The Rise of Elevated Horror and Its Detractors

Somewhere between The Babadook in 2014 and Hereditary in 2018, a phrase settled over the genre like a dust sheet. Elevated horror. It arrived in reviews, then in trailers, then in the mouths of people who had never willingly watched a horror film and now wanted credit for having watched one. The implication in the adjective is a small act of violence: horror is down there, and these particular films have been hoisted out of it. The genre noticed. The genre has been sulking about it ever since, and it is entitled to.

The trouble with dismissing the term outright is that it was tracking something real. A change did happen in the 2010s — in who financed horror, where it premiered, what it looked like and who it was sold to — and the fact that the name given to that change was insulting does not make the change imaginary. The honest position requires holding both halves: the label is snobbery, and the thing it points at exists.

What actually changed

The shift was structural before it was aesthetic. Through the 2000s, the horror that reached wide release in the English-speaking world was mostly financed by studios or by studio-adjacent specialty arms, aimed at an opening weekend, and cut to a rating. What happened next was that a cohort of first- and second-time directors started making horror on arthouse budgets, premiering it at Sundance and Toronto rather than at genre festivals, and selling it to specialty distributors who marketed it as cinema.

The Witch is the cleanest case. Robert Eggers premiered it at Sundance in January 2015 and won the directing prize in the dramatic competition — the dramatic competition, which is the whole story in one line. A24 released it a year later. The film cost around four million dollars and grossed roughly ten times that, and its opening-weekend audience gave it a CinemaScore of C−, which is a number usually reserved for films that have insulted their viewers. That gap is the entire phenomenon in miniature: a horror film sold to a horror audience by a distributor who knew it was going to disappoint them on Friday night and be argued about for a decade afterwards.

Hereditary repeated the trick in 2018 and drew a D+ from its opening-night crowd. It Follows came out of Cannes’ Critics’ Week in 2014, cost about two million, and made ten times that on the strength of a premise and a synthesiser. The Babadook was an Australian first feature that did almost nothing at home and built its reputation entirely on export and word of mouth; William Friedkin, of all people, publicly declared himself frightened by it, which did more for Jennifer Kent’s film than any campaign could have.

All of that is a claim about a pipeline rather than about quality. The pipeline is real, it is repeatable, and it produced a decade of horror shot by a small pool of cinematographers on real film with long lenses and available light. Jarin Blaschke shot The Witch and The Lighthouse; Pawel Pogorzelski shot Hereditary and Midsommar. When people say they can spot an elevated horror film from the trailer, they are largely spotting two DPs and a budget bracket.

The mechanics, which is where the argument should be

Strip the marketing away and there is a genuine craft signature underneath, and it is worth naming precisely because the term “elevated” is so useless at describing it.

The first move is duration. These films hold. Hereditary opens by craning slowly into a scale model of a house until the model becomes the house, which is a thesis statement delivered in one shot: everyone in this film is a figure being placed. Ari Aster then spends the next two hours refusing to cut when the audience wants him to, most famously in the long, static, unbearable hold after the car stops on the roadside. The technique is not new — the long take as an instrument of dread is as old as the medium — but the willingness to bore a paying audience in June is a distribution decision as much as a directorial one.

The second is sound over score. It Follows is the counter-example that proves it, because Disasterpeace’s synth score is the loudest thing in the film, but the dominant mode of the cycle is a bed of room tone with something wrong buried in it. This is the technique the desk has traced in the sound design revolution in modern horror, and it works for a specific reason: an audience will consciously discount music and cannot consciously discount a hum.

The third is the refusal of the reveal. The Witch keeps its supernatural cards face down for an hour and then plays every one of them; Saint Maud holds its final image for perhaps two seconds before the credits. That last one is worth pausing on. Rose Glass’s Saint Maud was finished in 2019 and then spent the best part of two years being shunted around a shut world before finally reaching audiences, and it is the film that best exposes the label’s weakness: it is a psychological character study with the shape of a saint’s life, and calling it elevated adds nothing whatsoever to your understanding of it.

The detractors have a case

The objection comes in three grades, and only one of them is silly.

The silly one is the pure territorial reflex: any horror film that gets reviewed well in a broadsheet is a traitor. This is fandom protecting its clubhouse and it can be ignored.

The second grade is the historical objection, and it is devastating. If the criterion is a horror film with formal ambition and serious intent, the genre has been producing them continuously since it had sound. Vampyr in 1932. Cat People in 1942. Eyes Without a Face in 1960. The Innocents in 1961. Repulsion in 1965 and Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. Don’t Look Now in 1973, the same year The Exorcist collected ten Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. The Silence of the Lambs actually won the thing in 1992. A term that implies this was all impossible before 2014 is amnesia. What the 2010s cycle inherited was a tradition; what it was sold as was a rescue.

The third grade is the aesthetic objection, and it has aged into the sharpest of the three. Once the pipeline was established, the formula hardened, and the formula is: a bereavement, a family home, a metaphor that the film will explain to you. Grief as the monster works magnificently once. By the early 2020s it had become a default, and a good deal of festival horror arrived with its thesis pinned to its chest, terrified of being taken for genre. The films that survive the decade are the ones with something under the metaphor — The Witch is really about a family starving on bad soil, which is why the Devil arriving is a relief rather than a punchline; Midsommar is really about a woman being handled by a boyfriend who wants to leave. The ones that will not survive are the ones where the trauma is the plot, and the ancestor they should have studied is The Shining, which never once tells you what it is about.

Where the label came from, and why it stuck

The uncomfortable answer is that it was useful to somebody. A specialty distributor selling a slow, subtitle-free, star-free horror film to a general audience in 2016 needed a promise that the film would not be embarrassing to have paid for, and “elevated” is that promise compressed to one word. The brand that perfected this deserves its own accounting, and gets it in the A24 aesthetic. It also arrived at a moment when a certain kind of critic urgently wanted distance from the previous decade’s reputation, which the desk has argued was largely a misfiling in the torture-porn panic. One label was invented to condemn, the other to excuse, and both were doing publicity rather than criticism.

Several of the directors involved have said in interviews that they find the term unhelpful. They are right, and their films argue it better than they do. Hereditary ends with a coronation in a treehouse and a headless corpse levitating in a doorway. Midsommar ends with a man sewn into a bear. These are the endings of people who watched the same folk-horror and Italian films everyone else did and then got the budget to shoot them properly.

The verdict

Keep the observation and bin the word. Something changed in the 2010s: festival premieres, arthouse money, 35mm, patience, and a distributor willing to let an audience walk out angry. That is a describable, financeable, teachable set of conditions, and it produced a body of work that will be watched in fifty years. The adjective attached to it is a piece of class anxiety that says more about the people who reached for it than about anything on screen.

The genre needed money and nerve, which is what it briefly got. If you want the whole argument in a double bill, put The Innocents next to The Witch and see how much of the newer film’s technique — the withheld reveal, the ambiguity that never resolves, the child who might be lying — was already sitting there in 1961, waiting for someone to notice it had been elevated all along.