The A24 Aesthetic and the New Art-Horror

Ask a filmgoer under forty to describe an A24 horror film and they will do it without hesitating. Slow. Symmetrical. Wide, cold, beautifully lit. Somebody’s family is falling apart and something old is watching. The score is a cello being tortured. The trailer has no dialogue and one enormous drone hit. They will be broadly right, and the strange part is that this is a description of a distributor, a company that for most of its life has largely bought finished films at festivals rather than making them.

A24 was founded in 2012 by Daniel Katz, David Fenkel and John Hodges. The name, by the company’s own account, comes from the A24 autostrada in Italy, where Katz was driving when the idea landed. Its first releases arrived in 2013 and its early reputation was built on Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers — a neon crime film with a Britney Spears singalong at the piano, which tells you the sensibility was never really about restraint. Inside five years the logo had become a genre signifier more powerful than most directors’ names. That is a genuinely new thing in film distribution, and it is worth working out what happened.

What the audience is actually recognising

Strip away the branding and the “A24 look” resolves into three concrete, nameable things, none of which A24 invented.

The first is a very small pool of cinematographers working at the same budget level. Jarin Blaschke shot The Witch and The Lighthouse. Pawel Pogorzelski shot Hereditary and Midsommar. When people claim to spot an A24 film from a still, they are largely spotting two DPs, both of whom favour long lenses, practical sources and a camera that stays where it is. Blaschke’s work on The Lighthouse is the extreme case and the best evidence: black-and-white 35mm in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio, shot on Bausch & Lomb Baltar lenses dating from the 1930s with custom filtration to push the skies black, which earned him an Academy Award nomination. That is a set of technical decisions, and the technical decisions are the aesthetic.

The second is the acquisition strategy. A24 buys at festivals, which means its horror slate is pre-selected for a specific profile: first or second features, low budgets, formal confidence, festival programmers’ taste. The Witch won Robert Eggers the directing prize in the dramatic competition at Sundance in 2015 before A24 released it a year later. Talk to Me was bought out of Sundance in 2023 and went on to become the company’s biggest horror opening to that point. If you buy from the same shelf every year, the shelf becomes your identity.

The third is a marketing department that decided the audience was the brand. A24 sells hats. It sells zines and candles and a magazine. It ran the Ex Machina Tinder stunt at SXSW in 2015, putting an account for the film’s android on the app so festivalgoers would match with a fictional character — a piece of promotion that was written about more than most films get written about. The company understood before anyone else that a distributor could be followed like a band, and once a certain kind of viewer is following the label rather than the director, the label starts to look like an author.

The honest case against calling it an aesthetic

Here is where the fan account collapses. A24 did not make most of these films. Under the Skin is Jonathan Glazer’s, financed in Britain, and A24 handled it for the United States; the film’s glacial cruelty is described elsewhere on this desk in alien cinema at its coldest. Ex Machina was a British production A24 picked up for US release, dissected here as the Turing test as a chamber thriller. Green Room — Jeremy Saulnier’s punks-versus-skinheads siege, covered in the punk band versus the skinheads — shares almost nothing formally with Midsommar beyond a distributor and a release year. Saint Maud is a Film4 picture. Talk to Me is an Australian film by two YouTubers, shot with a handheld urgency that is the precise opposite of the locked-off A24 house style everyone claims to recognise.

So the aesthetic is a curatorial illusion, assembled after the fact by the audience out of a distributor’s purchasing habits. That is a compliment to the buyers. But it does mean the “A24 look” is really the look of a generation: a cohort of directors who came up watching the same restored discs, who could suddenly afford real film and real cinematographers because digital had collapsed everything else, and who premiered at the same four festivals. A24 recognised them faster than its competitors, and it stamped its name on the recognition.

The genuine ancestor

Every claim of novelty in film distribution turns out to be a rerun, and this one is a rerun of the American independent distributors of the 1970s. Ben Barenholtz booked El Topo at the Elgin Theater in New York and invented the midnight-movie circuit out of it, then did the same for Eraserhead — a distributor manufacturing an audience for a film nobody had a category for, which is exactly the A24 trick performed with less money and a worse carpet. The whole apparatus is catalogued in the midnight movie canon. New Line Cinema spent its first fifteen years doing precisely this on college campuses before A Nightmare on Elm Street turned it into a studio.

The other ancestor is the boutique disc label, which arrived first and taught the audience the behaviour. Long before anyone was buying an A24 hat, people were buying Arrow and Criterion editions on the strength of the spine number, trusting a curator to have already done the filtering — a habit examined in the 4K boutique label and the cult of physical media. A24’s real insight was that this collector reflex, previously confined to a few thousand obsessives with shelving problems, could be scaled to a general theatrical audience. The label as guarantor. The spine number as taste.

The craft that justifies the fuss

Underneath the merchandise there is real work, and the desk should say so plainly.

Hereditary opens on a scale model of a house in a workshop, then cranes in until the model becomes the actual bedroom of an actual boy who is asleep in it. Every subsequent frame in the film is contaminated by that shot — you cannot see a doorway in it without wondering who placed the figure. Ari Aster then commits the film’s central atrocity in a moving car and holds on the driver’s face in near-silence for an unbearable stretch afterwards, refusing to cut to the thing you need to see. That is a director trusting an audience to sit still in a multiplex in June, and it works.

The Witch is a period-accuracy exercise that becomes a horror engine. Eggers built much of the dialogue out of surviving court records, diaries and pamphlets of the 1630s, and shot in light that a family on a failing farm would actually have had. The result is a film in which the supernatural is a relief — a family is starving on bad soil under a doctrine that offers them no comfort, and when the Devil finally makes an offer it is the first kind thing anyone has said. That inversion is why the film survives, and it puts it in a line of descent from The Wicker Man and the whole tradition traced in folk horror’s long road.

Midsommar is the formal dare. Aster and Pogorzelski shot a horror film with no darkness in it at all — flat Scandinavian daylight, white linen, a camera that keeps turning upside down in transitions until the audience stops trusting the horizon. The genre’s oldest tool removed, on purpose, to see what is left. What is left is a breakup film with a bear in it.

The Lighthouse is the one where the craft is the entire subject. Two men, a rock, a foghorn. Blaschke’s boxy frame is close to the shape of a silent-era image, and Eggers shoots the whole thing on real film in monochrome, which means the actors are working in light that will render as high-contrast silver rather than as a colour grade applied afterwards. The foghorn is the film’s real antagonist — a sustained bass note that the sound mix keeps pushing under scenes until you notice you have been listening to it for ten minutes. The technique belongs to the tradition the desk mapped in the sound design revolution in modern horror, and it is doing the job a score usually does, without the audience’s defences going up.

Ti West’s trilogy — X (2022), Pearl (2022) and MaXXXine (2024) — is the other side of the slate and the useful corrective to anyone who thinks the label only backs mournful austerity. X is a Texas farmhouse slasher shot in New Zealand that wears its debt to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on its sleeve, and Pearl was shot back to back with it on the same sets in saturated Technicolor melodrama pastiche. Two films, one location, opposite palettes, released four months apart. That is the AIP double-bill instinct running inside a prestige distributor, and it is the smartest thing the company has financed.

The cost of the brand

The case against is that a distributor with this much identity begins to exert gravity on what gets made. If a young director knows there is one buyer whose approval converts a small film into a cultural event, the incentive to make the film that buyer will want is enormous, and the result is a slate of submissions that already look like the slate. Festival programmers report the same drift under different names every decade. The mid-2010s version of it produced a great deal of solemn, slow, beautifully photographed horror about bereavement, most of which will not be watched again, and the label’s success is part of the reason it exists.

There is a pricing objection too. Specialty distribution is expensive per screen, and the audience it reaches is concentrated in cities. A24’s marketing spend on a horror release routinely dwarfs the film’s negative cost, which means the economics only close if the brand does the work — the opposite of the arithmetic described in the Blumhouse model, where the film is expected to earn its own way against a cap. One company sells scarcity and taste; the other sells volume and a ceiling. Both are betting on the same Friday night.

The verdict

The aesthetic is real, the authorship is borrowed, and the borrowing is the innovation. A24 built a taste brand strong enough that a general audience will book a ticket on the strength of a logo, and it did so by buying consistently from a cohort of directors who were already producing the work. The failures are instructive too — It Comes at Night (2017) was sold with a monster in the marketing and has no monster in it, and the resulting audience fury produced one of the worst exit polls of the decade for a well-reviewed film. That is what happens when the brand promises something the film never agreed to.

Whether this survives is an open question. The company now produces as well as acquires, won Best Picture with Moonlight in 2017 and swept the 2023 ceremony with Everything Everywhere All at Once, and a distributor with that much prestige is a different animal from a scrappy buyer with an eye. The label that gets to define the next decade of genre will be whichever one is best at finding the films — the same job Barenholtz was doing at the Elgin, in the dark, at midnight, with a poster he had printed himself.