtered through good lighting and polished dialogue. The spirit world, once looming and unpredictable, now feels stage-managed.

Or Ile Owo (2022), Dare Olaitan’s attempt at modern-day ritual horror. It is visually captivating, and conceptually rich. But the storytelling lacks weight. The terror never curdles. It hints at dread, but refuses to descend fully into it. It remembers the rituals of horror, but not the rawness.

Even The Origin: Madam Koi-Koi, Netflix’s much-anticipated dip into urban legend, failed to strike a chord. It had nostalgia, a familiar villain, and the perfect premise: the haunted school corridor, the eerie echo of heels on tile, but the series felt sterilised, as if afraid to commit to the folklore it borrowed from. It gestured toward fear, but never surrendered to it.

We are witnessing a kind of genre amnesia. Not a lack of skill, but a lack of conviction. Where early Nollywood horror embraced belief systems, modern films retreat from them. The horror is abstract now. It is aesthetic. Stylish. Measured. And often forgettable.

There are exceptions.

The Weekend (2024), directed by Daniel Oriahi, leans into psychological horror, wrapping themes of family tension and spiritual unrest into a story that, while minimal in gore, carries the elegance of a Jordan Peele film. It does not terrify, but it unnerves. It made modest waves, ₦18 million at the Nigerian box office, and marked a step forward in craftsmanship, if not in genre definition.

Resurrection Dreams

Not all is lost. Beneath the surface of Nollywood’s sanitised screen culture, something stirs. A few filmmakers are not content to let horror remain hollow. They are digging again. For meaning. For the fear that tells the truth.

C.J. Obasi is among them. His horror is not cheap spectacle. It is political. Emotional. Spiritual. In Ojuju (2014), a zombie outbreak becomes a metaphor for environmental neglect. Then came Juju Stories — an anthology co-created with Abba Makama and Michael Omonua under the Surreal16 Collective — and with it, a rebuke to everything that had been lost.

Each segment reclaims something with a fuse of comdey. Urban legend. Superstition. The quiet dread of being watched by something old. Obasi’s entry, Suffer the Witch, tells of obsession and suspicion between two young women, one possibly a witch. It is haunting, not because of what we see, but because of what we’re allowed to wonder. The fear is psychological. Queerness simmers just beneath the surface, not as provocation, but as atmosphere. It lingers like breath on a mirror.

Obasi does not preach. He does not resolve. He remembers what early Nollywood horror often forgot: ambiguity is its own form of fear.

Other filmmakers, like Dare Olaitan (Ègún, Ile Owo) and Daniel Oriahi (The Weekend), are also experimenting. They are peeling back the layers and testing how horror can speak to more than demons and curses. They are asking what haunts us now: the body, the city, the past, the price of desire.

But these efforts remain few. Their audiences are niche. Their impact is quiet. And in an industry increasingly driven by box office formulas and algorithmic tastes, horror still feels like a gamble.

What these Nollywood directors are doing is not revival. It is resistance. They are resisting the urge to sanitise. Resisting the idea that fear must always be marketable. They are not trying to recreate the chaos of the past. They are trying to redeem it. To find what was buried beneath the noise, the panic, the exorcisms and accusations — and bring it back with care.

What We Tried to Forget

There is a difference between forgetting and choosing not to remember. Nollywood did not simply lose its horror cinema. It buried it. Not with reverence, but with shame. As if to admit we once believed these stories was itself a kind of weakness.

What we tried to forget was not just a genre. It was a mirror. One that showed us what we feared about ourselves — our hunger, our cruelty, our helplessness. Horror films once named those things. They did not fix them. But they acknowledged them. That, at least, was honest.

Maybe that is the future of Nollywood horror. Not louder. Not bloodier. But braver. More honest. Less concerned with genre than with guts.

Because if we are honest, we never stopped being afraid. We only stopped allowing our stories to admit it.