By Steve Dinneen
With new “elevated horror” movie M3gan coming out this week, I thought I’d round up some of the top films in this nebulous genre. While the label – largely disparaged by the film community – can be retrospectively applied to films from The Exorcist to The Shining, it’s really a recent phenomenon, used to group together the new generation of horror movies that aim to make you think while they’re making you afraid.
More specifically, “elevated horror” is often used to describe movies with a progressive bent, those that explore, say, trauma, female empowerment, or racial or sexual equality. M3gan certainly fits the bill, with its Black Mirror-esque warning about the dangers of palming off parenting to computers and exploration of the difficulties of raising a child.
This incredibly unscientific list rounds up some of my favourites, limited to those released after the term moved into the popular vernacular and focusing on western releases. I’ve left out some of the best horror movies of the last decade – Mandy and The Lighthouse spring to mind – because they don’t fit easily into the bracket.
1. Under the Skin
Jonathan Glazer’s ethereal story of a lonely alien (Scarlett Johansson) preying on horny dudes in Scotland isn’t just one of the best examples of “elevated horror” – it is one of the best films this side of the millennium. Absolutely comfortable in its own skin, Glazer creates an elegiac dreamscape in which the camera is happy to linger on seemingly insignificant moments. These are contrasted with some stunning, stylised scenes in which the central character devours her prey. Johansson is excellent, never overplaying the part and inviting real sympathy. A masterpiece.
2. Get Out
Jordan Peele’s masterpiece Get Out is a razor-sharp horror movie where the unseen terror is casual racism and the insidious force is cultural whitewashing. It follows a young interracial couple as the white girlfriend prepares to introduce her fella to the folks back home. Alas, back home is a creepy, picket-fence suburb where people of colour have fixed smiles and glassy eyes. It touches upon various facets of racism: how it’s ever-present even when race isn’t being directly discussed; how black bodies are fetishised; how platitudes stop people from having real conversations. Innovatively shot and gripping from start to finish, this is horror at its best.
3. Midsommar
Smashing the assumption that a horror film should take place in the dark, Midsommar is pure spectacle, filled with beautiful meadows, floral head-wreaths and the occasional crumpled corpse. Florence Pugh takes the lead as a woman who begins to realise her relationship is not as perfect as she’d imagined, with a trip to a sinister, remote Swedish community the perfect place to come to this realisation. Folk horror with a huge debt to The Wicker Man, director Ari Aster delivers here in spades.
4. It Follows
One of the films that helped to redefine the slasher movie for a new generation, It Follows takes the idea of a silent killer stalking a group of teens and uses it to examine casual sex and social media shaming. The premise is thus: there is a “patient zero” being chased by a shapeshifting entity and the only way to escape certain death is to pass the curse to someone else by having sex with them. It’s slick, tense and genuinely frightening, and even a weak ending doesn’t remove the gloss.
5. Raw
This is a coming of age story of a young woman who just happens to be a cannibal. Touching on gender politics and class, this French-Belgian debut from writer/director Julia Ducournau is smart, sexy, gory and incredibly self assured, containing just enough knowing humour to offset the moments of gratuitous violence. Delicious.
6. The Witch
The movie that launched the career of Anya Tailor-Joy is a brilliant example of restrained horror. A bleak tale of a young girl – who may or may not be a witch – growing up in a strict farming community, The Witch is a wonderfully dark fairy story grounded in European folk horror.
7. The Babadook
Another formative text in the “elevated horror” canon, the Babadook is a horror movie about the anguish of mental illness. It stars Essie Davis as a grieving mother struggling to raise her child. The sinister figure stalking the house is a clear reflection of the cloud of depression that hangs over the family, but there isn’t a worthy bone in this film’s body. It’s raw and mean and genuinely chilling.
8. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Director Ana Lily Amirpour’s black and white neo-noir debut takes place in Bad City, a fictional Iranian oil-town where nobody seems to notice the mounting piles of bodies. It follows The Girl, an indie-music loving vampire in a billowing, cape-like chador and Breton stripe T-shirt. A good feminist vampire, she tends to target men who abuse women. Parallels are drawn between vampirism and various social problems – addiction, environmental and human exploitation – but they’re secondary to the general theme of being lost and alone and looking for someone to cling to.
9. Climax
Climax is deeply unpleasant, super-stylish and horribly compelling, which is little surprise given it’s directed by Gaspar Noé, the man behind gratuitous rape-horror Irréversible and gratuitous sex drama Love. It’s a surreal, inexorable descent into despair delivered with a pulsing soundtrack and nightclub lighting. It has little interest in establishing a line between soft porn and serious art, wavering between the two before breaking down into a queasy, bloody orgy of sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ EDM. It follows 20-or-so hot young dancers who are brought together in an isolated community hall for some unspecified production. Things go awry when they get spiked with LSD; aggressive characters become homicidal, depressed ones suicidal, horny ones overcome with insatiable desire. It touches on fear of pregnancy, fear of being a bad mother, fear of being alone and unwanted, fear of your own messed-up sexual urges. It’s painful stuff, building in pace and ferocity until its inevitably bleak… well, climax.\https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHhaIRevB-
10. The Love Witch
A visual feast, The Love Witch is a colour-saturated paean to the 1970s, telling a story about sexual politics through the lens of a beguiling witch. A B-movie at heart, the production values in writer/director Anna Biller’s film are top class. While thin on scares, this is the kind of movie you can really luxuriate in.
11. M3gan
This story of a robot companion to a young, grieving girl is a cautionary tale about the dangers of abdicating parenting to computers. It’s slick and poppy, having become a social media sensation thanks to a murderous dance routine, but there’s more substance to it than that might suggest. Taking the baton once carried by Chucky and Annabelle, this is the possessed puppet movie for the Tik Tok generation.
12. The Invisible Man
Conceived as a part of the now defunct Universal Studios ‘Classic Monsters’ universe, The Invisible Man is an excellent self contained movie. A 21st century ghost story directed by Saw and Insidious writer Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man plays on the same subversion of domestic safety that makes films like Paranormal Activity so frightening – doors drift open by themselves, floorboards creek ominously. This isn’t just a modern twist on the haunted house movie, though – it’s also a timely psychodrama about a powerful man’s mental and physical hold over a vulnerable woman. At the centre of it all is an exceptional performance from Moss, who really sells the maddening impotence of her situation. As “elevated horror” as it gets.
13. Hereditary
Another formative entry into the new wave of modern horror movies, Ari Aster directs Toni Colette in this story of emotional inheritance and how trauma can carry through generations of a family. While more straightforward in its delivery than many of the films on this list, it qualifies thanks to its ability to genuinely frighten, with nods to classic horror movies including The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.
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