I’ve always loved horror. My therapist would say it’s because I suppressed a lot of my emotions as a kid and can achieve catharsis only by consuming extreme and graphic material. My bisexual friends would say it’s because I’m a Scorpio. Either way, I’ve seen so many horror films that I’ve grown desensitized. Just the scariest stuff gets a rise out of me.
Over the past decade, there’s been a lot of scary stuff. The success of directors like Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse), Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), and Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) has sparked a renewed interest, among producers and audiences alike, in original horror tales—not sequels or reboots or spinoffs but genuinely fresh scary stories. Just take a look at the past three years and you’ll find a number of new hits with outsized impact; Pearl, Barbarian, Smile, Talk to Me, Longlegs, and The Substance are all carefully crafted and managed to slip out of their genre bubbles and into the cultural consciousness. Despite their merits, most of these movies failed to frighten me.
