The Emperor’s New Fear: Why Elevated Horror Is a Dead End
When Grief Becomes Genre: The Exhaustion of Elevated Horror
A Genre That Apologises for Itself
Elevated horror is a term that should make any serious viewer wince. It implies that horror, left to its own devices, is something inherently unworthy, something that must be refined, rebranded, or disguised to deserve cultural legitimacy. It’s not just a descriptor; it’s a moral judgment.
Critics use it to describe films like The Babadook, Hereditary, and The Witch, works that, allegedly, “transcend” the horror genre by addressing trauma, grief, and familial decay. David Sims of The Atlantic called The Babadook “an emotionally resonant masterpiece about grief,” not a horror film, but “a film that uses horror.”
And that’s precisely the issue: these films aren’t allowed to be horror. They must use it, contain it, elevate it. But horror doesn’t need elevation. It needs liberation.
What “Elevated” Really Means
When critics label something elevated horror, they mean it has a “respectable” aesthetic: slow pacing, formal restraint, metaphors for psychological states, and a conspicuous avoidance of jump scares or bodily gore. These are horror films trying very hard not to be horror films.
Consider Hereditary, hailed by The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw as “a new high watermark for horror.” It opens with a familial tragedy and ends in a satanic cult, but every act of dread is filtered through heavy symbolism. Grief becomes architecture. Possession becomes psychosis. The devil becomes allegory.
Ari Aster himself described Midsommar as “a breakup film dressed as horror.” But that’s the problem. Horror shouldn’t dress up as anything. It should undress us.
Metaphors Aren’t Scary
In elevated horror, the monster is never just a monster. It’s a metaphor. The demon in The Babadook is grief. The decay in Relic is dementia. The cult in Midsommar is emotional co-dependency. Every horror element must be interpreted, explained, and ultimately defused.
But as Julia Kristeva warns in Powers of Horror, metaphor can be a form of “purification”, a way of symbolically containing what is otherwise abject. In these films, horror is allowed only when it can be translated into something tasteful. And that translation kills it.
Slavoj Žžek argues that real trauma “resists symbolisation.” True horror lies in what cannot be understood, in what cannot be spoken or healed. Metaphors are tidy. The unconscious is not.
The Uncanny Is Missing
Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche (“The Uncanny”) describes horror not as spectacle but as the return of the repressed. It’s not what’s new that terrifies us, it’s what should have stayed buried. Yet elevated horror films often mistake ambiguity for eeriness, and grief for fear.
The Witch, for example, is beautifully shot and thematically rich. But its horror is so buried beneath religious allegory and historical detail that it rarely manages to disturb. The uncanny becomes distant. Fear becomes folklore.
True horror destabilises. It doesn’t ask to be interpreted. It refuses resolution. Elevated horror, in contrast, insists on being “about something,” as if that were a virtue rather than a retreat.
The Aesthetic of Suffering
Elevated horror often indulges in what can only be described as tastefully staged pain. Lingering shots of mourning, slow zooms into trauma, a muted colour palette, and a sense of detached misery. It’s horror curated for a film festival audience. It’s haute horreur.
These aesthetics distance the audience. Rather than implicating us in the horror, it asks us to observe it like a gallery piece. It turns pain into performance. It’s cinematic grief porn.
Barbara Creed’s concept of “the abject”, that which transgresses boundaries, particularly of the body, is vital here. The horror classics she analysed, from Alien to Carrie, engage the abject directly. They disrupt, disgust, and disorder. Elevated horror avoids abjection. It aestheticises the edge.
Sanitised Terror and Emotional Gatekeeping
Publications like IndieWire praise elevated horror for being “emotionally mature,” a term that subtly insults the rest of the genre. Films like Barbarian or Malignant are often dismissed as “schlock,” “gimmicky,” or “low,” despite their subversive energy and formal inventiveness.
This moral hierarchy flattens the genre. It implies that slow equals smart, and that gore equals stupidity. It’s a critical gatekeeping of sorts that has more to do with taste culture than with quality.
In doing so, it erases horror’s lineage: working-class horror, exploitation cinema, body horror, camp. All the messy, loud, vulgar, and powerful elements of horror are marked as lesser.
Camp Horror and the Politics of Taste
Elevated horror also suppresses horror’s camp lineage. There is no space in this world for Jennifer’s Body, Sleepaway Camp, or The Hunger. These films are messy, excessive, performative. They embrace horror’s theatricality. They let the monster dance.
Elevated horror, by contrast, is terrified of joy. It’s horror without kink. Horror without fun. It flattens camp into theme, removes sexuality from the equation, and replaces danger with decorum.
Horror has always been a genre of the Other. To make it palatable is to make it safe. To make it safe is to kill it.
Horror Doesn’t Need a Thesis
Horror doesn’t need to be about trauma to matter. It doesn’t need to explain its ghosts, or provide catharsis, or guide us gently through grief. Sometimes, the best horror leaves you stranded.
Think of The Thing, where the ending is unresolved and terrifying. Think of The Fly, where the body mutates beyond metaphor. Think of Possession, where language breaks down and the Real erupts. These films don’t tell you what they’re about. They possess you.
As Lacan defines it, the Real is that which cannot be symbolised, named, or integrated into language, it erupts where meaning fails, which is precisely why horror, when it’s at its most potent, bypasses metaphor and confronts us with the unbearable directly.
What Comes After Elevated Horror
Fortunately, horror is already mutating again. We are entering a post-elevated era that rejects metaphor and embraces sensation. Trends worth noting:
Analogue Horror (Skinamarink, The Backrooms): lo-fi, surreal, dread-heavy films that resist interpretation.
Femgore (Titane, The Substance): raw, violent, bodily films that explore female monstrosity without apology.
Elevator Pitch Horror (Talk to Me, Smile, Barbarian): bold, high-concept horror that trusts its premise, not its metaphor.
These films aren’t trying to be respectable. They’re trying to be unforgettable. And that’s what horror should be.
Horror Isn’t a Climb, It’s a Descent
The term “elevated horror” doesn’t describe a genre, it describes an evasion. It’s horror that’s afraid of its own shadow. Horror that wants to be taken seriously, but not too seriously. Horror that doesn’t want to get its hands dirty.
But horror should be filthy. It should transgress. It should make you laugh inappropriately, squirm in your seat, and feel something in your stomach you can’t name. That’s what horror does when it’s not being polite.
We don’t need elevated horror.
We need horror that descends.
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References
Freud, S. (1919). “The Uncanny.”
Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
Žžek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Verso.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.
Creed, B. (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
Clover, C. J. (1992). Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Princeton University Press.
Sims, D. (2014). “The Babadook: The Year’s Best Horror Film is About Grief.” The Atlantic.
Bradshaw, P. (2018). “Hereditary review.” The Guardian.
IndieWire (2019). “The Rise of Slow-Burn Horror and the Maturation of the Genre.”
Wired (2022). “The Return of Schlock Horror.”
The Times (2025). “Femgore: The Horror Trend That Refuses to Be Palatable.”