‘Elevated horror’ gets a bad reputation – but the era is easier to identify now it’s definitively ended with such films as The Monkey.
Hot off the critical success of his Silence-Of-The-Lambs-ish serial killer thriller, Longlegs, you could be surprised to find the next film Osgood Perkins’ name appears next to on a marquee is very, very silly.
The Monkey, which arrived in UK cinemas last week, shares a name and a simian mascot with the Stephen King source text. It even shares a certain amount of the author’s nihilistic wink-wink sense of humour. But where even King’s goofiest tales usually possess some amount of sinister melodrama, Perkins mines the “toy monkey that makes random people explode in gnarly ways” premise for damn-near every laugh it’s worth.
Theo James plays two comically opposed twins – one so terrified of a toy monkey he refuses to maintain any long-lasting relationships, the other so mean-spirited he only ever addresses his brother with an expletive. The local cheer squad arrive via school bus to celebrate every increasingly gory kill. The troubled teen down the road has an emo fringe long enough to cover his eyes and looks about 25 (probably because he is – actor Rohan Campbell was born in 1997).
The result is less straight-up horror and more Final Destination directed by Ethan Coen. The Monkey is a borderline-Jerry Zucker-esque comedy stuffed with the accoutrements of the horror genre (creepy childhood toys, displaced entrails, sharp objects) but few of the scares – and it’s far from alone. Whether it’s the brightly coloured killer mascots of Five Nights At Freddy’s, the roller coaster plot of Barbarian or the self-aware silliness of M3GAN, the genre is proving increasingly willing to leave real fear at the door if it gets in the way of a good time.
But the goofy horror trend doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In more ways than one, it feels like a reaction to what’s come before – not just a global pandemic and a deteriorating political climate, but every horror fan’s favourite source of rage: “elevated horror”. And while the term has attracted plenty of ire over the years, it’s undeniable that breakout horror today looks very different to the stuff of the late-2010s.
Creepy kids and kidney stones
Despite never finding much purchase in its native Australia, The Babadook has done pretty well in the decade since its release. An uncanny dissection of a mother’s intrusive thoughts around her demanding child, its horror is less the sudden shock of a cattle prod and more the gradual build-up of a kidney stone – slowly at first, then all at once.
For a generation raised on the more mainstream “quiet-quiet-BANG” horror cinema, The Babadook felt like something entirely new, and not completely welcome.
“We’ve had this film marketed in some countries to teenagers – young teens,” director Jennifer Kent once told Film Stories website editor Ryan Lambie in 2014. “They are expecting the crappy horror experience. And they can feel ripped off by this film, because it’s more gentle than that. It’s more subtle, and more psychological. It’s a crossover film, I guess.”
Faring well as a Sundance breakout internationally, The Babadook went on to earn a respectable $10.5m from a $2m budget. The industry reaction, though, was ecstatic. The Exorcist director William Freidkin compared it to Psycho, Alien and Diabolique. RogerEbert.com named it the best horror film of the century. The genre, everyone realised with a start, could be more than a series of nuns stood in increasingly dark corners.
Another Sundance hit, Robert Eggers’ The Witch, was picked up by A24 in 2015. Having dipped its toe into auteur genre fare with the likes of Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, the US distributor had yet to garner its reputation as the “cool horror” studio it’s known as today. Like Kent’s film, the New England cautionary tale eschews jump scares and creepy clergymen in favour of a bunch of miserable people in terrifyingly over their heads.
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Like The Babadook, reactions were positively hyperbolic, and the film made its $4m budget back ten times over. A24, now with a Best Picture Oscar (Moonlight) under its belt, doubled down with its courting of a fresh-faced Ari Aster; his first two feature films for the studio, Hereditary and Midsommar, became some of its biggest hits. Over at Universal, meanwhile, Get Out joined an elite rank of genre films to be nominated for an Oscar.
In hindsight, it might seem odd to generalise an entire cinematic movement after just four or five films, but by the end of 2019 these flicks had come to define an entire decade in film writing. In its year-in-review, Vanity Fair called the 2010s “the decade horror got elevated”, with Anya Taylor-Joy and Toni Collette taking pride-of-place on its featured image, despite the period’s biggest financial hits (It, A Quiet Place, The Nun) occupying a different tone entirely.
Still, discussions about the state of horror cinema were more positive than they’d been in years. Denigrations of what Kent had called the “crappy horror experience” were becoming more and more common. Finally, it seemed, “art horror” movies were going mainstream – audiences more accustomed to a lingering chill than the sudden shocks they’d been subjected to earlier in the decade. Obviously, it couldn’t last.
Premises and promises
With cinemas shuttered for a well-documented reason, the absence of high-concept, think-y horror movies was the least of anyone’s concerns. The biggest (some might say the only) horror hit to come out of the pandemic was Rob Savage’s Host – a video call chiller which owes far more to found-footage icons The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity than the critical darlings of the previous five years. Where the likes of Hereditary and Get Out are films that prove difficult to sum up in less than a paragraph, here was a return to something cinema more widely had largely surrendered to TV – the premise movie.
The genius of Host is one it’s easy to communicate in an elevator. A group of actors on a Zoom call, screaming as their lamps keep malfunctioning and furniture is thrown around their heads, is a brand of horror which felt immediate and visceral to a population then spending up to eight hours a day on one piece of video conferencing software or another. In a way, it feels like horror going back to its more mainstream roots – one simple idea escalated to the height of its powers.
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But even as social distancing restrictions lifted and actors were allowed back in the same rooms, horror cinema in its own way unintentionally began looking more like Host than the kind of thing previously dominating cultural conversation. 2022’s Smile, despite plenty of tonal similarities to the A24-adjascent horror subgenre, relies more on its simple visual premise (creepy smiling people) than the themes bubbling beneath. The likes of Barbarian (AirBnB horror) and to a lesser extent Talk To Me (mummified hand lets you talk to the dead – probably the closest we’ve had to an ‘elevated horror’ flick since 2020) feel more similar to pre-Babadook terrors than post-.
While Barbarian spends most of its runtime with its tongue firmly in its cheek, for the most part this new era of premise horror was still very sensible. The difference compared to the second half of the 2010s wasn’t so much in the volume of terror, but its source. Where Aster and Eggers seemed more comfortable mining fear from theme and tone than a singular terrifying idea, now filmmakers were delivering spooks from more familiar angles. Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, meanwhile, came and went with a splash which sounded a lot like a bellyflop.
Something completely different
But parallel to this straight-faced fare, something very different has started to emerge. On the surface, Elizabeth Bank’s Cocaine Bear shares plenty of features with the films mentioned above. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more succinct example of a premise movie if you tried – I’m not sure anyone who went to see the carnivore comedy-slasher in cinemas was particularly surprised by the result.
If the slasher genre in general has spent the last decade in hibernation, the last couple of years have seen it make a triumphant return – with a frequently goofy twist. The revival of the Scream franchise and the films of Christopher Landon and Radio Silence take a wry approach to what was for many years the definitive brand of horror cinema, but had more-or-less fallen out of fashion by the turn of the millennium.
Now, it’s arguable that the self-aware slasher is once again the dominant form of horror on the big screen. In the likes of M3GAN and The Monkey, inspiring genuine fear is a comfortable way down the priority list, behind quippy dialogue, ludicrous amounts of gore and poking fun at genre convention. It its own way, it’s a change that doesn’t feel a million miles from the house style of an emerging Marvel Studios – popcorn-friendly, largely uncontroversial, and unafraid to wink at the audience. We’re returning more to Nightmare On Elm Street 4 – which sees Freddy using his knife-glove like a shark fin and wearing shades on the beach – than the original Nightmare On Elm Street.
Plenty of horror flicks coming out right now don’t fit into this category, of course. Last year’s Immaculate boasted one of the boldest endings to a mainstream horror film in years, and Nosferatu, if anything, has been criticised for taking itself a little too seriously. But if we’re looking for trends like the “elevated horror” one, our 2020s equivalent is more likely to aim for a laugh than a scream. That’s no bad thing, really – it’s just different.
More than any other genre, perhaps, horror has a tendency to evolve with the times. It seems what the times want now is just a bit of fun – it’s hard to hold that against them.
The Monkey is in UK cinemas now.
