Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation

by David Church

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.

Genres: Horror, Nonfiction, Film

280 pages, Paperback

Published January 16, 2023

Reviews

[Brenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very complete analysis on arthouse horror. Church argues that, even though this type of movies have become visible and relatively popular thanks to movies from the production house, A24, they have existed well before that. And they'll probably return to darkness but continue to be produced in the future. Since, in the end, they are slow, and grim (my favorite kind).

[Hosein · Rating 3 out of 5]

سه فصل اول تمام حرف هاشو میزنه، ادامه‌ش بیشتر بسط دادن همون صحبت‌هاست و به نظرم "اونقدر" اطلاعات خاصی نداشت نیمه‌ی دوم کتاب. ولی به طور کلی جالبه.
در ضمن نوشته "هنر" توی اسم کتاب، به هنر کاری نداره و فقط سینما رو بررسی میکنه.

[Milan Van Bortel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great intro to the post-horror genre. It researches its historic roots within avant-garde filmmaking and analyzes some of its most recurring themes. Doing so it outlines the post-horror landscape (and the function of the landscape within this corpus of texts). Will be my point of reference for many years to come.

[John Schorg · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book about a bunch of movies that would easily inspire wonderful rounds of conversation with friends over beers. I'm not sure you'd want the author of this particular book coming along since he prefers pages upon pages of dreary symbolic analysis. Perhaps this might work better in a classroom setting, but reading it is a chore.

[sara]

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