In an October 2017 piece “How We Ended Up in the Golden Age of Horror Movies”, Scott Meslow notes that the history of horror films has been one of keeping the lights on in Hollywood while receiving no respect from the studios. Director Mike Flanagan recalls endless “eye rolls” at pitch meetings from executives who balked at any attempt to make a serious film in the horror genre—capital’s representatives wanted the equivalent of fast food with “empty calories” making up the bulk of their horror repertoire. What then explains this change of heart in recent years, with studios churning out critically acclaimed films such as Get Out (2017) and Hereditary (2018)? The most immediate cause is to be found in smaller studios producing critically-acclaimed box office hits with minuscule budgets—an attractive model in the era of $100 million dollar blockbusters.
Hereditary
Get Out
I would suggest an alternative, complimentary hypothesis to this. We have witnessed in recent decades shifts in cultural consciousness (derisively referred to as “wokeness”) largely as a consequence of the social resistance of the oppressed registered at the level of media spectacle. Media representation of the socially marginalized has become a site of social struggle derided by some as merely symbolic, yet given the outsized role Hollywood and television play in identity formation and maintenance among the vast majority of the population one cannot deny the significance such “symbolic” concessions represent. Traditionally, horror films have had a strong appeal to the oppressed, from women (who continue to make up the majority of the genre’s actual viewers) to non-whites to queer and gender non-conforming audiences. This in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that these “Others” have provided the raw material of trope production of the monstrous in the genre. Now, a new generation of innovative film-makers have “flipped the script” as a Washington Post Op-Ed penned by Danielle Ryan outlines. Instead of making films with these classic tropes, film makers like Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) director Jordan Peele “generate horror from the experience of being that formerly monstrous Other.”
With this sociological observation as our lodestar, we turn to examine the prominent themes of these contemporary horror films which have resonated so strongly with audiences and critics alike. There are of course outliers in every period but I would suggest we can date the trend in question from It Follows (2014). From this starting point I would suggest three thematic headings endemic to these films: the prominence of the formless monstrosity; the sensibility of dread in the face of cosmic fate supervening on private life; and the movement, often accomplished in the final moments of these films, towards embracing the monstrous in rejection of social identity—that is, there is a tendency in these films for the “evil” forces to be triumphant, both in the unfolding of the narrative and in the inner life of the protagonists. A word of caution is necessary here that we should not expect to find all three of these elements in each and every film—some might exhibit only one or two elements, though there are those like Annihilation (2018) which exemplify all three.
Annihilation
What is It? The Formless monstrosity
It Follows opens with a shot of an empty suburban street in the early morning when a young woman in her underwear dramatically burst out of her home and begins to look around in terror at an unseen threat. She turns down an offer for help from an older female neighbor, furthering the sexual assault allusion. We see terror on her face, witness it in her trembling and desperate voice, and finally are cued into the severity of the situation with the sudden eruption of the musical score. She escapes via her father’s car to the beach, leaves a final message on her father’s voicemail, and keeps vigil looking out for something she expects to emerge from the shadows as night creeps in. After an abrupt cut we see her mangled corpse in the early morning, limbs broken and twisted into a grotesque form.
Noel Carroll’s masterful study The Philosophy of Horror makes a compelling case for a definition of “art-horror” as opposed to, say, the horror of watching the news. He makes the case that horror involves a combination of disgust and fear, and that these emotions of art-horror are meant to be experienced vicariously by audience identification with the human characters of a given film. With this in mind we can see how the young woman at the beginning of the film portrays clearly what is so effective about a monster of indefinite form. Since we cannot see what she is terrified of we can only empathize with the emotional state she is portraying in her performance and project our own horrors onto this blank slate. The seriousness of her terror is retroactively justified and our feelings of fear confirmed when presented with the disgusting consequences of the formless monster: her mangled corpse.
It Follows
A monster of indefinite form can be anything from a homogenous blob to the—more relevant to our inquiry—heterogenous mass of individual instantiations, none of which represent the “true” form of the entity. If a monster is conceived in its classic form deriving from its Latin roots, it is seen as an aberration, an instance of nature out of balance, of the impossible becoming frighteningly immediate all in service to its function as a portent of social and personal destruction. Thus we see in this formless monster the distilled essence of monstrosity itself, the Ur-Monster which is in some ways capable of becoming any particular monster.
In the film the monster is referred to as “it” and as a “thing” in perpetual motion. It walks at a steady speed in the direction of its mark, a mark activated by engaging in sexual contact with a previous mark. That is to say, the monster is sexually-transmitted. One cannot ignore the heavy psychoanalytic elements here: “it” is in perpetual motion with a goal, forever following a desiring subject as a mark of guilt and death. In its pursuit only a marked person can see it, and it takes on a variety of forms usually involving nudity and disfigurement, or sometimes the appearance of loved ones. One character says of it, “Sometimes I think it looks like people you love just to hurt you.” From inhumanly tall men to urinating sex crime victims to the father of the mark (rather on the nose here), it is utterly traumatizing to its marks due to its relentless pursuit and ever-changing appearance.
This reference to “it” of course recalls an older shape-shifting monster of indefinite form: the infamous Pennywise from the Stephen King novel and the adaptation in which the titular monster was portrayed by Tim Curry. The new films, IT: Part One (2017) and IT: Part Two (2019) are exemplary of the trends under examination here. They are perhaps best expressed in the formula many horror critics have settled on for understanding the difference between the two portrayals of Pennywise first by Tim Curry and then by Bill Skarsgard: whereas Curry’s Pennywise resembled a human acting like a monster, Skarsgard’s portrayal shows a monster that is trying (and often failing) to pass as human.
It
To briefly rehash the plot: an ancient cosmic monster from space embedded itself deep in the Earth on land later settled by Native Americans and then the township of Derry; the monster takes on the forms of what is most feared most by individuals, primarily children, and feeds on their fear as it murders them and traps them forever in its lair deep beneath the Earth. A quirk of the monster is that it has taken on a more common, stable form in the guise of the clown Pennywise, though its “true form” is represented only by the trio of “dead lights.”
Pennywise enjoys another similarity with the It Follows creature in that it is activated by social activity, in this case forms of intimate social oppression. Incestual child abuse, bullying, homophobic hate crimes, all of these are fair game. King’s novel details this aspect masterfully, but its full relevance to the story seems to have been downplayed in the previous adaptation. The team of children who grow up to finally vanquish the monster call themselves “the Losers” and symbolically embody a resistance of the oppressed which is predicated on the rejection of fear in the face of oppression.
The monster of indefinite form enjoys a further mutation in Annihilation (2018) which portrays an extraterrestrial impact followed by a steadily-expanding dome dubbed “the Shimmer.” What happens behind the Shimmer is a mystery until the audience is treated to an all-woman team of investigators each of which have individual reasons not to fear for their lives. As we follow their journey, we are shown how the forms of all the life contained within the shimmer are in the process of being recombined and remixed in a ceaseless flux that erodes the memories and sense of personal identity among the investigators.
Annihilation
Thus, instead of an indefinite form contained in a precise localized instantiation we have an expansion of this entity until it envelopes everything else, disassembling and reassembling for opaque purposes of its own. This brings us to our next thematic focus: the predominance of dread and fate over traditional forms of agency demonstrated in horror films.
The investigators’ slow discovery allows the audience to build this sense of dread as they become attached to the characters and their relationships. We take this journey with them and experience their loss vicariously as they find themselves devoured, transformed, and, in a word, annihilated. Without a clear idea of why or what is behind this we are invited to experience profound dread in the face of a power beyond human agency.
Fate and Agency
Perhaps the most powerful statement about dread in the face of fate among these recent films is to be found in Ari Aster’s breakout masterpiece Hereditary (2018). The thematics of dread in the face of fate’s encroaching power over individual lives at the expense of any human agency are on full display in this elegantly-woven narrative. During a classroom discussion of Euripides’ tragic drama Herakles one student remarks that the situation evokes “horrible hopelessness.” This nod to the film itself ties it to this sensibility from ancient Greek drama that there are powers outside of human agency which compel us to act and yet, in spite of our determined nature, compel us to take responsibility for those very actions.
Indeed Toni Colette’s powerful portrayal of the mother Annie draws attention to this crisis in her own life as she melts down at a grief support group after her mother’s death. Choking on her suddenly unbottled despair, Annie decries how no one takes responsibility and states, “I am blamed.” This guilt and ominous disquiet pervades the entire film, with each character living a life that is somehow impacted by the specter of Annie’s dead mother. The mother has no lines and is only seen in brief visions, but her presence is interwoven into every scene with remarkable consistency.
We discover that the mother was the leader of a cult which has sinister purposes for Annie’s children and ultimately destroys each of them without any of the family members understanding what is happening to them or why. They are nonetheless regarded by one another and the cult as morally culpable. They do not exist in a condition which is set up for their agency, it is a world for-another, not a world for-themselves. There is not a lack of design and purpose, there is simply design and purpose not for-themselves. To borrow from Eugene Thacker, they experience the world-not-for-us: a world not devoid of meaning, but devoid of meaning for human agency.
The VVitch
A film which masterfully illustrates the emergence of this theme is The VVitch (2015), which marks a kind of transition from agency to fate by way of a creeping dread. The family of The VVitch lives in colonial New England and they separate themselves from their community at the command of the patriarch-father in the name of piety. The disagreement of “conscience” between the patriarch and the community leadership is only vaguely discussed. What is vital is the decision of the patriarch-father is final whatever the family might feel or how reasonable the claim is or is not.
Once isolated the family begins to forge a life according to the pattern of the patriarch-father’s will determined by scarcity and a struggle against the encroachments of nature, whether nature’s avatars be animals or sexuality. The isolation of the family leads the older brother to be infatuated with the body of his sister. Further reference to his coming of age is signaled when he is taken into the woods by the patriarch-father to be imparted with wisdom about salvation and his role in faith.
Nonetheless, the attempt to exist by the Protestant ethic alone is frustrated by the disappearance of the youngest child which is blamed on Thomasin, the oldest girl and subject of her brother’s desire. The crisis escalates as more disappearances and illnesses and blights strike, with Thomasin’s mother and father both focusing on her as the responsible party, threatened by her burgeoning sexuality and the threat it represents to the transmission of patriarchal agency to her brother.
Hints are given to the existence of a witch in the woods, but this is interpreted as evidence of Thomasin’s collusion. In the end, the whole family but Thomasin lies dead and in her desperation she prays to “Black Philip,” the folkloric devil figure haunting the children’s imaginations. Shockingly, he answers, and asks if she wishes to “live deliciously.” We then see Thomasin walking naked in the woods, this poor victim of her family’s threats and violence now embracing her body as she meets a coven of witches who dance and then levitate around a fire.
This final scene exemplifies our third theme, that of salvation by identification with the monstrous element (in this case the witch) which is discussed below. Thomasin’s acceptance of this overwhelming force churning around her is an acceptance of her fate, experienced as dread by her family, and broadly symbolic of the transition from the Protestant-Patriarchal-Agency dynamic in the face of the faceless horror to a Pagan-Liberated-Fated dynamic.
Embracing the Monstrous
This brings us to our third theme, namely the theme of salvation by way of embracing the monstrous. Thomasin surrenders to the power of Black Philip, the hidden witch, and the natural forces of the woods. She does not flee or seek to retain her previous life, to make amends for the victims in her family, to slay the monster—rather she becomes it. She embraces the invitation to “live deliciously.”
In this she stands as a kind of heroic figure, not unlike the character of Susie in the remake of Suspiria (2018). Susie is presented to us as a sacrificial lamb, as a soft-hearted and inexperienced youth unaware of how her talent and hard work merely fattens her up for slaughter. Until the last moment we believe that she is to be the coven’s victim when suddenly it is revealed that Susie is herself Mother Suspiriorum, the supreme witch who then exacts gruesome vengeance on her rivals. All of the dread conjured by brief glimpses of the coven’s cruelty is upended as the audience is invited to embrace that very power in the hands of Susie/Mother Suspiriorum.
Suprisia (2018)
In both of these cases the film builds up the emotional state of the audience into a frenzy of horror, a “horrible hopelessness” which suddenly and violently shifts. The previous agents are extinguished and the dreaded power responsible for the horror becomes something to identify with. Annihilation takes a similar turn in its final act as Natalie Portman’s character Lena is seemingly absorbed into the alien force at the source of its impact. The Shimmer dissolves and all that is left is Lena and her husband—or, some simulacrum of them containing some higher state of consciousness resultant from the alien entity’s work in the Shimmer.
It Follows embraces something like this ending without the salvific overtones. Indeed one could argue that it takes a classical Jewish theological approach by simply embracing the guilt in question. The final shot is of the surviving teens holding hands, walking ahead, with the monster in steady pursuit—but they simply stare forward and walk without fear. They are accepting the external force that has encroached on their lives through sexual contact, but there seems to be no salvation on the horizon, merely a quiet hope that continuing forward is all that is to be done.
Hereditary also plays with this theme without salvation, at least not for the victim-protagonists. Peter, Annie’s son, is finally expelled from his body which is then fully inhabited by the Demon Prince Paemon. This accomplishes the cult’s plan. Triumphal music swells with the faithful kneeling and the family in various states of decomposition—headless corpses and the like—inviting the audience to delight in the transcendence finally achieved by the cult after the litany of horrors just witnessed. One cannot look on those final moments without a sense of bewilderment: is this salvation? Yes, but not for the victims, for the perpetrators.
Midsommar
Aster’s follow up Midsommar (2019) takes this to a more salvific and even therapeutic level (he describes it less as a horror film than a break up film). A group of younger Americans in the grad school age range are invited to take part in the Midsommar festival of a village in Sweden’s far north. There they are subject to an endless string of awkward atrocities which range from the slightly hilarious to the downright disturbing. In the end however, the young lead Dani embraces the rituals and becomes the May Queen. The final shot is of her joyous face as she watches the immolation of her now ex-boyfriend. If Carroll’s claim about horror films is correct, what else is to be said by this? We’ve followed Dani through the horrors of her family’s murder-suicide and her mistreatment at the hands of her boyfriend, only to arrive at this moment when we are—like the cult members around her who literally mimic her emotional distress—called to embrace her feeling of joyous liberation.
Conclusion
This is not to suggest that these are inherently radical developments in the horror genre, but they are suggestive of a resonance at the level of art and cultural symbol with concrete social struggles. Certainly there are films which do not fit this pattern that are themselves culturally-salient, such as Get Out (2017) and Halloween (2019). But even these films register in their own way the political transformation in question even if their thematics do not quite match those under consideration here since they embrace anti-racist and feminist standpoints by which their protagonists orient themselves to their respective horrors.
These trends of course are subject to future revision as studios seek out new forms of empty caloric content, but for now we have a string of thought-provoking and subtle horror films which are not only excellent representatives of the genre, but of film itself.
Jase Short is a writer and activist studying philosophy at the New School For Social Research. Social media splash image by Johnny Hammond.