John Semley ,??????? ???????? ??? ??????? September 12, 2024

Elevate Me Later

Highbrow horror cinema has won respectability—but sold its soul The Baffler

When the actress Maika Monroe first laid eyes on costar Nicolas Cage in caked-on Tiny Tim makeup as the titular Satanic serial killer of the recent hit horror-thriller Longlegs, her heart rate peaked to a hyper-tachycardiac 170 bpm. We know this because we were told as much, in a viral trailer cut by the film’s producer, NEON. As movie marketing goes, “Nicolas Cage looked so weird that he almost made a woman’s heart explode” may seem gauche, but it was effective. Longlegswas the indie horror sensation of the summer, and NEON’s most profitable release ever—surpassing Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite. Pushed by cryptic trailers and the promise of a late-career Nicolas Cage as some kind of weird-looking serial killer, Longlegsdrew massive crowds. It did, in the parlance of the industry trades, “boffo b.o.” So, a colossal success. But was it scary?

Written and directed by Osgood Perkins (son of original Psychokiller Anthony Perkins), Longlegscasts Monroe as a maybe-clairvoyant FBI agent tasked with tracking down a mysterious killer connected to a string of family murders that have roiled the Pacific Northwest for decades. A promising first act—replete with some tantalizing table-setting, a truly shocking kill, and an understated performance by Monroe—quickly fizzles, as Longlegssinks into a dense, messy mire of generic cliches: satanic panic, spooky dolls, cryptograms, sinister nuns, mysterious Phantasm-style-orbs, cycles of family trauma, and an anguished FBI profiler whose gift is her curse. Watching it alone at a $5 cheapie Tuesday matinee, I felt myself retracting into the sticky pleather plush of the theater seat, my wide-eyed excitement curdling into an annoyed grimace as the film unfolded, one hackily preposterous turn after another. I silently reckoned with the reality that Longlegswas just another inspired advertising campaign with a crappy movie tacked onto it.

Horror cinema has always relied on such promotional gimmickry to lure audiences. Hitchcock famously stipulated that no audiences be admitted to Psychoafter the film began, lest its first-act twist be spoiled. Consummate carnival barker William Castle issued $1,000 life insurance policies (backed by Lloyds of London) with tickets to his 1958 fright-fast Macabrein the event that audience-members be scared to death. The casts of Cannibal Holocaustand Blair Witch disappeared for months to juice rumors that they had actually been murdered. The difference between then and now is not just the advertising but the results. The gulf between Longlegs’s carefully keyed marketing publicity and the film’s actual merit is so wide that Grandpa Munster could gun his souped-up Dragula hot rod through it without scratching the paint.

Yet its anticlimactic disappointment—in its very badness—Longlegsis revealing. More than another boring, letdown of a movie, it signals the exhaustion of a trend in cinema that has long worn out its welcome. It is a nail in the coffin of so-called elevated horror.

It’s a term deployed uneasily and almost always in quotation marks. “Elevated horror”: part marketing idiom, part abused critical byword. It’s a slippery, contested, obnoxious term that can be tricky to define. To paraphrase another notorious non-definition, you know it when you see it. Even if “elevated horror” (or “prestige horror,” or “post-horror,” or, god forbid, “hipster horror”) is essentially a made-up term, it describes a real thing. Over the past decade-or-so, a cycle of films has emerged that share common thematic and visual preoccupations. They also share something harder to dissect and easier to sniff out: an attitude.

The designation emerged in the mid-2010s, to describe movies like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook(2014), Robert Eggers’s The Witch(2015), Jordan Peele’s Get Out(2017), and Ari Aster’s Hereditary(2018). These films were all driven by the sensibilities of their “auteur” writer-directors and prized aesthetic sheen and psychological depth over typical hallmarks of the genre, like gore, jump scares, or heavy-breathing serial killers in dinged-up goalie masks. For their deliberate appeal to higher sensibilities, they won considerable critical acclaim, which further distinguished their ambitions as loftier than more standard horror fare.

Like most genres, horror cinema evolves in cycles: distinct trends in style and storytelling that chime with the moviegoing public, begetting strings of sequels and shameless imitators. Think of the gothic-inspired Universal Monster movies of the 1930s, the moody atmospherics of Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO Pictures in the 1940s, the slasher flicks of the 1980s, and the post-Blair Witchboom in “found footage” horror. The contemporary vogue in elevated horror constitutes such a cycle, born of the winking, postmodern, meta-textual horror movies of the 1990s. Films like Wes Craven’sNew Nightmare (1994), Scream(1996), Funny Games (1997), and The Cabin in the Woods(2011) riffed on generic conventions. But the trend toward self-aware, meta-textual, “postmodern” horror had broader, more deleterious effects on the genre.

These films trained audiences how to watch (or see through) horror movies. Generic tropes were openly parsed as a form of subversion. In Scream, a dorky superfan played by Jamie Kennedy interrupts a screening of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) to deliver an animated, half-soused harangue on “the rules” of horror movies (“Never, ever, ever under any circumstances say, ‘I’ll be right back’”). Certain codes and clichés that had long governed the genre were exposed, immediately diminishing their power. It’s like a magician giving away the secret to his trick. Once the viewer is primed to it, all they see is the method, not the magic. Audiences wise up and spoil in turn.

Before long, these sorts of self-conscious contortions become agonizing. By the time of its seventh installment, the Scream franchise had devolved into the sort of murder-by-numbers storytelling the original satirized. Likewise, Cabin in the Woodsfunctions less as a horror movie than as a movie abouthorror movies. Horror’s meta turn had lumbered on long enough. In this light, the artier pivot of the elevated horror was initially refreshing. Here was a crop of thoughtful, capably directed movies that wrung genuine terror out of their premises without all the wink-nudge stuff that had needled audiences for over a decade. They also functioned as a corrective to the super-violent “torture porn” provocations of the early 2000s and the even more lamentable string of classic horror remakes ranging from Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) to Samuel Bayer’s offensively self-serious A Nightmare on Elm Street(2010).

Elevated horror abjured torture porn’s gore and nudity. And the films drew from a broader base of generic touchstones. The Witchborrowed from British folk horror trends of the 1960s and 1970s. Get Outwas a wickedly funny satire drawing equally from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and its 1978 remake, The Stepford Wives(1972), plus that Eddie Murphy joke about how black people would react if plunked into a haunted house movie (“I got the fuck out”). Most noticeably, these films tread freely in the realms of the psychological and social. Like plenty of other genre movies, horror was (incorrectly) accused of not being “about” much. With elevated horror, the about-ness is never in question. Ari Aster’s auspicious feature debut proves a particular exemplar in this regard.

Hereditarymay not be the first film in the elevated horror cycle. But it demonstrates its broader gist, for better and worse. The film stars Toni Collette as a miniaturist whose life is derailed following the passing of her mentally ill mother and the subsequent death of her young daughter. To process her grief, she joins a support group that leads her deeper into a cult conspiracy entangling her mother, daughter, son, and whole family. The film reeks of quality, from the performances to the cinematography. It also abounds with more abject horrors: a woman garrotting herself with piano wire, a little girl’s severed head crawling with bugs, and Gabriel Byrne aflame. The shot of a grieving Toni Collette heaving back and forth blubbering, “I JUST WANNA DIE!” rings true to anyone who has ever ached, inconsolably, to end it all.

The issue is that Aster plays with these bigger, realer feelings—with troubling matters of suicidality, schizophrenia, familial (or “hereditary”) mental illness—in a way that comes across as careless, bordering on cruel. Their very realness is diminished by the film’s implausible climax. Turns out the materfamilias whose death kicks off the haunting proceedings wasn’t actuallycontrolling, or emotionally manipulative, or even mentally ill. Rather, she was a literal bride-witch betrothed to a demonic hell-king invoked by a coven of callow, buck-ass-naked cultists. It’s like all that mental illness and trauma stuff (and the powerful performances behind it) is merely there to add voltage to a story that’s deceptively hack. Aster’s pretensions of emotional or psychological realism are revealed to be just that.

In this sense, many of the elevated horror pictures recommit to the most grating postures of their meta-horror predecessors. A film like Scream rises above its status as a self-conscious genre “exercise”; it is a totally worthwhile horror film. But it mainstreamed the idea of a slasher villain having recognizably “human” motivations informed by family trauma and petty grievance. Are these sort of movies really any more clever than the existing slashers that had been self-consciously fiddling with the genre since the 1970s without making a big show of it? Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) constitutes its own winking, cartoonish critique of its predecessor. Even earlier, Slumber Party Massacre (1982)—scripted by Rita Mae Brown, the lesbian activist and author of the classic queer bildungsroman Ruby Fruit Jungle—functions simultaneously as a bloody, horny slasher movie and a feminist disquisition on the same. Audiences who enjoy such entertainments were in on the joke and were generally much smarter than critics gave them credit for. The rest could enjoy the baser delectations of an enormous chainsaw or power drill being bandied about wantonly without meditating on the phallic implications. Countless films think through the machinations of their own genre withoutshowing their work. They are also extremely generative in the sense that they can be read in multiple ways.

By contrast, a great many of the postmodern and elevated horror flicks feel as if they’re knotting in on themselves. They’re hermetic in the negative sense. There is not much to dowith Scream,or The Cabin in the Woods, or Get Out, or Midsommarother than to say, “I get it.” Where many of the classic horror films felt like they were smuggling meanings into them, these new cycles pushed (or “elevated”) any buried subtext to the level of text. 

Even when these movies are obsessively parsed by fans, such interpretive work almost inevitably points back to basic, clearly stated themes. I am reminded of savvy viewers pointing to a scene in Get Outwhere Allison Williams’s character carefully separates her multicoloured Froot Loops from her glass of white milk, a detail that does little beyond confirming that, yes, this is a film is about racism and the cognitive dissonance of the liberal class. And when such ideas are not painstakingly telegraphed, italicized, and double-underlined, some handwaving about “generational cycles of violence” will typically satisfy lingering questions regarding what a given movie is up to.

At worst, such films foreground their thematic and intellectual work at the expense of being, you know, scary. At best, they play like their own term papers; as someone who used to lecture on the genre, I’d give the whole cycle a B-.

Regardless of these films’ individual merits, the elevated horror boom has gone a long way to legitimating the genre. Films like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), Possession (1981), and Jacob’s Ladder (1990) had edged the genre towards reputability. But such films—artfully conceived, bigger-budgeted, starring more recognizable actors—were always exceptions to the rule. Now, they’ve become the dominant mode. They earn rave reviews. They win awards. They’re even respectable. But what does the average horror hound care for respectability?

Horror (and genre movies in generally) are sometimes termed “ghettos” for their sequestering from mainstream cinema. (The video store I frequented as a kid had its own “Horror Cave” in an alcove that previously housed pornographic video cassettes.) As a genre, horror has long nurtured its own constellations of stars and personalities. “Kane Hodder” and “Tony Todd” may not exactly be above-the-title, marquee names down at the multiplex. But sit them at a folding table at an over-lit convention center and watch as fans queue in droves to press the flesh of the guys who played Victor Crowley and the original Candyman. Filmmakers and technicians are likewise revered. There was a time, not so long ago, when legendary makeup artist Tom Savini would appear on Letterman to show off some gnarly prosthetic head or prophylactic filled with prop blood. Periodicals and web pages interviewed these sorts of minor celebrities, playing directly to the hardcore fans.

Many of the directors and distributors strip-mining the horror movie landscape can feel like vampiric tourists sapping the mana of the very movies to which they condescend. Robert Eggers, director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, has admitted as much, telling an interviewer, “I wouldn’t have the incredible opportunity to be making cinema if it wasn’t for genre.” Eggers’s next film is star-studded remake of F.W. Murnau’s German expressionist classic Nosferatu, starring one of the Skarsg?rd brood as Count Orlok. It concentrates so many of the cycle’s more obnoxious postures: remaking a movie produced as a cheap (but incredibly atmospheric), unlicensed rip-off of Bram Stoker’s novel, subsequently accepted as a masterpiece following decades of dissemination and reappraisal. With its ashy color palette, keyed-up Willem Dafoe performance, and big-ticket Christmas Day debut, Eggers’s version feels like a mothballed masterpiece-on-arrival.

Here, the difference between elevated horror and its ground-level predecessors recalls the late film critic/painter Manny Farber’s distinction between “white elephant art” and “termite art.” As outlined in a 1962 Film Cultureessay, white elephant art is that which amounts to a “yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition,” whereas termite art “leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” Termite art (or “termite tapeworm-fungus-moss art”) typically reveals itself where the “spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence.” Termite art is proudly beneath esteem; its very lack of cultural worth corresponding, in inverse proportion, to its preciousness among those eager to receive it.

There’s a reason some particularly grungy horror fans praise the bozo-auteurism of Rob Zombie’s Halloween II(2009) or Lords of Salem (2013) while eye-rolling at the new Ari Aster: the former comes by his wacky indulgences honestly, as a lifelong fright flick freak who legally changed his last name to “Zombie.” Maybe a better term than “elevation” is something like “gentrification.” These films capitalize on the ideas, images, and stock characterizations of the genre, re-present them as slicker and more serious, and peddle them to “savvier” audiences who wouldn’t be caught dead renting a Dimension Extreme DVD, or paging through a dog-eared edition of Fangoriaor Famous Monsters of Filmland. Elevated horror is not only a non-definition, but one that is negatively defined. It’s horror that’s not like that otherhorror.

Thankfully, the other horror persists, un-killable. It’s not all lofty elevation nowadays. A countervailing trend has also emerged. Take as an especially gruesome exemplar Damien Leone’s Terrifierfilms. The original, from 2016, was a refreshingly cheapo, and gruesomely violent, Halloween-night slaughter fest. The series’s villain is giddily cruel psychopath named Art the Clown (who by the time of 2023’s Terrifier 2acquires some sort of supernatural qualities). Art subjects his luckless victims to a brutal battery of stabbings, slicing, and dismemberments (no spoilers, plus typing them out may get me onto some sort of government watch list). Indeed, these films are sonasty that early audiences at Terrifier 2 screenings reportedly puked and passed out—the sort of publicity not even A24 or Neon can buy.

Such pulpy panoramas are Terrifier’s main draw. They are, foremost, showcases for Leone’s hyperrealistic practical effects: puppets, animatronics, and enough prop blood to fill an elevator at the Overlook. Leone is a craftsman of the Savini school, and his films exude a handmade, lunchpail quality that is both revulsive and charming. These films have also found a broad audience of aficionados and sickos. Terrifier 2grossed some $15 million worldwide, against its modest $250,000 budget. A third entry (set at Christmastime) is due later this year—in time to square off against Eggers’s Count Orlok 2.0.

Further north, a crew of Canadian filmmakers scored a recent indie hit with In A Violent Nature, a movie that mocks its snootier, elevated step-siblings. It’s a simple slasher setup: a mentally disabled burn victim named Johnny reawakens in a shallow grave and hunts down a group of young people who have snatched a precious locket. What distinguishes the film is style. Realized with tremendous patience, and even beauty, by writer-director Chris Nash, the film drew facile comparisons to filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, the Dardennes brothers, and sundry other practitioners of “slow cinema.” But such “Jason-meets-Journey-to-the-West” evaluations risk making Nash’s film seem far shtickier than it is. In a pan, critic Amy Nicholson grumbled that the film is “just as dumb” as other slasher flicks. Precisely.

In A Violent Naturethrills not because it subverts shopworn, stock-and-chop tropes of the slasher movie but because it satisfies them. It is a sad comment on the state of the art that a such a film would draw comparisons to all manner of hifalutin arthouse fare simply because its director devised clever setups for his kills and novel ways to frame them. For all its aesthetic gloss, Nash fundamentally understands the genre’s pleasures. The film boasts one of the most stomach-churning, and memorable, offings in horror’s long history. Nash does not hold himself, or his film, above such dubious delectations or the audience who enjoys them.

Here we knock into elevated horror’s biggest insult to the genre. These films cast implicit aspersions on the horror’s baser appeal. And not just the jump scares, gore, and promise of co-eds going full frontal. In their heavy psychologizing, and insistence upon their sophistication, they take for granted that terror, anxiety, and disgust are insufficient emotional responses. But a truly effective scare or gnarly gross-out is more difficult to put across the screen convincingly than some Psych 101 bunk about grief. Elevated horror’s recourse to “the real” diminishes the genre’s power, which has always fed on fear of the fantastic, the unknown, the unreal, and given it form in all the omnifarious creatures, creeps, ghouls, and brutes that go bump in the night. Horror’s ability to terrify isits art.

If the chilly response to a film like Longlegs—a film Frankenstein’d in a lab and publicized as a kind of ne plus ultraof every stock elevated horror trend—bespeaks anything positive, it’s the by now total expenditure of the trends themselves. Elevated, gentrified, white elephant horror has worn out its welcome, won its plaudits, snagged its hardware, and can be sent shuffling off, stage left, as the violins in the orchestra pit spike and play it off, pizzicato,and the spotlight of culture drifts elsewhere. Time now for something baser, gnarlier, and more challenging to gnaw through its polished alabaster bulk, gnawing, clawing, biting, gnashing, termite-like, zombified, slashing and chopping and stabbing and gashing, like a faceless, formless shape that lurks in bushes, stands stiff in shadows outside your window, haunts your dreams, and strangles them into the stuff of nightmares.