Everywhere in the world, the horror film genre aims to affect the psychology of its audience, using various elements to induce shock or apprehension. While it has several forms, it often incorporates a central villain, monster or malevolent force that poses a challenge throughout. The genre has a universal appeal, domesticated to shoulder the peculiar weight of any film industry it finds expression, and Nigerian cinema, also called Nollywood, is no exception. Horror in Nollywood is, however, not just about fanciful esoteric possibilities aided by special effects and visual tricks. It is firmly rooted in the lived traditional and spiritual realities of Nigerians. Here, when we think of horror , it includes infamous bloodsucking witches and their hysterics, demonic forces and their liaisons with humans, eerie sounds that serenade the night when harm is underway. It involves suspicious interactions with deities and spirits of the dead. Divine judgments, seemingly unapproachable at first, are evoked to salvage the situation. Historically, this combustible world of Nollywood horror reveals a constant clash between forces of good and evil. There are themes of occultism and ritual killings, such as in films like Living In Bondage (1992/93) directed by Chris Obi Rapu and Billionaire’s Club (2003) by Afam Okereke. In these films, sanity eventually outpaces evil and a moral lesson makes the finishing line.
Horror feels personal and immediate in Nollywood because it stems from social experiences rather than distant fantasy. Unlike Western horror where monsters are conjured from nowhere and abstract evil operates, here, horror develops from traditional institutions and age-old beliefs that many people can connect with in everyday life. In most Nigerian cultures, accounts of witchcraft attacks, family curses, spiritual insights and money rituals are common. They can be traced, not perceived as hypothetical fabrications or myths. Evidence exists in villages and local communities. Witch doctors and herbalists claim to possess powers beyond mere human comprehension, for which people dread them. Those believed to be afflicted consult these spiritual authorities, in search of lasting solutions to their problems. Sacrificial bowls aimed to placate displeased unseen forces sit at T-junctions and market squares. What this means is that, the average Nigerian, who occasionally or constantly reacquaints himself with their ancestry , already has a sense of how things can get when humans provoke or insensitively engage the supernatural realm. Even without first-hand experience, there’s an existing cautionary tale. Nollywood’s horror canon has recognizable settings, sounds, and cultural codes that readily stimulate the psyche of the audience. Fear rarely unfolds in a vacuum. Locales are hardly nondescript, and even when they are, they leave behind familiar emotional trails. The opening scene of Christian Onu’s Karishika (1998), for instance, reveals an otherworldly realm, the Kingdom of darkness, that is under the leadership of Lucifer, a belligerent fictional character. We see brightly burning fires with thick smoke in the air, a host of subjects dressed in red and black attires, and other seemingly indistinguishable objects around as props. This setting is remotely familiar for Nigerian Pentecostal Christians whose collective religious book, the bible, already presents a detailed account of the devil’s abode and his cohorts as epitomes of chaos and evil.
In Andy Amenechi’s Igodo (1999), an epic fantasy and horror film, a group of young men empowered with charms and diabolical powers are sent to the evil forest to recover a magical sword with which they can finally ward off evil spirits and stop the afflictions bedeviling their village. For much of its running time, the film is set in the evil forest, also called the land of the living dead, a place populated with trees where they tread with caution and occasionally encounter harmful anthropomorphic forces. The evil forest setting here is rooted in the consciousness of many traditional African societies. In pre-colonial African communities, evil forests were uninhabited dense rainforests believed to be enchanted with ghosts and foul spirits. Sometimes, outcasts and people guilty of grave crimes like murder and treason in those communities were sent to live forever in the evil forests as a form of punishment. Among the Igbo and Efik people of those times, the birth of twins was seen as a bad omen for the family and community, and twin babies were disposed of in evil forests.
Predating the country’s cinema culture, early Nigerian literary traditions have established and mirrored the existence of the evil forest. Daniel Fagunwa’s Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀ (1938), the first novel written in the Yoruba language, later translated in English by Wole Soyinka with the title Forest Of A Thousand Daemons, follows a hunter’s adventure in a bizarre forest where he encounters and outwits several ghosts, spirits and deities. In China Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), the evil forest is deliberately given to the Christian missionaries when they arrive in search of land to build their church on, with the villagers hoping that the white men will either be killed or driven away by the malevolent forces that inhabit the forest.
A decent study of Nollywood history shows that the horror genre, rather than being independent, has subsisted among other film forms. From epics to supernatural thrillers, witchcraft-themed films, spiritual warfare narratives and even full-fledged faith-based or gospel productions in the domestic industry, there have been horror imprints, without necessarily obfuscating the mission of the filmmaker. We have evidence of this in films like Nneka the Pretty Serpent (1992), Battle of Musanga (1996), Ijele (1999) and Egg of Life (2003).
The rise of Nollywood on VHS in the 90s and early 2000s coincided with the growing influence of Pentecostalism and other Christian denominations at a time when witchcraft suspicions and accusations were rampant. Helen Ukpabio, under the aegis of her production company Liberty Films, gained recognition with the release of horror-esque films such as End of The Wicked (1999), Highway To The Grave (1999) and Married to a Witch (2001) that addressed witchcraft and the demonic possession of children, garnering lots of criticisms in the process.
While early gospel productions such as those of Mount Zion Films did not come off as explicitly horror, they yielded spiritual welfare narratives, weaving elements of the horror genre as they explored tensions between supernatural forces of good and evil. A notable mention is Agbara Nla (1993), a story about a small community besieged by an amalgam of dark forces, with their earthly emissary Isawuru possessing diabolical powers through which he holds the villagers in bondage. The film reaches for a redemptive arc when a young missionary couple shows up with the gospel of Christ and the intent to free the people from their bondage.
As with horrors elsewhere, the Nollywood horror genre contains symbols of terror—houses, objects, possessions that sustain tensions, water superstitious beliefs and remind us of our core existence as products of different cultures that once embraced and entertained barbaric traditional practices. In Nollywood horror, haunted spaces are sites of hidden sins and ill foreboding. Shrines are not innocent places of worship, but altars where human sacrifices happen and evil is orchestrated. Bewitched objects and entities are metaphors for greed and compromise. In Living In Bondage, for instance, Andy Okeke’s greed and inordinate ambition lures him into the occult.
With the rise of modern Nigerian cinema, there is a noticeable shift in the tone and dimension of how horror is understood and interpreted by Nigerian filmmakers. Our filmmakers no longer seem to be as obsessed about situating scary narratives and actions within broad religious frameworks. Instead, the narratives have become psychological and social experiments. In 2009, Kunle Afolayan released The Figurine, a critically acclaimed supernatural thriller that is believed to have broken new grounds in aesthetics and storytelling in the industry, drifting away from cliché and mediocre plots, prioritizing excellence in cinematography and production design, and leading the revolutionary birth of what has been described as New Nollywood. The film also redefined the concept of horror, in Nollywood, blending myth, folkloric traditions and modern themes through the story of a mysterious figurine in an abandoned shrine that becomes the product of fear and tensions between family and friends. The Aníkúlápó franchise is another supernatural thriller with elements of horror. Also created by Kunle Afolayan, the franchise kicked off with the pilot film Aníkúlápó in 2022, set in ancient Yoruba society, following the story of a young man who, during his sojourn in a community, becomes implicated in a saga through which he comes in possession of a unique power that allows him to manipulate life and death.
The Nollywood horror also appears to be taking an eclectic dimension, rooted in local sensibilities but also reaching out to tropes from Hollywood and global cinema, as seen in films like Dare Olaitan’s Ile Owo (2022), Jay Franklin Jitubor’s The Origin: Madam KoiKoi (2023), Ogodinife Okpue’s A Song From The Dark (2024), Jerry Ossai’s Ms. Kanyin (2025) and Nnamdi Kanaga’s Water Girl (2025). In such productions are themes of urbanisation, paranoia and modern anxieties. The Origin and Ms Kanyin are inspired by the Nigerian urban legend of Madam Koi koi, a vengeful ghost believed to haunt dormitories, hallways and toilets in boarding schools at night. Ile Owo explores the notion of ancestral curses through the story of a family entwined in an age-old tradition of sacrificing a young virgin to preserve immortality. Water Girl stems from Igbo spirituality, particularly the concept of Ogbanje, a child that is said to die and be reborn multiple times to a family or household in order to traumatize them. Yet all these Nollywood projects rely on modern cinematic techniques and special effects to drive their narratives and appeal to international audiences.
The future of Nollywood horror seems to be taking shape as a confident and elastic ecosystem that mixes cultural realities with modern technical nuances. As the genre evolves, filmmakers are pressured into adopting global horror troupes to reflect the social and psychological tensions of contemporary Nigerian life. Foreign horror elements such as the zombie have already found their way into Nollywood, evident in C. J. Obasi’s experimental zero-budget film Ojuju (2014) and Leo Obienyi’s anticipated film Alive Till Dawn. Programmed for release this year, Alive Till Dawn, is set in the wake of a Zombie virus outbreak during which the police, criminals and civilians must form an alliance to navigate and survive the chaos by finding their way to a rumored paradisiacal location. From a surface-level reading of the synopsis, the film offers a portrait of the zombie thriller, a horror subgenre that is long familiar to Hollywood audiences, for instance through films like Zombie Apocalypse (2011) and World War Z (2013). However, films of this nature face the problem of maintaining the integrity of the country’s indigenous values and cultural identity even while aiming to meet international standards. Ultimately, the opportunity for any progressive Nigerian horror filmmaker lies in finding the right balance between traditional aesthetic appeal and modern filmmaking techniques and narrative forms.
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