This is the Golden Age of Paranormal Entertainment

The television and movie industries have a long history of doing their level best to scare audiences, and viewers have been eating up the thrills and chills for decades. As the Internet has become mainstream over the last ten years or so, the public's appetite for scary entertainment has been married with a growing hunger for all types of information, and the result has been an arguably more sophisticated kind of horror connoisseur. No longer content to watch simple dramatizations of childhood campfire stories, today's thrill seekers demand ever more realistic cinematic depictions and, more significantly, recorded proof of the paranormal. Producers, regardless of their media, seem only too happy to oblige, and have created a continuous cornucopia of the macabre. Thanks to these developments, the 2010s truly are emerging as the golden age of paranormal entertainment.

Reality TV Shows

Once reality television took hold in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was probably inevitable that real-people shows would eventually branch out to tackle the issues of the unknown, in whatever gory glory might be out there. Debuting in October of 2004, SyFy's "Ghost Hunters" is arguably the seminal member of the genre and has spawned scores of copycats and spinoffs. Now, on any given night, viewers can watch footage of spirit hunts, explore alien conspiracy theories or learn about the latest sightings of mythical creatures simply by switching on the tube. The credibility of these shows is aided by the quasi-scientific approaches displayed by the series' stars, a standard that was established right off the bat by Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes on "Ghost Hunters."

Box Office Movie Releases

No matter how much reality programming viewers gobble up, there always seems to be room for the supernatural at the box office. The consistent progression of technology has made recent films more realistic than ever before, and scary movies continue to draw large fan bases. The legions of "Twilight" fans are a testament to the never-ending infatuation with fictionalized supernatural beings that are just believable enough to cause goosebumps. The virally successful "Paranormal Activity" drew liberally from the characteristics of reality TV, Internet videos and movie effects to suck in audiences.

Dedicated Cable Networks
SyFy and Chiller provide a ready repository of paranormal programming for viewers to draw upon any time they wish. Not only are these networks the home to reality shows and classic spooky movies and series, they also produce their own films and series to give fans something new on the palette.

Websites and Internet Broadcasting
As with nearly every other area of human interest, the Internet provides an endless source of paranormal material for those seeking answers, questions to explore or just thrills. YouTube is rife with scary videos and audio clips, there are tons of websites devoted to the supernatural and there are even several paranormal radio stations to keep you up all hours of the night.

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No matter how you like to be scared, your thrill of the day is always just a button click away in this digital era. For lovers of the macabre and seekers of the supernatural truth, these truly are the golden years of paranormal entertainment.