Horror’s longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed 'elevated horror' and 'post-horror,' films such as
The Babadook
,
It Follows
The Witch
It Comes at Night
Get Out
The Invitation
Hereditary
Midsommar
A Ghost Story
, and
mother!
represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from critics and populist rejection by wider audiences.
Post-Horror
is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema.