This is not an idle question for a working movie critic who — shh, don’t let this get around — doesn’t really enjoy horror movies. I know, I know: As a consumer guide and cultural commentator on the things we watch, I’m supposed to be open to and appreciative of all genres of filmed narrative. A critic has to be knowledgeable about the entirety of his or her field — has to be able to distinguish not only between good art and bad art but good and bad schlock and everything in between. In theory and mostly in practice, I do. But, man, have my nerves been taking a pounding lately.
The cinema is deep into a horror renaissance that’s been going on for the better part of a decade, the latest entries including films like Ti West’s “MaXXXine” and Osgood Perkins’s “Longlegs.” Each week brings new frightmares; the genre has dedicated streaming channels such as Shudder (11.5 million subscribers and counting), endless devoted websites and packed horror conventions. The hallmarks of the current cycle are young, imaginative directors — many of them women — a stress on atmosphere and ambiguity, an interest in social metaphors and metafictions, pop culture artifacts used as a delivery method of unease, the internet as a haunted limbo, retro formalism, mysterious cults, Gen-Z disillusionment and a particular attention to body horror and the potential mutations and/or mutilations of the flesh.
Whee.
Almost all these elements have been present in filmed horror from the very beginning, of course, just in different concentrations and emphases. Silent expressionism gave way to the monster movies of the 1930s and ’40s, which gave way to the fears of nuclear and personal obliteration in the ’50s, and so on. Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) can be seen as the movie that broke horror and, indeed, film history in half by being the first to not only (seem to) show murder realistically — inaugurating the slasher film as we still know it — but to consciously toy with the audience as an act of consensual gamesmanship. You don’t watch “Psycho,” you surrender to it, and every horror film made since works in its shadow.
I didn’t get around to seeing “Psycho” until college in the 1970s, and by then the movie had so fully entered the pop-culture lexicon that I was already familiar with every scene. But that period was also when I walked out of a screening of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974) in a cold sweat of panic — one of the very few times I’ve ever bailed — before what I was sure was a coming deluge of carnage. (I was wrong, as I found out in a rewatch years later: “Massacre” is surprisingly ungory, relying more on suspense, set decoration, sound and makeup to sustain its aura of human butchery.)
But gritting one’s teeth and sticking it out became a point of pride as films got bloodier, freakier, scarier; part of the “fun” was steeling yourself for the jump scares. (Unless you didn’t; I still remember a college girlfriend who had to be bodily carried to the car, traumatized and sobbing, after the final gotcha shot of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie.”) When a horror movie came along that was touted as a must-see — “The Exorcist” or “The Silence of the Lambs” or “Scream” — all of us weenies had to decide whether to gird our psyches and go.
It got more interesting when I started getting paid to go.
I came of age as a professional reviewer during the 1980s and ’90s, a time of retrenchment into the bloody catechisms of the post-“Halloween” slasher film as well as an exploration of new boundaries of transgression. This is where I learned what kind of horror movies bored me or just grossed me out and which engaged me on a more primal, technical or artistic level. I came to despise the teen dice-and-slice subgenre of “Friday the 13th” et al. as pure product, a cash cow for a numbed generation desperate to feel something. I also learned that I had a taste for horror when it had a sense of humor about itself, especially when that humor went way over the top. Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator” (1985) is still one of the funniest and most memorable movies I’ve ever seen — pretty remarkable given that it ends with the villain being strangled by his own reanimated intestines.
This is what has kept my hair from turning white over 40 years of writing reviews: an antenna for and appreciation of when a horror movie has something else going on beyond merely separating characters from their limbs and moviegoers from their money. An idea, for lack of a better word, or at least a healthy sense of absurdity. My list of favorite gonzo horror comedies is long and includes the Evil Dead movies, “Zombieland” (2009), “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil” (2010) and “The Cabin in the Woods” (2011).
New filmmakers using the form to explore issues like racism (“Get Out,” 2017), STDs and sexual anxieties (“It Follows,” 2014), family dysfunction (“Hereditary,” 2018), gender dysphoria (“I Saw the TV Glow,” 2024) and religious fundamentalism (“Saint Maud,” 2019) — fine, bring ’em on. Genre fiction has always been a vehicle for social criticism disguised as horror, melodrama, science fiction or westerns, and it’s where ambitious young artists have traditionally learned their trade. And when a director really plugs into an existential sense of doom, it can carry more power than all the latest digital gore effects. Julia Ducournau’s “Raw” (2016), a tale of incestuous sisterly cannibalism, is an impossible movie to shake because it taps into such deeply powerful taboos about family rivalries and loves. (And, yes, because it gives new meaning to the word “ladyfingers.”)
West’s much-praised trilogy of “X” (2022), “Pearl” (2022) and “MaXXXine” (2024) plays with the styles of earlier horror movies — specifically the grainy sleaze of “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and other ’70s films in “X” — while Mia Goth’s tough-skinned heroines upend the cliché of the virginal “final girl” who survives the mayhem. Perkins’s “Longlegs” continues the tradition of demonic murderers out there somewhere between urban legend, the online netherscape and reality, and adds a truly disturbing Nicolas Cage performance like a rotten cherry on top. These are filmmakers who aspire not to raise horror to the level of the “culturally respectable” but to double down on craft and impact and imagination until the genre’s virtues can’t be denied.
By contrast, it’s the films that are primarily about how much pain can be inflicted on a person while we watch — where the act, not the dread of the act, is paramount — that I find as enjoyable as a trip to the dentist. The Saw movies, as intricately constructed as they may be, are essentially torture devices for an audience’s delectation. The gleeful carnage of Eli Roth’s “Hostel” (2005) and “The Green Inferno” (2013) is, to me, offensive. The demonic possessions of the Insidious franchise and the haunted houses and dolls of “The Conjuring” and its spinoffs — meh. I get more scared reading the daily headlines.
But that’s part of what horror movies are for, at least to the millions who respond to them. The real world is terrifying enough for many if not most people, and a large part of the fear is our powerlessness and lack of control. A horror movie lets us feel, viscerally process and resolve those anxieties, and then go out for drinks afterward. Horror also allows for socially acceptable date-clutching — a time-honored tradition — and a reminder that, while everyone in the movie may be dead, we’re still alive. It lets us fantasize about our own death, in fact, without actually dying. On a darker note, it can indulge the human tendency to rubberneck, and, for some, it caters to and satisfies an innate taste for sadism.
Which is, at rock bottom, why I still have an inherent dislike of the form, even as I’ve learned to appreciate the more interesting or ambitious entries as part of growing a thicker critical skin. I simply don’t enjoy watching other people’s physical pain, especially when it serves as a movie’s primary reason for being. Does that make me a wuss? Sure, why not. But people who feel the suffering of on-screen characters could also be called empaths.
I have yet to be convinced that’s a bad thing.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
