Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation

Description

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. Contents Figures Acknowledgments 1. Apprehension Engines: Defining a New Wave of Art-Horror Cinema 2. “Slow,” “Smart,” “Indie,” “Prestige,” “Elevated”: Discursive Struggle for Cultural Distinction 3. Grief, Mourning, and the Horrors of Familial Inheritance 4. Horror by Gaslight: Epistemic Violence and Ambivalent Belonging 5. Beautiful, Horrible Desolation: Landscape in Post-Horror Cinema 6. Queer Ethics and the Urban Ruin-Porn Landscape: The Horrors of Monogamy in It Follows 7. Existential Dread and the Trouble with Transcendence Selected Bibliography Index