Horror films are, at heart, lowbrow art
Critically acclaimed, hyper-smart entries in genre just disappoint
There’s no getting around it: the horror film is, at heart, a lowbrow genre, the cinematic equivalent of the carnival sideshow, where we go to gawk and laugh at what terrifies us.
It’s the only genre named after an emotion — and a primitive one at that — and it achieves its unique effects by transforming our base fears into literal monsters.
No wonder so many critics dismiss the genre out of hand. But thanks to a recent wave of wildly popular indie horror films, including It Follows, The Witch, Get Out and It Only Comes at Night, those same critics have been forced out to their local multiplexes to see what the fuss is about.
Imagine their shock — and horror — when they liked what they saw! A flurry of glowing reviews and think pieces have followed, proclaiming a new kind of horror film, one that challenges the genre’s supposedly tired conventions.
“Horror is the best it’s ever been,” Ira Madison III raved in a column for MTV.com titled “The Prestige Horror Revival.” Over at Vulture, an unnamed columnist opined, “In the last few years, filmmakers have begun experimenting with horror as a highbrow medium . . . not held back by the negative aspects of the genre.” (Those negative aspects: “one-dimensional ghosts,” jump scares, and gratuitous sex and gore.)
Not to be outdone by his American counterparts, Guardian film critic Steve Rose coined a new phrase, “Post Horror,” to describe this new sub-genre of innovative, brainy horror movies.
So does this sub-genre of hyper-smart, boundary-expanding horror films live up to the hype? Not really.
Let’s start with Get Out, which many critics have tagged for the Best Picture Oscar. The film’s first half, in which an African American photographer arrives for a weekend at his wealthy white girlfriend’s family home, creates an atmosphere of paranoid claustrophobia and suspense. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the film’s second half devolves into an updated version of The Stepford Wives, substituting race relations for feminism as its subversive conceit.
It Follows also transforms a contemporary social issue — the aftermath of rape — into a terrifying monster in its memorable first hour. Then, inexplicably, the film all but abandons its brilliant premise to tell a mumble-core coming-of-age story.
The selling point for A Ghost Story — the Rooney Mara haunter that opens this weekend in Toronto — is Casey Affleck mooning around in a sheet with the eyes cut out. That’s right: Casey Affleck in a sheet.
The problem with most “prestige” horror films is that they are too smart, too rational, to scare the audience for very long. Even when our fears are rational — such as the fear of losing a child — we don’t experience that fear as rational. Instead, our subconscious, in order to alert us to danger, transforms that fear into a kind of monster, a bogeyman, such as Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Once we rationalize our fears, they no longer frighten us. So it goes with the horror movie: a monster ceases to scare when it’s dragged into the light and analyzed.
The best horror films embrace sophisticated themes and the genre’s tried-and-true storytelling and cinematic techniques. Take The Exorcist. Arguably the best horror film of all time, The Exorcist isn’t great because of its protagonists’ anguished struggle with faith in a post-Christian society, though those struggles add depth to the film.
Rather, The Exorcist is great because director William Friedkin went to manic lengths to terrify the audience, including utilizing jump scares and scary music, splicing splitsecond images of demons into the film’s final cut and mixing the noise of angry bees into the soundtrack because the noise triggers a panic response in the human nervous system. He also filmed a possessed girl masturbating with a crucifix and bazooka-puking in a priest’s face. Highbrow indeed.
Horror movies return us to the time of our ancestors, huddled around a campfire, united in shivering catharsis by tales of ghosts and demons. If that’s not deep enough for you, it’s time to try another genre. James Grainger is the author of Harmless.