Back in March, my friends and I shut my living room curtains, switched off the lights and sat down to watch Ari Aster’s infamous Hereditary. Disturbingly creative body horror and a harrowingly captivating performance from Toni Collette as main character Annie seemed to promise that we’d be swiftly recommending the film to everyone we knew. Then we got to the ending.
I’m picky with horror movies. I’ve watched a fair few, and I dislike most of these. In many cases, shock value and jump scares are prioritised over storylines that could actually invoke terror, or any emotion other than momentary panic. And while the enjoyment in watching a slasher with a group of friends and laughing at each others’ screams can’t be denied, there often doesn’t seem to be much space left for those of us who want to see actual psychological horror. The incredible thing about film as a medium is how sound, visuals, motifs etc. can be crafted together to produce genuine emotion in a viewer. To see so many movies trying, and, at least in my opinion, failing to produce genuine fear is something I’ve often found disappointing.
Hereditary is, perhaps objectively, a good horror film. It has an unsettling premise, and doesn’t overuse aspects like jump scares or shocking gore. But what let me down was the twist – vague spoilers ahead! – that the evil of the film was a supernatural entity. What I found so fascinating about Hereditary to begin with was the keen focus on the relationship between Annie and her recently deceased mother, and how the complexities of that bond were in turn felt by Annie’s children. What I had hoped was that the supernatural occurrences would have turned out to be manifestations of Annie’s fear that she had failed her children in the same way her mother failed her. I wanted the film to utilise the conventions of the horror genre to viscerally portray the terror of a mother fearing she could never be enough for her kids. I wanted the grandiose reveal to be that there is nothing scarier than real life.
It’s understandable that a lot of people prefer films about ghosts or serial killers because it provides a layer of separation between the suffering of the characters and the viewer safe at home. And yet I still can’t help but yearn for more films that strive to use the genre’s conventions to comment on more relatable, everyday terrors, and portray the emotional experience of them in abstracted and enlarged ways. That being said, here are some horror films that did manage to take my fancy, for your (probably less picky) viewing pleasure this Halloween!
Unlike the somewhat underwhelming Netflix hit Bird Box, John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place takes a similar concept and crafts an intense and intimate experience of a family’s survival in a world where making a sound will get you killed. The notion of taking an instinctual human sense like sight or sound and making it deadly is something that, done right, pairs incredibly well with the technical aspects of filmmaking. A Quiet Place’s use of sound – and the lack of it – is masterful and creates an incredible atmosphere. I was able to see A Quiet Place 2 at the cinema in 2021, and its soundscape is brilliantly pervasive; I was often holding my own breath alongside the characters. Films like these make the cinema a truly immersive experience. A Quiet Place also reveals its monster within the first fifteen minutes of its runtime, dedicating its energy instead to the intricacies of the familial bonds between the characters. This makes for a film that has so much heart, and is able to break hearts with equal force. The franchise’s prequel, A Quiet Place: Day One, released in June this year.
The 2017 and 2019 adaptations of Stephen King’s It similarly utilise the horror genre to tell a relatable coming-of-age story with wonderful characters at its centre. If you’re a fan of the films (or the whopping 1100 page long book!), I’d also recommend the 1990 miniseries; Tim Curry’s Pennywise is, in my opinion, the more disturbing of the two due to his much more human-like appearance.
Space horror is a guilty pleasure of mine, and no one does space horror like the Alien franchise. The classic ‘loveable cast of characters gets killed one by one by an extra-terrestrial being’ will never get old to me, but Alien takes it a step further by incorporating philosophical and commercial evils into its universe. The 2012 prequel Prometheus is one of my favourite sci-fi/horror movies to date, and I eagerly await an opportunity to watch the recently released Alien: Romulus.
Honourable mention goes to Scott Derrickson’s Sinister, because while it doesn’t particularly adhere to my personal criteria of utilising the horror genre in a unique way, it is one of the best uses of the classic horror tropes and conventions I’ve encountered. My parents watched it one night, and, in my mum’s words, they ‘took it to work with them’ the next day. If that doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will; who doesn’t want to spend a day of lectures plagued by murdered children and the horrifying supernatural potential of true crime?
I hope you can find something worthy of a spooky season movie night this October, whether it’s watching Hereditary to see what all the fuss is about, or spending the runtime of The Blair Witch Project hiding behind cushions with your housemates. Even ‘bad’ horror can be fun with the right company, which makes it a genre always worth looking out for.
Image by Humberto Guzman on Pexels