The New York Times recently ran an editorial exploring when horror isn’t strictly speaking horror. Recent releases including The Humans on Showtime and Spencer’s premium on-demand release have centralized elastic horror as one of the genre’s most enduring contemporary concerns. Gone are the days of torture porn and elevated horror. Yet as a curious love child of the two emerges what I call gnomic horror: cinematic outings that flirt with genre trappings and beats yet defy genre classification. It’s especially curious in the horror fandom’s perennial resistance to awards season, a months-long stretch that almost antagonistically ignores the horror genre.
For every Get Out, there’s a Hereditary, Midsommar, or Relic that goes uncelebrated in the hegemonic discourse of what movies matter and what performances resonate The context of gnomic horror, however, does provide a worthwhile retrospective lens through which previous Best Picture nominees or winners might, with the right perspective, be recontextualized as horror. If horror endeavors to frighten and unfurl genuine, visceral discomfort, then the following five films are arguably just that: horror.
Spencer
Pablo Larraín’s Spencer is the most recent entry here. While the preeminent nominations and wins have not yet been announced, it’s a de facto frontrunner. There’s little doubt that the forthcoming Academy Awards won’t nominate Spencer for both Best Actress and Best Picture. Ostensibly a docudrama of Princess Diana’s (Kristen Stewart) last Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, Spencer has more in common with the psychological horror of the past, namely Polanski’s Repulsion and even Clayton’s The Innocents. Spencer has body horror, ghosts, and several protracted sequences of self-harm and mutilation. There are hallucinations, visions, and a gauze-like atmosphere that feels as alienating as it must have felt for the late Princess Diana. It’s a profoundly human portrait of one woman’s mental health crisis and the family that compounded it. Yet Larraín doesn’t borrow his rhythms and beats from celebrated biopics; he borrows them from horror.
Parasite
When Dread Central reviewed Parasite, we said “Joon-ho’s film blends a multitude of genres.” That’s certainly true, yet the present discourse– desperate to qualify all things as just one thing– often chooses to retrench the horror moniker and nothing else. By the time Parasite was awarded Best Picture, audiences who had not yet caught Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece would be forgiven for not recognizing it as a horror movie. The genre has always melded different subgenres, though, using romance (Spring), comedy (Scream), or even politics (Night of the Living Dead) to augment its scares. Parasite is no different. When it finally concludes, the enduring sense is not one of relief– it’s one of terror. Parasite is terrifying, and while it’s many things, it’s most certainly a horror movie.
Room
The Academy presented Room’s Brie Larson with the statue for Best Actress for her harrowing, deeply empathetic performance as Joy Newsome, a mother living in the titular “room” with her son, Jack (a star-making turn from young Jacob Tremblay). Joy has been trapped there for years, a captive of “Old Nick,” Jack’s father and Joy’s kidnapper. The film is inspired by the Fritzl case where Elisabeth Fritzl was held captive by her father for 24 years, abused repeatedly, and forced to birth seven children. To that effect, Room is uncompromising in its depiction of the worst annals of human cruelty.
Room similarly exploits genre templates, chiefly in its unfathomably intense escape sequence involving misdirection and a rolled-up rug. Post-escape, Room settles into a conventionally lustful awards format– crying, close-ups, shouting matches. But it’s hard to discredit the opening act. It’s as horrifying as anything the best of the genre has to offer. Were it not for the awards focus, there’s a solid chance Room might be remembered as one of 2015’s scariest movies.
The Father
The Father is the kind of story that cements the filmic form as urgent and necessary; as capable of producing enduring, modern art as any antecedent form. Anthony Hopkins, awarded Best Actor for his performance, stars as Anthony, a man suffering from dementia while living alone in his London flat. His daughter, Anne (Olivia Coleman) routinely visits to correspond with his sundry caregivers. However, Anthony is frequently hostile, misremembering dates, people, and even locales. Director Fioran Zeller, adapting his own stage play, expertly manifests Anthony’s dementia in a way only film can.
The actress playing Anne swaps between Coleman and Olivia Williams. The layout of his apartment shifts from scene to scene. Time is nebulous, with later scenes bleeding into earlier scenes and vice-versa. It’s disorienting and deeply unsettling, a quite literal portrayal of Anthony’s decline and progressive sense of sequestration from everything he’s ever known. It’s harrowing and horrifying. The Father uses the trappings of a haunted house movie– temporal uncertainty, strange figures, and an ever-evolving landscape– to tell the scariest, and likely saddest, story about dementia ever told.
Black Swan
Black Swan’s genre classification infuriates me. Like Se7en or Hereditary, it’s too often conceptualized as a psychological thriller, an elevated drama with horror elements. It’s those things, yes, but it’s fundamentally– in mind, body, and spirit– a horror movie. Natalie Portman, awarded Best Actress for her performance, stars as Nina Sayers in Darren Aronofsky’s most successful work (don’t fight me; it’s true). Aronofsky was inspired by the longstanding folk tales of doppelgängers as he tracks Nina’s descent into madness. That’s then compounded by her desperation to secure the lead in her company’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
Natalie Portman has never been better, and like Spencer, Aronofsky visualizes her unraveling with hallucinations, terrestrial uncertainty, and graphic body horror, including the genre’s preeminent hangnail scene. Black Swan was a commercial success, grossint almost $330 million against a $13 million budget. That should have signaled a shift for the genre. It should have incited a move over a decade ago that recalibrated critical perceptions of horror. Had Black Swan been appropriately labeled, Toni Collette or Lupita Nyong’o might have an Oscar today.
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