'It Follows' to 'Fear Street': Elevated Horror Is the Genre’s Winning Argument

Ever since the 2010s, films like 'Get Out', 'It Follows', and the 'Fear Street' series have been called "elevated".

(Spoiler alerts for some major horror releases)

There has been considerable debate surrounding ‘elevated horror’. Horror, in itself, is a genre that is notoriously hard to define owing to the subjectivity of ‘fear’ and the genre’s versatility. In the 2010s, horror somehow achieved a more public appeal and several films started to be labelled as “elevated horror”. I argue that this “elevation” isn’t a new phenomenon but it is, in fact, distinct from the films that focus on jump-scares and torture porn.

I would be the last person to argue that the latter aren’t good films—I love a good slasher flick as much as the next horror fan. Consequently, the Fear Street series on Netflix took its place on my mantlepiece for good horror. However, the concept of “elevated” horror isn’t about timing or popularity, or even quality—it’s about the content. But yes, it exists.

There has been a rise in elevated horror films in recent years. At a very base level, let’s consider elevated (or modern) horror to be a film that does more than scare—it informs, it experiments, it represents.

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Too Much to Expect?

Is it too much to expect from horror? Absolutely not. I would actually argue that horror is the genre that can definitely pull it off. Horror is one of the genres that features women in the lead the most. Several women have been involved in the production of classic horror films, even though their contribution has been downplayed over the years. Daphne du Maurier wrote The Birds and Rebecca, both cult genre films.

Everyone was surprised that women are one of the most consistent demographics for horror. Gita Jackson puts it brilliantly in the very headline of her piece in the Polygon, “Horror movies are one of the few places women are told their fears are real.”

Horror flicks like Teeth subverted ideas like vagina dentata-- the folklore that women’s vaginas contain teeth, directly linking sex with a woman to emasculation. Emasculation, in itself, is a very prevalent horror trope. Psycho (1960) has a male villain but his motivations rise from a Freudian emasculation from a mother figure.

Movies like Teeth (2008), Jennifer’s Body (2009), and the Netflix release Bulbbul (2020), all portray horror as a consequence to the evils that affect the (fully fleshed out) women characters—often the audience stars rooting for the woman.

Horror Is a Double-Edge Sword

So, was horror perfect? Far from it. These wins for female characters were overshadowed by the ‘slutty characters’, the ‘sex is sin’ trope (female characters who engaged in sexual activity were more likely to become victims), and the damsels in distress. Female victims took almost twice as long to die, their suffering was prolonged. So, yes, the genre of horror was in need of a major upheaval.

Coming to the people on top of Hollywood’s (and cinema’s) kill list—people of colour and queer people. The treatment of black characters (all people of colour, in fact) in horror films led to the joke “black people always die first” in horror. Either that, or they’re typecast as the magical guide, visible in both Eve’s Bayou (1997) and Ghost (1990).

Queer people, and especially trans characters, are portrayed as crazed killers or dispensable victims. Like black characters, queer people are often exploited to signify upcoming danger. In It: Chapter 2 (2019), a queer couple survives for less than four minutes (one is killed on screen), and most of that time features them as victims to a hate crime.

There was no need for them to be gay in the first place. Pennywise is notoriously homophobic (Stephen King’s It series is the last place to look for sensitivity) but that is addressed later in the film through Finn Wolfhard’s Richie Tozier.

Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is a famous antagonist, and they’re trans, and a serial killer. The killer in Sleepaway Camp (1983) is a person assigned male at birth who is forced to dress as a girl by their parents. The film mixes child abuse and the trans identity in a complicated mess. It’s worse because the film’s sequels solidify Angela as a trans person, AND a killer.

Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1946) also fits its villain in the same archetype. Even though not all such characters are explicitly stated to be trans, they mimic aspects of the trans identity.

People of colour and the queer community are already subjected to violent crimes in the real world. Portraying these characters as victims or crazed killers in film propagates a harmful message.

Elevated Horror: Does it Help?

The “elevation” in question in recent horror movies boils down to basic respect and equal treatment. The term elevated horror is directly reminiscent of films like The Witch (2015), Us (2019), and Fear Street (2021). I would also put the films mentioned above (Teeth, Jennifer’s Body, Bulbbul) in this category.

A major reason for women watching horror is that they’re able to see characters do things that would be considered ‘deviant’ in society. Fear Street, for example, took the ‘sex is sin’ trope and trashed it completely. In one scene, every character is engaged in sexual activity and if anything, they leave the scene ready for battle.

The leads are predominantly feminine presenting, they’re dressed the way you’d expect to be dressed in a fight against killers (comfortably, ideally in denim). Nobody’s misery is more drawn out than others—everyone is miserable. All three films are pastiche—reminiscent of the slasher films, such as the Blair Witch category, the gore and the chase.

In Us, the woman is evidently in-charge, both for the family and the Tethered, and the entire story revolves around her. The most gripping part of Us is the absence of infantilisation—all characters are equally prone to violence. At one point, the family, with the kids, tally their kills.

Movies like Blacula (1972) and Night of the Living Dead (1968) steered away from Black stereotypes and tried to comment on the social status of the American person of colour. With Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us, the black characters became heroes.

In Us, a Black family’s vacation is interrupted by terrifying doppelgangers, and eventually, the real antagonist is the State. The analogy isn’t subtle. Get Out is a clear allegory of racism in America. A black man visits his girlfriend’s house and steps into a racist nightmare.

Many call elevated horror ‘horror for people who don’t like horror’, but both of Peele’s films employ traditional horror narratives. Mind control, medical experiments, slashing, mindless violence—you name it.

At the risk of sounding redundant, I shall come full circle to Fear Street. The part set in 1666 doesn’t just touch upon homophobia in the 1600s, it also touches upon the misogynistic “witch hunts”. In RL Stine’s novel ‘Fear Street Cheerleaders: The First Evil’, ‘witch’ Sarah Fier is originally not even queer (as far as I remember) or accused of being a witch. She is just an entity attached to her best friend after an identity switch.

In Fear Street, she is an unapologetically queer woman accused of being a witch. “I am no lamb,” Sarah assures her partner and eventually, the curse seems only fair. Yes, the very story of Sarah Fier has been “elevated”.

Horror, as a genre, has been sidelined by critics and audiences ever since its inception despite its propensity for championing social causes and spearheading matters of representation. Despite that, films that have subverted problematic horror tropes not only open up the genre to a wider audience, they also improve horror and elevate it.

Films like It Follows (2014) and Jennifer’s Body touched upon rape culture and violence against women but they also armed their women with the agency to take justice into their hands. Wronged characters get an outlet for their rage – something that is still predominantly given to the oppressor in other genres.

Elevation isn’t a new phenomenon. It: Chapter 2 decided to keep the antagonist’s homophobia in without fleshing out Tozier’s queer identity (he doesn’t even say it out loud).

What It: Chapter 2 did wrong by sticking to the theme of its source material, Fear Street corrected by taking the source material a step further. For everyone defending horror’s right to be recognised as a genre on par with others, elevated horror is a winning argument.

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