The meaning of elevated horror as a label

The meaning of elevated horror sits in marketing and distribution, and the films it is attached to have almost nothing formal in common.

Nobody set the definition. The phrase spread through reviews and press coverage in the middle of the 2010s, applied to horror films built on dread, bereavement and formal control, released by specialty distributors and written about in the arts pages rather than the genre press. It has never described a technique. It describes a position in the market, and the films that carry it share a release pattern far more reliably than they share a style.

The label's arrival

The run of films that gave the phrase something to point at came out over three years, all of them cheap. The Babadook (2014) arrived from the Australian low-budget scene and went out in the United States through IFC Films, where it took $964,413 at home and $10,683,688 worldwide. It Follows (2014) was released domestically by RADiUS-TWC and made $14,674,076 in the United States, $21,994,539 worldwide. Then came The Witch (2016) from A24, in American cinemas from February 19 of that year, taking $25,138,705 domestically and $40,911,014 worldwide on a budget of $4,000,000, according to Box Office Mojo.

Those are art-house numbers with horror margins. A four-million-dollar film returning ten times its cost is the economics that made distributors want more of them, and wanting more of them is what turned a description into a category.

The shared traits

Read across the films and the recurring features are easy enough to list. A long first act. A death or an illness in the family doing the work a monster used to do. Sound design carrying the fear where a score would once have carried it. Gore withheld until a single scene needs it. An ending that declines to explain itself.

None of that is new. The Exorcist (1973) is a film about a mother, a doctor and a bureaucracy before it is a film about a demon. The Wicker Man (1973) spends an hour on folklore and singing. Suspiria (1977) is almost entirely design. Lake Mungo (2008) is a grief documentary with one image in it. The traits the label points at were the genre's property for fifty years, which is why the phrase reads to a lot of horror viewers as a compliment paid by someone who has not watched much horror.

The distributor's hand

A24 is the clearest case of a company writing the frame its films are received in. Its own page for Hereditary describes Ari Aster's debut as exhibiting “the craft and precision of a nascent auteur” and as “pushing the horror movie into chilling new terrain”. That is a distributor publishing the review it would like to receive, and the trade press largely reprinted the sentiment.

The films earned the attention. Hereditary went out on June 7, 2018 and grossed $44,069,456 in the United States against $90,431,327 worldwide. Midsommar followed on July 3, 2019, taking $27,426,361 domestically and $48,582,493 worldwide on a $9,000,000 budget. Neither is a blockbuster. Both are enormous for films of that cost, and both were sold on the director rather than on the scare.

Get Out and the awards shelf

Get Out (2017) is where the industry's confusion about the label became visible. Jordan Peele won Writing (Original Screenplay) at the 90th Academy Awards, held on March 4, 2018, and the film was also nominated for Best Picture, Directing and Actor in a Leading Role for Daniel Kaluuya. Before that, the Golden Globes had placed it in Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, one of its two nominations at the 2018 ceremony, where it won nothing.

A horror film with an Oscar-winning screenplay had no obvious shelf, so the Globes put it on a comedy shelf and the critics reached for a new adjective. On a budget of $4,500,000, Get Out grossed $176,040,665 in the United States and $259,718,091 worldwide in 2017, which is a wide-release performance rather than an art-house one. The label stuck to it anyway.

The insult inside the compliment

The objection to the phrase is not that it describes nothing. It is what the word elevated implies about everything underneath: that a horror film has to be lifted out of its own genre before it can be discussed seriously. The films themselves rarely make the claim. A24's copy for Hereditary never uses the term, and the marketing for these releases tends to lean on the director's name and on festival reception instead.

The category is also unstable in a way a real genre is not. Membership moves with reception. A slow, ambiguous, grief-driven horror film that reviews badly is quietly left out, and a film that reviews well gets folded in whatever its content, which makes the label a record of critical mood at the time of release.

The practical use

For a viewer choosing something to watch, the phrase does predict a few concrete things. Expect a first hour with more silence in it than jolts. Expect the violence to be scarce and unusually explicit when it comes, which is what Hereditary and Midsommar both do. Expect no closing explanation.

It predicts nothing about how disturbing a film is, and nothing about quality. The Witch and Midsommar sit under the same heading while asking completely different things of the person watching, one of them a slow, quiet Puritan chamber piece, the other two and a half hours of daylight and pageantry. The release history is the more honest guide. A film that opened through a specialty distributor on a few hundred screens is the shape the phrase describes, and Get Out went wide in 2017 and grossed $259,718,091 worldwide and got called elevated horror anyway. Read what the film contains before pressing play, because the label will not tell you.