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Midsommar: Horror That Refuses the Dark

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Horror lives in the dark. It has always been the genre’s first tool — the thing off-screen, the corner the candle does not reach, the cut to black that lets your own imagination do the director’s work. Ari Aster’s Midsommar, from 2019, throws that tool out. It stages nearly its entire runtime under a sun that never sets, in a Swedish meadow so bright you have to squint, and it is one of the most upsetting films of its decade. Taking the dark away turns out to be scarier than any shadow, because in the light there is nowhere to hide from what people do to each other on purpose.

The Witch: Folk Horror and the Puritan Nightmare

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Robert Eggers put a subtitle on his first film that told you exactly what kind of horror you were getting: The VVitch: A New-England Folktale. He reached past the ghost story and the monster movie for the register of a folktale — the sort of thing that gets told to frighten children into obedience and then curdles into something the tellers half-believe. Released in 2015, it remains the cleanest debut in modern American horror, and the most disciplined film ever made about the machinery of Puritan faith turning on the people it was meant to protect.

Elevated Horror and the Backlash Against the Slow Burn

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Somewhere around 2015 a new phrase started appearing in reviews, and it caused more argument than any film it was attached to. “Elevated horror.” The term arrived to describe a wave of slow, dread-soaked, formally ambitious genre pictures — Robert Eggers’s The Witch, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and soon the twin peaks of Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar — many of them distributed by A24, whose logo became shorthand for a certain kind of tasteful terror. And the moment the phrase caught on, a counter-army mobilised to hate it, because “elevated” carries an unmistakable insult in its tailcoat: elevated above what, exactly?

Hereditary: Grief Wearing a Haunted House

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Ari Aster has said that he thinks of Hereditary as a tragedy that happens to have a horror film wrapped around it, and the description is exact enough that you could use it as a warning label. People walked into cinemas in June 2018 expecting a possession picture and got, for roughly ninety minutes, one of the bleakest domestic dramas of the decade — a mother and a family disassembling under a grief so total it has nowhere to go but the supernatural. The demon arrives eventually. By then you have long since stopped needing it.