Horror Is a Genre Worthy Of Awards

It was supposed to be the year horror finally got respect.

While 2017 brought some stylish small films (“It Comes at Night,” “Raw”) and a blockbuster (“It”), the real reason for optimism was “Get Out,” Jordan Peele’s indictment of liberal white orthodoxy told in the language of a paranoid gothic nightmare. Critics rightly received it as a weighty work of art, and it became the kind of prestige film that gets talked about during awards season, especially in the lead-up to the Oscars.

But when it was nominated for a Golden Globe, it landed in the comedy and musical category, and Mr. Peele weighed in with concerns that the comedy label trivialized the subject matter. But Mr. Peele didn’t insist on its being labeled horror, either. He instead described it as a “social thriller.” (It still didn’t win anything at the Golden Globes.)

To a lover of horror, the attempt to push “Get Out,” a movie with body snatching and lots of blood, out of the genre stings, in part because it’s so familiar. Arguing over the definition of a genre is only slightly sillier than fighting over what movie should win an award. But how we describe movies does matter, telegraphing value judgments and informing their context.

There’s a long history of movies being too good to be considered horror. Brian De Palma said he never thought of “Carrie,” his movie based on Stephen King’s novel, as horror, and William Friedkin has also rejected that label for “The Exorcist.” When “Rosemary’s Baby,” an inspiration for “Get Out,” premiered, the Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin criticized it as “sick and obscene,” before later adding that it was “too well done” for a horror movie.

For many, “horror” is shorthand for cheap, unreal, bad. The genre has garnered more respect today, but the tradition of dismissing it remains alive. Just last year, another film critic from The Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan, wrote off the entire genre in an essay that suggested he sees scary movies narrowly, a genre for escapist shocks. A similar condescension can be found from those who have told me that “Get Out” is a comedy because it has funny moments. “Hamlet” has laughs, but no one calls it a comedy.

No wonder Mr. Peele prefers “social thriller.” But by using this relatively obscure term, he implies the more common designation, horror, is unconcerned with politics or social issues, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Horror movies are nearly as old as film itself (the first “Frankenstein” movie was produced by Thomas Edison in 1910). In its current, mature incarnation, horror is applied to so many different kinds of movies that it’s harder than ever to pin it down. Horror deserves to be considered as a broad genre, not a niche. Guillermo del Toro, the greatest monster movie director alive, seemed to be making that case in “The Shape of Water,” a film widely described as a romance, with the lovers being a mysterious scaly beast and a woman played with terrific sensitivity by Sally Hawkins.

“Shape” is overtly inspired by “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” the 1954 B-movie about a murderous aquatic humanoid, but it also harks back to classic horror from the 1920s and ’30s, when fans saw those monsters as new kinds of heroes, misunderstood outcasts from a cruel society.

By allowing the creature to not only get the girl but to also be plausibly loved by her, Mr. del Toro has extended his longstanding sympathy for monsters further than anyone else, while keeping elements of dread and violence in the mix.

When he won best director at the Golden Globes, he praised monsters as “patron saints of our blissful imperfections.” Then he made his point more explicit afterward, saying it’s important that “Get Out” and “The Shape of Water” stood next to movies from more traditionally respected genres. “We have a place in the cinematic conversation that has led to the creation of beautiful, powerful images but also, thematic weight,” he said.

The conviction in his voice made me think that maybe it is horror’s time after all.