In a Guardian piece, a so called ‘hot take’, on “How post-horror movies are taking over cinema” (2017), author Steve Rose asserts that what he dubs “new post-horror cinema”, which comprises films such as It Comes at Night (2017) and The Witch (2015), The Neon Demon (2016), Personal Shopper (2016) and Get Out (2017), are redefining the horror genre, “replacing jump-scares with existential dread.” What all these films of a so-called “post-horror” seem to have in common is that the spectator can never be sure where the horror is actually coming from: “What happens when you stray beyond those cast-iron conventions and wander off into the darkness? You might find something even scarier. You might find something that is not scary at all.” Rose claims that post-horror films all find horror in an “elsewhere,” in unusual places that stretch and extend the boundaries of the genre itself. While I would agree with Rose that the boundaries of horror’s genre conventions have again be shifting, I find it problematic to define the entire genre up to the last five years as trapped in “cast-iron conventions” that a new form of horror, a seemingly more “politically, socially and intellectually attentive” form could save the genre from its own ghosts. Rather, I would suggest here that a more comprehensive inquiry into what has been called “post-horror” or “horror renaissance” is necessary and will locate a new realism in contemporary horror that very much situates itself in relation to the genre’s rich creative history, but, instead of in “unusual places,” finds its horror in a social, political and cultural landscape of the 21st century.
About the presenterTanja Beljanski
PhD student in English at the University of Rochester