Elevated horror: how films like Midsommar, The Lighthouse and Doctor Sleep are bringing new thrills to the genre

Offering more than simple scares and overused tropes, highly original ‘elevated horror’ films have been among the best of the last few years

The films often give the opportunity to cover wider themes and are an enticing alternative in a mainstream culture dominated by superhero movies

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Octavia Spencer as Sue Ann in a still from Ma, released in Hong Kong this week, which its director Tate Taylor calls a “cautionary tale” about social interaction and responsibility.

Published: 10:00pm, 17 Jul 2019Updated: 3:50pm, 18 Jul 2019

It’s a phrase that irritates some purists, but “elevated horror” has become a buzz word in Hollywood circles in recent years. Films like The Witch, A Quiet Place , Hereditary , Get Out and It Follows , which feature more than simply nerve-shredding scares, could all fall under this umbrella term. Movies like those found in the Saw franchise – inventive though they are – don’t fall into this category.

While so many formulaic horror movies follow simple tropes, “elevated horror” shows it doesn’t have to be all oversexed teenagers becoming sacrificial lambs to the slaughter. David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, for example, took that overused theme to conjure a thematically rich script packed with metaphor – from victimhood to rape survival – featuring a shape-shifting creature relentlessly pursuing its victims after he or she has sex.

Get Out, which won an Oscar for writer-director Jordan Peele and grossed US$255 million worldwide, explored racial tension in America using social satire, with the film focusing on a young African-American man’s visit to his white girlfriend’s “liberal” parents. Films like Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967) were cited by critics as inspiration for Get Out as it ploughed into traditions of American gothic horror. Peele’s follow-up Us was equally loaded, a story of doppelgängers that reads as a study of America’s fear of outsiders.

This week, Tate Taylor’s Ma hits cinemas in Hong Kong. Octavia Spencer plays Sue Anne, a lonely middle-aged woman whose friendship with a group of teenagers turns towards psychopathic obsession. As Taylor recently stated, the film is a “cautionary tale” about social interaction and responsibility: “[It’s about] what happens when you aren’t kind to people, when you do things to people while their brain is still developing. It can have horrible consequences.”

Originally scripted for a white actress, Spencer’s casting is yet another groundbreaker that goes hand in hand with elevated horror films, which not only want to push the boundaries of horror but of the industry itself. (It’s no surprise to learn that the film is produced by Jason Blum at Blumhouse, the company responsible for Get Out and The Purge, the latter of which pursues incendiary themes of class tension in its story of a near-future America where, for one night a year, all crime is consequence-free.)