Complimentary terms can come across as the cruelest of insults. The horror community has found some critical success in the last decade thanks to the proliferation of brilliant horror films. Articles from Esquire Magazine and Vanity Fair praised films like The Babadook, The Witch, Hereditary, Get Out, Midsommar and The Lighthouse as examples of "elevated horror."

These critics are wrong. Horror films didn't "get smart" in the 2010s; they were already smart. The problem isn't that horror magically got smart in the 2010s, but rather that film critics forgot the great horror films from before the 2010s.

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HORROR'S BAD REPUTATION

night of the living dead

When asked about the term "elevated horror," Ari Aster, director of Hereditary and Midsommar, stated, “It’s a shame that the genre has such a bad reputation among the ‘elite’ (laughs) to the point where you need to distinguish whether a film is a celebration of the genre or an elevation of the genre." But Aster never forgets that, while there are many cheap films being made for a quick buck and have been for decades, many filmmakers that work within these constraints who are making deeper works.

In the Academy Award's long history, only six horror films -- The Exorcist, Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan and Get Out -- have ever been nominated for best picture. Only one, The Silence of the Lambs, has won, and almost immediately after critics refused to call it a horror film, instead calling it a "thriller." Even the universally loved Hereditary didn't receive a single Oscar Nomination. Critics often dismiss legendary horror films in their day. Films like The Thing, Martyrs and even The Shining received middling to poor reviews upon release, despite now being hailed as classics. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was one of the first films to feature a black lead in a heroic role. Many horror films were dismissed as being exploitative when they had some seriously deep messages to relay.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the 1978 film I Spit On Your Grave, the controversial grind-house film. The film was dismissed as exploitative trash upon release by feminist critics, but, in an ironic twist, years later was re-examined and hailed by those same critics. In an editorial for The Guardian, film critic Julie Bindel, who picketed the film on release, claimed that the film offers a brutally honest depiction of the sexual assault experience. She compares the film to the well-received The Accused and describes that film as unrealistic compared to I Spit On Your Grave, due to how The Accused shows that the criminal justice system can protect sexual assault survivors. "On reflection I was wrong about [I Spit on Your Grave] being harmful. It was and still is exploitative, but at least it does not present the criminal justice system as a friend to women."

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THE CINEMATIC LANGUAGE OF HORROR

When critics dismiss horror films, they dismiss the genre in order to say why certain people do a great job at it. They dismiss acting in horror films, despite the great number of unforgettable techniques employed by horror. The Best Make-Up category for the Academy Awards was invented to give Rick Baker's groundbreaking special effects work in An American Werewolf in London its fair due -- while Baker cites the Jack Pierce make-up of the Universal Monster Cycle as his inspiration. John Carpenter used Hitchock techniques when filming Halloween -- techniques Hitchocok created for the horror genre. Horror has always been on the edge of using cinematic language to tell a story, even if they were B-movies. However, few filmmakers advanced cinematic language in horror quite like Val Lewton.

Val Lewton is a horror producer and writer who created low-budget horror films for studio RKO from 1942 to 1946. His first RKO horror film, Cat People, was an incredibly low-budget film that required Lewton to be creative with his limitations. Cat People features a woman who transforms into a panther when aroused. Lewton couldn't afford a real panther, so he used shadow, sound and movement to create atmosphere. His most famous contribution to horror was his fake-out jump scare, a technique that has been used by everyone ever since Lewton perfected it that included a build-up, silence, followed by a loud noise and visual to startle the audience.

The Lewton scare is now seen by many horror fans to be a cheap thrill. Many films have the "cat scare" sequence that features build up before a rather underwhelming release that diffuses tension immediately. While Lewton and many other films avoid this by never relenting on the tension, these horror films are still capitalizing on a cinematic technique that employs all elements of the film to relay: story, shot composition, sound and editing. The jump scare might seem cheap, but it has a rich cinematic history and incorporates components of all cinematic language to relay. Few film genres, from romances to dramas, would be able to utilize all the elements of film-making at once, utilizing low-budget to tell huge narratives, only for critics to dismiss it as a cheap trick. Yet even when horror, when utilizing all these techniques, is "cheap."

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