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?

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Elevated Horror and the Backlash Against the Slow Burn