Horror finally moved out of Get Out’s long shadow this year |
Jordan Peele’s 2017 movie Get Out changed a lot of things. Chief among them was inventing — certainly unwittingly, and perhaps unfairly — a new and extremely virulent strain of horror. Peele’s perfect bitter little pill of a thriller about racism, appropriation, and white hypocrisy was a big hit and a critical darling. It proved that small, clever, thematically serious films could be commercial if they were scary, and that horror could be an effective Trojan horse for aspiring cinephile directors to smuggle themselves and their big thoughts into moviemaking. Almost overnight, the “elevated horror” industry was born, and it has held the prestige end of genre moviemaking in a firm grip ever since.
But this year, it finally felt as if that grip was loosening. A trio of superb, high-profile horror movies — Sinners, 28 Years Later, and Weapons — achieved both artistic respectability and box-office success without needing to lean on the crutch of metaphor. These are grand, involving films with something to say. But they are also just a vampire movie, a zombie movie, and a possession movie. And they are scary. In 2025, being scary mattered.
The glut of movies that followed on Get Out’s heels were sometimes grouped under the term “elevated horror,” but what linked most of them was an insistent, systematic application of metaphor to surface themes of inequality or trauma. The monster in movies like Midsommar, His House,