Introduction

A 2018 piece in the New York Times by film critic Jason Zinoman announced that we are "in the midst of a golden age of grown-up horror."¹ The laudatory quality of Zinoman's essay and his emphasis on the genre's ostensibly newfound sophistication and focus on adult anxieties resonate with many other assessments of horror cinema of the past decade. Echoing Zinoman's phrasing, Robin Means Coleman titled a 2019 piece for The Conversation "We're in a Golden Age of Black Horror Films" and suggests that "the horror genre is maturing and becoming more imaginative and inclusive."² These and related essays consistently cite an emergent canon of contemporary work in the genre: The Babadook (Kent, 2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Amirpour, 2014), It Follows (Mitchell, 2014), The Invitation (Kusama, 2015), The Witch (Eggers, 2015), The Love Witch (Biller, 2016), Get Out (Peele, 2017), Hereditary (Aster, 2018), A Quiet Place (Krasinski, 2018), Midsommar (Aster, 2019), Us (Peele, 2019), Blood Quantum (Barnaby, 2019), Relic (James, 2020), and Antebellum (Bush and Renz, 2020). Zinoman argues that recent films such as these expand the genre's emotional parameters, with a particular focus on grief and mourning; complicate the intergenerational conflicts of previous horror cycles; explore sexual anxieties without exploitative intent (a point analyzed in greater depth in feminist assessments of these recent films); and ultimately construct complex narratives that "blur the line between scary movie and bleak drama."³ The claim made by Zinoman, Coleman, and others that the genre has opened up to an increasing diversity of voices might seem supported by even more recent work, such as Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021) and Julia Ducournau's Titane (2021).⁴

The critical and commercial success of many of these films and the wave of think pieces that has accompanied them raise a number of questions for scholars of the genre. Are we witnessing some genuinely new thematic and aesthetic developments, or are these films treading on familiar ground? What textual factors support the idea of a shift from a youthful to an adult perspective, and what would be the ideological implications of such a shift? Are we seeing social and political anxieties and subjectivities thematized in this recent work that have gone unaddressed by the genre in the past?

The field of horror studies has complicated Robin Wood's "basic formula" for the horror film that he established in 1979: "normality is threatened by the Monster."⁵ Yet, scholarship and criticism examining the domestic turn of the American horror film beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s continues to revolve around how normative, hierarchical, patriarchal social structures may be exposed for their inherent forms of terror and violence or how the genre provides an outlet for the expression of feelings repressed and devalued by such structures.

This special issue seeks to move beyond this binaristic framework by reconsidering the implications of the formative period of the modern horror film (1960s–1970s) and drawing new through lines to the distinctive aesthetics and thematics of recent "grown-up horror." Shifting away from the broadly framed intergenerational conflicts of these earlier films, in which monstrosity is aligned with the side of either the parent or the child, present-day films engage with a range of familial discourses and experiences rooted in contemporary forms of precarity and anxiety: economic insecurity and job loss; toxicity in food, water, and domestic environments; anti-Black racism and police violence; and now a global pandemic and the failure of political leadership to address it. Such subject matters subtend Zinoman's claim that these recent films blur the line between horror and nonhorror "bleak drama[s]."⁶ This point is echoed by comments from directors such as Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Jennifer Kent, who have stated in interviews that they don't identify solely or even primarily as horror filmmakers.⁷

This special issue had its beginnings in a panel we organized together for the 2019 annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. As we assembled that panel, it struck us that Zinoman's article was...