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.) If anything, the scary movie offers the perfect cover to smuggle across wider themes. “What I love about the horror genre is that you can take personal material and push it through a filter and then it becomes something else. It becomes a work of invention,” says director Ari Aster. His harrowing debut hit Hereditary (2018), which took US$79 million globally, was as intense as it was intellectual, a tale of demonic possession wrapped inside a family tragedy. His second movie Midsommar just debuted in America to rave reviews. Like its predecessor, it explores the devastating impact of grief – in this case it is of Florence Pugh’s character Dani, who is torn apart after the horrifying deaths of her family. The influence may clearly be The Wicker Man as Dani heads to a Swedish summer solstice celebration with her lover and friends, but as The Wall Street Journal trumpeted, “there’s nothing else like it at the movies”. It seems no coincidence that among the best-reviewed movies of the past couple of years has been this crop of sophisticated, intellectually robust and highly original horror movies. With so many of these films coming from directors fresh out of the blocks, horror has proved the ideal strategic choice with which to kick-start a career. Able to be made cheaply, without need for expensive computer-generated effects, the films are a seemingly safe bet for studios. Robert Eggers, the director of 2015’s The Witch and this year’s Cannes sensation The Lighthouse , remembers what it was like for him before he made The Witch . “I had tried to get a lot of other scripts produced before this and they were too weird and genre-less. [So I thought,] ‘I need to make something that’s in an identifiable genre if I’m going to get a film financed, so what is something I can do that I’m not going to be compromising my values and who I am and so forth?’” When it came to The Witch , a supernatural tale set in 17th-century New England, the US region he is from, Eggers dubbed it “a Puritan’s nightmare” story. “It’s horror for sure. But it’s a great folk tale, a fairy tale. My goal was to make something archetypal and morally ambiguous … [like] pre-Victorian-ised, pre-Disney-ised fairy tales that survived time. They’re ambiguous and they’re scary and they’re hard to wrap your head around but they feel right, damn it!” The same can be said for The Lighthouse , the story of an early-20th-century lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) and his assistant (Robert Pattinson) on an isolated island who gradually slide towards madness. Shot in black-and-white Academy ratio (1.375:1) – such formally daring techniques are typical among these rising-star directors – the film immerses viewers in antiquated maritime language to the point where it feels like you’ve just swallowed Moby Dick . This rise in elevated horror has come partly from a profound disappointment in a genre that has so much potential. The horror movie has so often been synonymous with exploitation flicks cranked out to satisfy the bloodlust of the midnight movie circuit. “So many of them are so cynically produced, they’re guilty until proven innocent,” Aster says. Moreover, in a mainstream culture dominated by superhero movies, these offer an alternative where the world is less certain, more unsettlingly complex. Audiences are keen, too: actor John Krasinski’s directorial debut A Quiet Place , a smartly engineered post-apocalyptic monster movie that plays out (almost) in silence, took a staggering US$340 million at the box office. Ironically, the genre has always attracted directors of the highest order – whether it’s Roman Polanski ( Rosemary’s Baby ), William Friedkin ( The Exorcist ) or Stanley Kubrick ( The Shining ). In the latter case, Kubrick’s iconic film is the ultimate in elevated horror. Based on Stephen King’s novel about a writer who gradually loses his sanity while caretaking at a remote snowbound hotel, it generated acres of conspiracy theories about its hidden meanings. Now, almost 40 years on from the film’s 1980 release, US director Mike Flanagan has been tasked with following it up. Doctor Sleep (adapted from King’s 2013 sequel novel) follows the character of Danny Torrance – just a boy in The Shining – during his adult years. The film stars Ewan McGregor as Torrance and expectations are high – not just from the legions of Kubrick and King fans, but also those who loved Flanagan’s Netflix drama The Haunting of Hill House . Arriving after the recent Pet Sematary and the forthcoming It: Chapter Two – proving this really is the year of King at the cinema – Doctor Sleep will deal with Torrance unable to escape the ghosts of his past, with themes including “childhood trauma … addiction, the breakdown of a family”, Flanagan says. It’s a mouth-watering prospect. It may just offer further proof that the horror movie is the most fertile ground in cinema right now. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook