end of decade

This Was the Decade Horror Got “Elevated”

The term “elevated horror” remains silly, but at least a genre that’s been dismissed for far too long is finally getting its due.
scenes from midsommar the witch and hereditary
Photo Illustration by Lauren Margit Jones; Images from the Everett Collection.

Toward the end of Ari Aster’s sun-soaked horror film Midsommar, Florence Pugh’s character Dani has had enough. She’s tripped on mushrooms, lost multiple friends, and, most immediately, witnessed her boyfriend performing a cultish sex act with a young girl. Overcome by her emotions, she releases a volley of gasping, heaving sobs as a group of women wails along with her. It’s one of Midsommar’s most memorable and widely discussed moments, and speaks to the film’s fascination with the ways in which a community can function as both a savior and destroyer of lives. That contemplative bent has become Aster’s calling card after Midsommar and his debut feature, Hereditary—vaulting his films into an increasingly discussed category called “elevated horror.” But that scene also captured the main attraction horror has long offered its devoted fan base: a collective release of alienating emotions like dread, anxiety, and rage.

It’s impossible to talk about the ways horror has shifted in the past decade without mentioning Aster, or that bothersome term that often follows his films. The “elevated horror” discussion peaked in the latter half of the 2010s, as titles like The Witch, Get Out, and Hereditary made waves. But horror aficionados and some critics pushed back against the notion that these films are doing something entirely new. For instance: Is Get Out really an elevation of the genre, or part of a conversation that includes films like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead—which gave horror its first black hero only to reveal that he was ultimately killed by a white police officer? Is The Babadook not a direct spiritual descendent of Rosemary’s Baby? And even the films often perceived as “trashier” horror—from slashers to so-called “torture porn”—have always had more to say than they have gotten credit for.

But what if horror really was elevated in the 2010s—just not in the way the term suggests?

Whatever one might want to say about the past 10 years in horror, there’s really only one place to start: Blumhouse Productions. In 2009 the studio released its first breakout hit, Paranormal Activity, from director Oren Peli. Made on a budget of $15,000, the night-vision-heavy found footage thriller captivated audiences to the tune of more than $193 million worldwide. Two years later, Blumhouse produced James Wan’s Insidious, a $1.5 million project, on which Peli also served as a producer. Both films display masterful command of traditional horror tools like pacing and suspense. And Insidious, in particular, displays impressive restraint, refusing to let loose until the very end—a maneuver that makes its ending, in which Patrick Wilson’s father character, Josh, must venture into a demonic realm called the Further to save his son’s soul, all the more effective.

Insidious, 2010.

From FilmDistrict/Everett Collection.

No one accused Insidious nor Paranormal Activity of “elevating” anything—but we have them to thank for horror as we know it today. Both spawned profitable franchises that would endure for years, and it was on the back of the Insidious franchise that Wan was able to parlay a deal with Warner Bros. to make The Conjuring, a stunningly precise throwback to 1970s horror in both style and subject matter that eventually became horror’s first and (so far) only successful contemporary cinematic universe. (RIP, Universal’s Dark Universe.)

Even more importantly, Insidious and Paranormal Activity solidified the genius of the Blumhouse model: offer fledgling creatives a tiny budget and creative control. Studios large and small took notice and began to do the same, backing away from gimmicks and instead investing in visionary talent. A24 made its name this decade with Robert Eggers’s The Witch and Aster’s films as much as it did with Moonlight or Spring Breakers. And even the It movies, it’s worth remembering, come from director Andy Muschietti, whose only previous feature-length work was Mama, a film that, despite its indulgence in some cliches, displayed a knack for memorable, nightmare-inducing visuals—likely a factor that landed him the director’s seat in a movie all about bringing children’s nightmares to life. (It: Chapter One also came in at a $35 million budget—pretty meager for a time when studio films usually hit closer to $100 million.) Add in the rise of streaming services, which allowed studios added revenue streams to make money on films that might have underwhelmed in theaters, and Hollywood’s willingness to let newer directors take bigger artistic risks only grew stronger.

Clever marketing had its part to play in all of this as well; after the generally uninspired horror of the 2000s, horror’s image had hit a low point. And both Blumhouse and A24 both had a hand in turning that ship around.

Blumhouse led the way by churning out hits that ran the gamut of what horror films could be—entries including Peele’s Get Out, the Purge films, Unfriended and its sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web—which received an honorable mention on V.F.’s K. Austin Collins’s best of 2018 list—2018’s Halloween, two Happy Death Day films,* and M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass among many others. And with certain films, like Get Out the marketing strategies specifically targeted not only horror fans, but awards audiences as well. A24, meanwhile, has enjoyed the benefit of its broader library; it’s a studio with its hand in just about every genre, and its fervent fans will often give its output a chance regardless of genre. It also probably helps that A24’s horror releases have often been more darkly contemplative and immersive than scary—a quality that has made its films uniquely welcoming to viewers who have usually skipped the horror genre more broadly. Yes, the upstart has earned a reputation among horror diehards for misleading marketing that frames films as more conventionally “scary” than they really are. But the end result has been a net positive for the genre: more people filling more seats, giving other studios more confidence to let more directors make more weird horror flicks.

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Get Out, 2017.

From the Everett Collection.

But beyond any shifts in how these films are made, perhaps the most encouraging trend in horror for the past decade has been the regard it has begun to receive as a vehicle for meaningful storytelling. Get Out is one of the most influential films of the decade, and a definitive horror film, one of only six best-picture nominees for the genre in its entire history. Even beyond Get Out, the Oscars have paid more attention to horror this decade; 2017’s The Shape of Water, only arguably a horror film but definitely a monster film, won Guillermo del Toro his first Oscar for directing. A Quiet Place received a nomination for its meticulous sound editing. And this year’s list of awards-season contenders includes more horror entries than it has in years—with possible nominees including The Lighthouse, Midsommar, and Us. And although it’s less of a genre film than some of director Bong Joon-ho’s previous output, it feels nonetheless noteworthy that the South Korean thriller Parasite has become one of awards season’s most beloved and widely discussed films.

During his own interview with the L.A. Times this fall, author and Horror Writers Association president John Palisano offered a theory as to why horror, particularly social horror, is finally getting its due. “Horror is speaking to all generations in a way it never has before,” he said. “In the 1950s, it gave people a way to deal with atomic fears; in the ’60s, horror addressed societal change; again in the ’70s, with consumerism, and the ’80s, with AIDS. Now, the entire country is unified in a threat we’ve never had to face before: the threat from within. And it speaks to both sides [of the political divide].”

So maybe it’s not that horror got elevated, but that this has become the decade when mainstream audiences finally started to notice. Jaws, The Exorcist, The Shining, and, more recently, Get Out and Midsommar aren’t anomalies—they’re horror at its best. Horror has long been one of cinema’s most effective and interesting lenses through which to examine the things that scare us most, both as individuals, and as societies. In the 2010s, directors have been given the space to tell these stories their way—and confident marketing that makes sure they reach not only typical horror audiences, but outsiders who might love them just as much. If this continues into the decade to come, the exhausting semantic debate over “elevated horror” will have been a pretty small price to pay.

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