Home Is Where the Horror Is (2022)

Sometimes facing your fears isn't enough. You have to scrutinize them. In an attempt to understand my own nightmares—and the ones that shaped our culture—my first book, Shock Value, published a decade ago, examined one of the great eras of modern film: the revolutionary scary movies made between the late 1960s through the end of the following decade.¹ I called them the New Horror. To tell the story of its artists—masters such as Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and Dan O'Bannon among many others—I interviewed them about their work with an ear sensitive to what this group shared. One surprisingly common thing I discovered was an embarrassment about working in the genre itself. To the people who made Halloween (Carpenter, 1978) and Alien (Scott, 1979) horror, as they had understood it since they were young, was lowbrow, disreputable, the kind of thing you didn't want to tell your parents about. To hear these great artists tell it, the genre they worked in was kid's stuff.

Sadly, most of the filmmakers I wrote about in the book have died, but part of their considerable legacy is to change the reputation of horror and consequently the atmosphere that their successors work in. The genre is not only bigger and more lucrative, a persistently popular part of the cultural diet, but also more respected. For young filmmakers, there is no shame in working in the genre of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974). There are downsides to the growing stature of horror, to be sure, but also advantages, a new sense of the possible that allows for growth. The recent expansion of the genre is what inspired the article below, which I wrote for the cover of the "Arts & Leisure" section of the New York Times in 2018 about the artists at the forefront of an ambitious new direction in horror.

Building on the work of their predecessors, their work appears unshackled from any status anxiety over genre and deals directly and expansively in mature themes. They are making movies that kids enjoy but are primarily aimed at adults. Since I wrote the article this trend has only intensified, and its impact is evident in recent movies such as Relic (James, 2020) and She Dies Tomorrow (Seimetz, 2020) that speak to the terror of isolation in the age of COVID-19 better than any new mainstream dramas. This new grown-up horror has produced movies that I believe will be studied and imitated just like those from the 1970s were. This essay, and the others in this journal, attempt to understand this new golden age.

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What happens when your family is what frightens you? A new renaissance in scary movies skips jump scares in favor of dread based on adult fears.

In Hereditary (Aster, 2018), bugs crawl from decapitated heads, ghosts lurk in the shadows, and an artist tries to communicate with the dead. But the most jarring moment of this terrifying new movie might be when Annie, a mother played by Toni Collette, tells her son she never wanted to have him and tried to induce a miscarriage. Then she wakes from this nightmare, unsettled by the thoughts rattling in her subconscious. Parental guilt is the real monster here.

Moving into territory once the preserve of prestige dramas, horror has never been more bankable and celebrated than it is right now. And while evil clowns and serial killers at sorority houses still haunt young viewers (and make tons of money), we're in the midst of a golden age of grown-up horror. Hushed and characterdriven, this mix of indie fare and blockbusters works ferociously on adult anxieties in an age of dislocation.

These movies have confronted liberal racism, economic worries, and family dysfunction, and while horror has always reflected the social and political concerns of its day, if you had to pinpoint a unifying theme that distinguishes this renaissance, it's the ominous danger of overwhelming grief. A character coping with the death of a loved one is the new car of teenagers heading to a...