New genre of horror is here
Films such as ‘It Comes at Night’ and ‘A Ghost Story’ are sparking a new breed of horror films that are replacing scares with existential dread
‘ Do not go see It Comes at Night, its so not worth watching. Worse movie ever hands down [sic]’. Twitter has been filled with countless such posts after the US release of It Comes at Night last month. Mainstream moviegoers went in expecting a straight-up horror; they came out unsure about what they’d seen, and they didn’t like it.
Critics, and a certain section of viewers, have loved the film, but its Cinemascore rating — determined by moviegoers’ opening-night reactions — is a D. You can understand the confusion. The title alone strongly suggests It Comes at Night is a horror movie. As does the movie’s trailer, whose ingredients include a post-apocalyptic scenario, a cabin in the woods, gas masks, shotguns, prisoners, a stern patriarch (Joel Edgerton), and warnings never to leave doors unlocked or go out at night. It’s by no means false advertising, it’s just that this tense, minimal movie doesn’t play by accepted rules.
“I didn’t set out to make a horror movie per se,” says Trey Edward Shults, the film’s 28-year-old writer-director. “I just set out to make something personal and that’s what it turned into. I put a lot of my own fears into it, and if fear equates with horror then, yeah, it’s horror. But it’s not a conventional horror movie.”
RULES OF HORROR
Considering that horror is the place where we explore our mortal and societal fears, the genre is actually one of the safest spaces in cinema. More than any other genre, horror movies are governed by rules and codes: vampires don’t have reflections; the “final girl” will prevail; the warnings of the gas station attendant/ mystical Native American/creepy old woman will go unheeded; the evil will ultimately be defeated, or at least explained, but not in a way that closes off the possibility of a sequel.
The rules are our flashlight as we venture into the unknown. But in some respects, they’ve made horror a realm of what Donald Rumsfeld would describe as “known unknowns”. No wonder some film-makers are starting to question what happens when you switch the flashlight off. What happens when you stray beyond those cast-iron conventions and wander off into the darkness? You might find something even scarier. You might find something that’s not scary at all. What could be emerging here is a new sub-genre. Let’s call it “post horror”.
To its fans, at least, It Comes at Night is all the scarier because you don’t know exactly where the horror is going to come from. There’s a civilisation-levelling apocalypse and a contagious virus and a Blair Witchy forest, but the film is more interested in the horrors within. Edgerton and his family form a nervy alliance with another in a similar predicament, and with shotguns to hand and trust in short supply, the threat of violence is never far away.
There is grief, guilt, regret and paranoia. There are family bonds, which turn from protective to constrictive. The teenage son is plagued by nightmares. And then there’s simply the darkness, which the film’s visu- als make tremendous use of. It’s amazing how unsettling it can be just watching someone with a lantern wandering around in the pitch black night. It’s easier to identify what’s not scary. “I’m aware that the title sounds like a dope monster movie or something, but it speaks to the movie thematically, not in the literal sense,” says Shults.
He turned off all the lights in his Texas home and wandered around with a torch to get a feel for the movie, he confesses. He also researched genocides and societal cycles of violence. But the story really stems from his personal anxieties. Shults talks of his estranged father, who had a history of addiction, and died shortly before he wrote the movie. He confessed his regret to his son on his deathbed. “Death is the unknown. We don’t know,” he says, “And that’s always terrifying. But then more so is regret. The way you led your life, the decisions you made. That terrifies me all the time.”
As a former business-school student who quit college against his parents’ advice to pursue film-making, the fear of