Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation By: David Church

Author: David Church

Horror’s longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed ‘elevated horror’ and ‘post-horror,’ films such as The Babadook , It Follows , The Witch , It Comes at Night , Get Out , The Invitation , Hereditary , Midsommar , A Ghost Story , and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema.