|Abraham Teuber|
The VVitch plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, October 2, through Sunday, October 4. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Have horror movies always been so romantic? As predictable as the changing leaves, the dating app normies whip out the ol’ “Let’s cuddle and watch a horror movie” line every October. The hulking recliners in chain multiplexes have enabled the canoodling. Raisable armrests and blankets let sweethearts clutch more than just a tub of popcorn during jumpscares, neglecting any substance the film might offer in favor of exploiting its ambience.
For me, the horror genre has always been a social domain. In the fall of 2009, a Redbox in the McDonald’s lobby spit out a mild gateway drug to me and my best friend: Coraline. We watched it in his basement during a sleepover, eager fourth graders instantly hooked on its creepiness.
The selection of a horror film became a grounding ritual for our weekend rendezvous, growing more gruesome and inappropriate with each pick. At home, we delighted in the ceremony of shutting off the lights, closing the curtains, and priming the environment for maximum scares. Sometimes, we biked to the local AMC for the PG-13 releases at our disposal. Mostly, these were middling but reliable Blumhouse titles like The Visit and the Insidious franchise.
As we got older, we grew more daring, browsing for something raunchier. The tone began to shift with David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, a vibey and dreamlike parable of a sexually transmitted demon. The movie transfixed us with more than just fright. On another chilly fall night, I huddled in a different basement to watch The Babadook, an unsettling meditation on the manifestation of grief into its titular monster (who we then gleefully meme-ified into a gay icon).
In both of these viewings, the credits were no longer a reprieve from a scary movie’s immersiveness. Instead, they allowed us to dive in even further, to pick apart the details and create an interpretation of misfortunes we’d just moments ago felt as our own. Horror became a bit headier, grounded more in conceptual anxieties than a bloody schtick.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out cemented this approach, prompting a parking lot conversation between my friends that lasted for hours. Peele delivered the horror of white supremacy with genius storytelling devices like Daniel Kaluuya’s descent into The Sunken Place and Allison Williams’s freakish cereal eating. I started to realize that movies could really say something, that these symbols were everywhere. In horror, though, choices get tethered to such immediate sensory thrills that their meaning often strikes you later, a satisfying afterthought during the debrief.
In 2018, looking for something to do on a Friday night in June, the group chat assembled for what we expected to be a standard entry to this tradition, distributed by the up-and-coming indie company A24: Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Instead of launching into analysis, we shuffled out of the theater in a petrified daze.
Hereditary stars Toni Collette as Annie, an artist struggling to hold her family together in the wake of her strange mother’s death. Its first act hits some classic beats, easing you into a familiar rhythm with shadowy figures in the corner, bizarre noises, and the vacant stare of Annie’s daughter Charlie. A third of the way in, though, the film takes a stunning risk that makes it a much more horrifying movie.
I won’t spoil it in detail, but a child dies in an extremely graphic and unexpected fashion. (Years later, this stunt was so memorable that the Las Culturistas Culture Award for “Scariest Moment in History” went to “Hereditary Lil Diva Head Come Off.”) The death sets the film’s anticipated arc completely askew, a Psycho-esque pivot from ambient spooks to the unrelenting and immediate pain of grief. We experience the family’s shock as our own, equally horrified by the paranormal forces preying on them and the cruel jabs they take at each other in their mourning.
While I also fell in love with Moonlight and Lady Bird that year, it was Hereditary that really made me realize something was going on with these A24 people. I dove into the distributor’s short back catalog to find what I’d missed, watching Robert Eggers’ similarly auteurish The Witch.
Anya Taylor-Joy accomplishes a star-making performance as Thomasin, the eldest daughter of a Puritan family banished from their community over accusations of sacrilegiousness. They struggle to sustain themselves in the bleak and barren fields of New England, due to their isolation and the intervention of sinister creatures in the woods.
The film’s strength is its simplicity. Many people first encounter horror through the archetype of the witch, a durable figure that can be PG-ed for kids or amped up for terrifying shock value. Its historical basis is rife with opportunity for race, gender, and religious analysis. Eggers’s film is a spare fable that doesn’t overdo any of these angles. It horrifies with the plainness of its imagery. Its witches perch on broomsticks with the same banality of a pilgrim daydreaming in a buggy.
Just as you start to settle into the slog of colonial life, The Witch pivots from a barnyard chore to startling gore. If you are snuggling up with your lover for a horror movie and that A24 title card zigzags across your screen, TURN THE TV OFF. Eggers and Aster DO NOT mess around. You do NOT want to grind a ding-a-ling while a witch grinds an infant to a pulp.
While watching The Witch (colloquially pronounced “the v-vitch”), a pattern emerged. The primary mode of these two A24 breakout genre pieces is not necessarily horror, but dread. Both movies kill kids with abandon, lingering not on the act itself but on the unbearable sound of a mother’s keening. Both feature insanely unnerving child actors. Both subvert the final girl trope with ambiguously liberated heroines, floating into the occult.
And where many of their 2010s companions strive primarily for arthouse prestige, these two genuinely terrify. They force an unflinching camera on violence, refusing to adorn it with camp or theatrics. We watch children take their feverish dying breath, with only prayers to comfort them. We watch Toni Collette floss her neck with a garrotte, bleeding over her panicked son. Despite this, I have rewatched Hereditary more than any other film. It makes me feel like shit in such an addictive way because its horror actually feels familiar.
In a time when “trauma” is such a buzzword, when children die daily in shootings and bombings and disasters, it can be frustrating how often artists distort death into a rhetorical symbol instead of an actual experience people constantly witness and endure.
Both Hereditary and The Witch create horror from the mundanity of traumatic circumstances that so many people experience every day. Genre is not just a vehicle for adrenaline. The engines of their plots are not so much the threat of a villain, but an underlying paranoia, making the audience doubt just how much of the insidiousness is actually real. The films don’t abandon genre tropes, though. Their grand finales reveal that the stakes are social and supernatural.
Since 2018, Eggers and Aster have kept up the streak with three more films each. Aster has stayed with A24 for all three, and Eggers for The Lighthouse. “A24” has become a genre marker in and of itself, that iconic title card granting its films a vague sense of cultural cachet. This is somewhat ironic given they started as just a distributor, since evolving into a production powerhouse whose “indie” association is a total misnomer. I completely fell for their branded hipness, snatching up a Midsommar T-shirt and dressing as King Paimon for Halloween (to nobody’s amusement but my own).
These films succeed on a level far beyond marketing. Many have unsuccessfully tried to imitate them, infusing horror elements into dull stories about grief or other psychological woes. They fail to actually elevate anything and end up sloppier than more modest B movies that prioritize thrill, shock, and disgust. When I saw the trailer for Weapons, for example, I thought we would finally get a horror movie that grapples with school shootings. Instead, Cregger made a tonal mess that can never decide what kind of film it’s trying to be.
The recent inheritors of the A24 horror torch are the Phillipou brothers, who made the less delicately brutal Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, and wunderkind Kane Parsons, who broke all the studio’s records this summer with Backrooms. I liked them all, but none quite capture the it factor of those 2010s hits.
Thanks to the programming of excellent independent cinemas, I now know that A24 was by no means the pioneer of arthouse horror. But for those of us who came of age alongside the brand, their directors provided an excellent crash course on the possibilities of genre cinema outside of a generic atmosphere.
Whenever the Trylon decides enough time has passed to program an “Early A24” series—I’m betting sometime in the 2040s—you better believe I’ll be seated for every show.
Edited by Finn Odum