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Get Out, Hereditary, The Witch, Us, Midsommar - what do they have in common?
Eschewing traditional horror troupes, they all share the common trait of the psychological horror style and they are all directed by new and emerging directors.
Get Out and Us are directed by Jordan Peele. The Witch is directed by Robert Eggers. Hereditary and Midsommar are directed by Ari Aster.
All of them are critically acclaimed, with some critics even claiming that we are in a new era of horror.
These horror filmmakers stand apart from horror filmmakers such as James Wan or Wes Craven.
Wan and Craven's horror movies - Insidious, The Conjuring, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream - belong to the more traditional mould of horror.
Traditional horror films employ devices such as clearly defined villains (Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, Sadako Yamamura), jump scares, frantic editing, claustrophobic compositions before revealing the monster lying just outside of the frame, and at the end of the movie, the narrative is unambiguously resolved.
Whereas the kind of horror that these new filmmakers are making are generally more formalist, slow-burn, character-driven, atmospheric, and ambiguous. They are usually inspired by arthouse cinema than by mainstream films. These filmmakers would more readily cite Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick than John Carpenter or George Romero.
In
an interview for the Verge, Aster explains “You have two camps. One is horror films that are essentially roller-coaster rides, that are there to just give people a series of jolts, and then let them go home and get on with their life. Then there are others that are maybe more existential in nature and are really trying to play with very serious fears and engaging with them on a serious level."