Horror Grows Up, Playing on Adult Fears
In “Hereditary,” bugs crawl from decapitated heads and ghosts lurk in shadows, but the most jarring moment of this new movie might be when Annie, played by Toni Collette, tells her son she never wanted to have him and tried to induce a miscarriage. Then she wakes, unsettled. Parental guilt is the real monster here.
We’re in the midst of a golden age of grown- up horror. Hushed and character- driven, this mix of indie fare and blockbusters works ferociously on adult anxieties. These movies have confronted racism, economic worries and family dysfunction. If you had to pinpoint a unifying theme from this renaissance, it’s the danger of overwhelming grief.
A character coping with the death of a loved one is the starting point of “Hereditary,” “Goodnight Mommy” and “Pyewacket,” to name just a few movies from the last three years. Then there’s the subgenre of apocalyptic movies ( like “It Comes at Night”), whose narratives revolve around the vanishing not of one person, but possibly all of them.
“A Quiet Place,” the horror blockbuster of the year, belongs to both categories. Directed by John Krasinski, it’s an end- of-the world movie about unstoppable monsters that appear to have wiped out most of humanity, but the engine of the story is a sibling’s ill-advised decision that leads to the murder of her brother, fracturing the family.
“Get Out,” Jordan Peele’s triumphant debut of 2017, does not begin with mourning, but the inability to process grief is a critical theme. Though liberal racism is the source of the main character’s terror, what allows him to be rendered frozen and helpless is the memory of his mother’s death and his guilt over not doing more to save her.
These movies feature the usual preoccupations of horror — supernatural evil, gore, creepy basements — but they also evoke the poet Anne Carson’s answer to the question: Why does tragedy exist? “Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
For most of its history, horror was considered kids’ stuff. Scary movies started to change in the late 1960s and ’70s, when a new breed of filmmakers pushed to make them darker, more realistic and mature. (See “The Exorcist” or “Don’t Look Now.”) In the following decades, horror became more diverse, gaining more respect from critics.
“Hereditary,” which is opening globally this month, is the apotheosis of this trend, a visually ambitious and ruthlessly disturbing supernat- ural story that is also an intricate meditation on mourning.
It begins with a family late for the funeral of its matriarch. After delivering a halfhearted eulogy for her mother, Annie asks her husband ( played with grave unease by Gabriel Byrne): “Should I be sadder?”
When Annie’s son, a withdrawn teenager played by Alex Wolff, witnesses an act of unspeakable violence, he freezes, then heads home, goes to sleep and tells no one. “Hereditary” turns the teenager’s denial into the subject of the scare, making the lack of sustained response to death appear chilling.
Something seems i nexorable about the miseries that befall this family. Annie is an artist who creates tableaux in miniature houses, which the camera lingers on, at one point segueing seamlessly into a scene of the real house. The implication is clear: These people are minor players in a drama they have little control over.
Sexual voyeurism and exploitation have long been hallmarks of horror, but they are relatively absent in grown- up horror. “It Follows,” which centers on a world of teenagers, does play on the old formula of sex leading to death. But this movie has none of the titillation or theatrical kills of a slasher picture; it’s deliberate, melancholy and deceptively layered.
There has been a backlash to such character- driven restraint among the horror faithful. On his podcast, the novelist Bret Easton Ellis has been critical of what he calls “indie art house horror.”
In an interview with Jason Blum, the most influential producer of horror today (“Get Out,” “Split” and more), Mr. Ellis said too much logical explanation can be ruinous.
Mr. Blum pushed back, saying his films must be rooted in a coherent reality.
Mr. Ellis hinted at a concern that many fans have about the growing respectability of the genre. Now that horror attracts better actors, bigger budgets and meatier scripts, a sense of fun is missing in some movies. Has horror lost some of its pleasures, its single-minded determination to terrify?
H. P. Lovecraft famously wrote that the strongest kind of fear was that of the unknown. But the older you get, the less unknown there is. Vampires, werewolves and zombies don’t frighten like they once did. But ghosts still do — when they remind us of what we have lost.