The unbearable arrogance of elevated horror
Or: What CinemaSins Does to a MF
Last night I watched the remake of Suspiria. I’m a big fan of the original — it was bright, and colorful, and full of music, and quite intense and surreal, in short it was the perfect late 1970s horror film. The sort of platonic ideal of the genre, if you will. The remake was none of that, and as it careened towards its long-overdue finale I tried to figure out what about the film was bothering me. As I sat through the credits, I figured it out: it was basically an Ari Aster film without Ari Aster, and much like his actual films I felt really ambivalent about it. Ultimately, the strongest feeling I had watching it was a cementing of my dislike of “elevated horror,” both as a label and as a movement, and my finally being able to put to words what it is, exactly, that I can’t stand about it: it’s basically a rebranding of arthouse horror cinema, but slathered in money and metaphor to hide the fact that most of these movies aren’t meaningfully “smarter” than other horror movies.
Suspiria 2018 attempts to draw connections between the political upheavals of 1970s Germany and the long reach of the Holocaust with the goings-on at the dance company and the competing factions of witches who run it. But these connections are superficial at best. “Elevated horror” wants so badly to be meaningful, so badly to have something to say, but the men — and it’s almost always men — who make these movies are aware that they cannot bridge the gap between what their movie is and what they want it to be, and so they play a sleight of hand, because they know that making the movie 150 minutes long and sucking all the color out of it will attract evangelists to explain the metaphors for them.
One of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen of the last two decades is The Empty Man. It’s a profoundly uncomfortable film that touches on a number of topics ranging from the nature of identity (a favorite subject of mine) to the subtly destructive nature of urban legends (and, indirectly, suicide-contagion) to the way highly corporatized cults like Scientology or NXIVM exist as a microcosm of what reactionaries might call the “Deep State” — the complicated webwork of formal and informal structures that perpetuate an abusive system. It was done absolutely dirty, first by 20th Century Fox and then by Disney (which cared so little about the project that it did not update the opening logo to 20th Century Studios.) Severely under-promoted, and criminally misrepresented in the trailer as another weak Slenderman-style teen horror movie, it was a box office flop, an ignominious fate for an imperfect, yet terrific, horror-noir. But it wasn’t directed by Ari Aster or Robert Eggers so it’s been forgotten by the type of movie nerds who jerk off over Ari Aster or Robert Eggers.
This then is the real sin of the “elevated” label: it’s arbitrary. It’s not a real subgenre of horror, only a gimmick, a virtue signal for lack of a better term. By its very name it’s implying that other horror movies are lesser. In so doing, it exposes the obvious purpose of the label as a marketing buzzword, intended to absolve critics — who want to be seen as intelligent — from the sin of liking “genre” film.
Now, to be clear, this isn’t to say that every “elevated” horror film is bad, overly long or needlessly desaturated. After all, they’re not all Suspiria 2018. I namedropped Robert Eggers earlier in a fairly derogatory context, but I like his movies. My issue is with the label, and the movement it represents. As a movement, it is the kind of people who paid for Twitter (or Medium, let’s be real here) reacting against movies they don’t like and retroactively inventing a pseudo-genre consisting solely of the movies they do like to justify their personal biases. They don’t believe that horror as a genre is valid or capable of being meaningful, but that it’s inherently lowbrow, and must be “elevated” — there’s the buzzword — by throwing in a lot of overwrought metaphors for trauma. As if all the characters not being thoroughly immiserated by each other strips the film of “meaning.” As if horror can never be allowed to exist in and as itself.
These people don’t give a shit about horror as art. They just want to seem smarter than you.
-june❤
