This spooky season is tinged with a little sadness: just a few weeks ago, William Friedkin passed away at age 87, shortly before his final film premiered. But while The French Connection won him Best Picture and Director Oscars, arguably his best and best-known film is 1973’s The Exorcist. However, Friedkin rejected its ‘horror’ label at first, saying, ‘I never intended The Exorcist to be a horror film.’ He isn’t alone in being wary of accepting the ‘horror’ label. Jordan Peele insisted that Get Out was a ‘social thriller’, and Julia Ducournau said her cannibal coming-of-ager Raw was not a horror film as ‘I did not write this movie to scare people’. Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell once told me: ‘When I started out there, horror was just above porno.’ While we’ve progressed beyond horror being sex-work adjacent, it still doesn’t get the respect it deserves.
Around the time The Babadook premiered in 2014, the label ‘elevated horror’ emerged – one of the most passive-aggressive terms imaginable, used to describe the likes of Hereditary, It Follows, Saint Maud and The Witch. Even though these films were brilliant and bold horror films, a caveat had to be used to acknowledge the genre’s value. This wasn’t ‘horror horror’ but something more sophisticated, and heaven forbid they use the art form of cinema to do something so base as to try to scare people!
As a result, the past decade has seen many pale imitations of the ‘elevated horror’ trend, with films so caught up in messaging and intergenerational-trauma metaphors they felt like dramas tangibly embarrassed to throw in a scare lest they be labelled as ‘torture porn’. They were films that forgot torturing your characters does not necessarily mean torturing your audience.
And now, the genre seems to be shaking loose that embarrassment, and new, gnarly filmmakers are making their mark. Speak No Evil director Christian Tafdrup brazenly embraced the label that so many had previously rejected and said he intended to make the ‘most unpleasant experience ever’ (mission accomplished). With Evil Dead Rise and Talk to Me being adored by audiences and critics, it is an utterly thrilling prospect to consider a pivot away from ‘good tast
