Copyright

by

Alexander Joseph Brannan

2021
 The Thesis Committee for Alexander Joseph Brannan
Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Thesis:

Artful Scares: A24 and the Elevated Horror Cycle

APPROVED BY
SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Thomas Schatz, Supervisor

Alisa Perren
Artful Scares: A24 and the Elevated Horror Cycle

by

Alexander Joseph Brannan

Thesis
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin

May 2021
 Acknowledgements

This project would not have been completed were it not for the aid and support of

a number of fine folks. First and foremost, my committee members Thomas Schatz and

Alisa Perren, who with incisive notes have molded my disparate web of ideas into a

legible, linear thesis. My fellow graduate students, who have kept me sane during the

COVID-19 pandemic with virtual happy hours and (socially distant) meetups in the park

serving as brief respites from the most trying of academic years. In addition, I am grateful

to the University of Texas at Austin and the department of Radio-Television-Film in the

Moody College of Communications for all of the resources and opportunities they have

provided to me. Finally, my parents, who have enough pride on my behalf to trump my

doubts. Here’s hoping they don’t find these chapters too mind-numbingly dull.

Onward and upward!

iv
 Abstract

Artful Scares: A24 and the Elevated Horror Cycle

Alexander Joseph Brannan, M.A.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2021

Supervisor: Thomas Schatz

One notable cycle of production in horror cinema in the 2010s was so-called
“elevated horror.” The independent company A24 has contributed heavily to this cycle.
This project argues that A24 employs the aesthetic of elevated horror as part of its house
style. One of A24’s major corporate mandates is to “bridge the gap” between the art-
house and the multiplex. Thus, it works to market its films to both the art-house cinephile
audience and the casual, mainstream cinemagoer. This thesis examines the marketing,
branding, and distribution strategies underlying A24’s pursuit of its target markets,
focusing specifically on the company’s horror products. Using the films Under the Skin
(d. Glazer, 2013), The Witch (d. Eggers, 2016), and Midsommar (d. Aster, 2019) as case
studies, the thesis presents these strategies at pivotal moments in the company’s
development from a newcomer to a notable player in American independent cinema. In
doing so, I present the parallel histories of A24 and the elevated horror cycle and provide
evidence for an interdependence between the two. The project has a particular emphasis
on the narrative, stylistic, and generic components of elevated horror film texts; the
marketing, distribution, and branding practices of A24; and the discourses of critical
reception regarding the elevated horror cycle which circulated in the popular and trade
presses.

v
 Table of Contents
List of Figures .............................................................................................................. viii

Introduction: House Styles and Horror Cycles ................................................................. 1

Genre Cycles in Horror Cinema .............................................................................. 2

The Emergence of Elevated Horror ....................................................................... 10

Chapter Overview................................................................................................. 22

Chapter 1: A24 and the Presentation of Genre in Under the Skin ................................... 27

“A Glimpse Inside” A24: The Beginning .............................................................. 35

The 13-Year Journey of Under the Skin ................................................................ 41

Reconstructing Genre in the Under the Skin Marketing......................................... 45

Approaching Elevated: Genre and Under the Skin ................................................ 50

A Film for the “Cognescenti:” A Reception Study ................................................ 64

Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 70

Chapter 2: The Witch and the Cultural Emergence of Elevated Horror ........................... 73

Psychology, Monstrosity, and the Mainstreaming of The Witch ............................ 80

A24: “Pushing Horror into New Realms” ............................................................. 92

Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 98

Chapter 3: Midsommar: Genre Hybridity, the Horror Auteur, and the Self-Seriousness
of Elevated Horror ................................................................................................. 101

Ari Aster: Horror’s “God of Mischief” ............................................................... 104

Genre Experimentation and Humor in Midsommar ............................................. 111

Manufacturing and Selling the Horror Auteur ..................................................... 126

Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 135

vi
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 139

References ................................................................................................................... 146

vii
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1: The Neon FYC book prominently features the company’s branding (Weber,

2019)......................................................................................................... 33

Fig. 1.2: The Dunkirk screener from Warner Bros. does not display studio branding

(Ehrlich, 2017). ......................................................................................... 34

Fig. 1.3: More than half of the runtime of the teaser trailer for Under the Skin features

these two ambiguous shots. ....................................................................... 46

Fig. 1.4: Isserley recognizes her human face in the mirror. ............................................ 57

Fig. 1.5: Isserley’s path is clear as she abandons her kidnapping duties. ......................... 58

Fig. 1.6: One of Isserley’s victims looks into the void. ................................................... 60

Fig. 1.7: An alien space inside a manmade structure. ..................................................... 61

Fig. 1.8: The duality of Isserley’s identity superimposed. .............................................. 63

Fig. 1.9: Rotten Tomatoes, March 31, 2014 ................................................................... 66

Fig. 1.10: Rotten Tomatoes, April 07, 2014 ................................................................... 67

Fig. 1.11: Rotten Tomatoes, September 06, 2014 ........................................................... 68

Fig. 2.1: These images from A24's official trailer exaggerate the extent to which the

film’s narrative is propelled by external conflict. ....................................... 84

Fig. 2.2: The opening scene introduces the family with centered, symmetrical

compositions, a pattern which is broken several shots later. ....................... 88

Fig. 3.1: A24’s marketing for Hereditary assured audiences that the massive hype for

the film created by critics was warranted. ................................................ 108

Fig. 3.2: Aster and Pogorzelski use centered framing in Hereditary during key

moments of the plot................................................................................. 114

viii
Fig. 3.3: Symmetrical framing and deliberate camera movement are prominently

featured in the prologue to Midsommar. .................................................. 117

Fig. 3.4: Examples of camerawork demonstrative of elevated horror in Midsommar. ... 118

Fig. 3.5: Images from A24’s trailer for Midsommar which sell the film as a slasher..... 130

ix
 Introduction: House Styles and Horror Cycles

One of the most prominent genre cycles of the 2010s was so-called “elevated

horror” films, or what is sometimes referred to as “prestige horror,” “art-house horror,”

and “post-horror.” The independent studio A24 has contributed the largest number of

films to this cycle, and, as I will argue in this project, the company has strategically

deployed these elevated horror films as part of its house style. A24, which launched in

the summer of 2012, has released a number of high-profile films which have been

categorized as part of the elevated horror trend—Under the Skin (d. Glazer, 2013), The

Witch (d. Eggers, 2016), It Comes at Night (d. Shults, 2017), Hereditary (d. Aster, 2018),

Midsommar (d. Aster, 2019), and The Lighthouse (d. Eggers, 2019).

Both the elevated horror trend and A24 have received little attention in the

academy. David Church’s recent book, Post-horror: Art, Genre, and Cultural Elevation

(2021), is the first major study of the trend. Church’s work looks at the major themes of

elevated horror (e.g., grief, trauma, gaslighting, familial inheritance) through analyses of

case study films. By focusing on one independent studio and its impact on elevated

horror, I wish to build on Church’s initial analysis by looking at the industrial practices

which have allowed elevated horror to become a fixture of contemporary horror cinema.

As such, my primary research question is as follows: In what ways have A24’s

distribution, marketing, and branding practices impacted the elevated horror cycle? In

addition, by identifying the elevated horror trend as a distinct genre cycle, I wish to

1
illustrate a coherent set of stylistic and narrative commonalities which define elevated

horror.

GENRE CYCLES IN HORROR CINEMA

Leger Grindon defines a generic cycle as “a series of genre films produced during

a limited period of time and linked by a dominant trend in their use of the genre’s

conventions” (2011, pp. 44). Cycles trace the evolution of genre by periodizing

significant phases in a genre’s history. The study of genre cycles explores the industrial

and cultural factors that influence trend shifts within a genre (Grindon, 2011, pp. 45). As

Amanda Ann Klein argues, the cycle model’s “focus on cinema’s use value—the way

that filmmakers, audiences, film reviewers, advertisements, and cultural discourses

interact with and affect the film text—offers a more pragmatic, localized approach to

genre history” (2011, pp. 5). This approach sees genre as being directly affected by the

environments in which its texts are produced and consumed. Cycles are commodities

(Klein, 2011, pp. 8), as such they illustrate how the industry uses genre to appeal to

shifting audience desires. As I argue below, the emergence of elevated horror films in the

mid-2010s was an industrial response to trend shifts occurring in the horror genre in the

decade previous. The elevated horror cycle is one logical progression from the dominant

horror cycle that manifested in the 2000s, the neo-grindhouse cycle. Elevated horror

signaled a pivot away from certain aesthetic and narrative tendencies which, by the end

of the decade, had fallen out of favor with audiences.

2
 Genres develop through a multi-faceted relationship between filmmakers, the

industry, and the moviegoing audience. As Thomas Schatz makes clear, film genres are

constructed through the repetition of narrative and thematic elements. This repetition “is

generated by the interaction of the studios and the mass audience, and it [is] sustained so

long as it satisfies the needs and expectations of the audience and remains financially

viable for the studios” (Schatz, 1981, pp. 10-11). Cycles, too, develop as part of this

dynamic between industry and audience. Klein argues that cycles exist as financial

schemes which the studios can manipulate based on audience response. Film cycles are

“dependent on audience desires” and thus are “subject to defined time constraints” (2011,

pp. 4). As cycles wane in financial viability due to declining audience demand for that

cycle’s content, they must “be updated or altered in order to continue to turn a profit” or

else phase out of existence (Klein, 2011, pp. 4).

Cycle studies is useful in the case of horror cinema, as the genre has maintained

relative success and longevity through studios course correcting in their use of horror’s

generic traits. Of all the genres, horror is perhaps the easiest to trace historically using

cycle studies, as cycles in horror tend to respond to or be in conversation with horror

cycles of the past. For example, the repetitive narratives of films in the slasher cycle that

peaked in the 1980s gave way to more self-aware and self-reflexive films like Scream (d.

Craven, 1996), films which openly comment on and deconstruct the characteristics of

slasher films.1 Another reason cycle studies is apt when looking at horror is that horror

1 Scream was by no means the first horror film to deconstruct the genre, but its massive success correlated
in an influx of self-reflexive horror cinema.
3
cinema has progressed through recognizable cycles of production since as early as the

silent era.

These early horror cycles were defined, in whole or in part, by the house styles of

specific studios. These house styles were most coherent in the classical era, where the

major studios “developed a repertoire of contract stars and story formulas that were

refined and continually recirculated through the marketplace” (Schatz, 1988/2010, p. 7).

Each studio had their stock-in-trade genres, which served the dual purpose of providing

an efficiency in production and giving studios a recognizable brand identity (Schatz,

1988/2010, p. 7). Warner Bros. had musicals and gangster pictures, MGM had glossy

prestige films, and Universal had the monster movie. The Universal horror films of the

1930s-1940s were themselves influenced by the German Expressionist cinema of UFA,

particularly in the use of low-key lighting. Former UFA filmmakers Joe May and Karl

Freund came to Universal after emigrating to the United States and helped establish this

style. Universal’s horror output in the early 1930s helped cut costs and limited the

negative economic impact of the Great Depression on the studio (Edwards, 2014, p. 20).

This allowed the studio, which did not have the financial boon of owning a theater chain,

to remain competitive with the majors.

In an attempt to rival Universal’s horror output in the 1940s, RKO hired Val

Lewton to create its horror unit. A former pulp fiction writer and employee of

independent producer David O. Selznick, Lewton produced 11 films for RKO in a four-

year span. These were low-budget horror films such as Cat People (d. Tourneur, 1942)

and I Walked with a Zombie (d. Tourneur, 1943) which proved modestly successful, and
4
they have been championed in retrospect for having a distinctive “dreamy” atmosphere

and “pathos-filled moments” (Nemerov, 2019). Jacques Tourneur, who directed three

films for Lewton at RKO, said that the producer had an idealism which brought a certain

poeticism to his films (The Criterion Collection, 2016). This pathos and idealism which

Lewton brought to RKO’s production cycle of horror films was distinct from competitors

like Universal, whose films were steeped in expressionistic and Gothic influences.

House styles revolving around horror production were evident outside of the

Hollywood majors as well. Hammer Films made a name for itself with its own brand of

Gothic horror and a stable of stars that included Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. In

the 1950s, American International Pictures (AIP), which courted the “19 year old male”

market with titillating genre B-pictures (Davis, 2012, p. 108), introduced the Roger

Corman school of low-budget, quickly produced exploitation cinema. Bob Shaye’s New

Line Cinema was financially bolstered through the 1980s by A Nightmare on Elm Street,

a crucial franchise in the slasher cycle. Meanwhile, one of New Line’s major competitors,

Miramax, was “performing a balancing act” of sorts when it came to the branding of its

genre division Dimension in the early 1990s (Perren, 2012, p. 132). The company was at

once using the prestige associated with its mainline Miramax brand to market their

Dimension properties as higher quality than B-pictures and distancing the Miramax and

Dimension brands to avoid tarnishing the Miramax name with perceived lowbrow genre

films (Perren, 2012, p. 132).

In the 2000s, a prominent feature of Lionsgate’s output was violent, “hard-R”

horror films. This house style emerged with American Psycho (d. Harron, 2000), and it
5
factored heavily into the marketing of the company’s massively successful Saw franchise.

The success of Saw (d. Wan, 2004) gave rise to the dominant horror cycle of the 2000s,

what Sarah Wharton refers to as the “neo grindhouse” (2013, pp. 198). The neo-

grindhouse cycle encompasses horror films from the 2000s which are characterized by

their explicit depictions of violence and sex—this includes so-called “torture porn” films,

hyperviolent slasher remakes, and films that pay homage to the violent exploitation films

of the past like Grindhouse (d. Rodriguez and Tarantino, 2007) and House of 1000

Corpses (d. Zombie, 2003).

Saw was a surprise hit for Lionsgate, grossing $103 million on a $1.2 million

budget.2 Saw II (d. Bousman, 2005) and Saw III (d. Bousman, 2006) each out-grossed its

immediate predecessor. Subsequent sequels saw a decline in revenue, save for Saw 3D (d.

Greutert, 2010), which likely benefitted from being billed as “The Final Chapter” in the

series. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade the mainstream appeal of the franchise had

faded. Despite attempts to revive the franchise in the 2010s—Lionsgate’s week-long re-

release of Saw in 2014 grossed less than $1 million, and their return to the franchise in

2017, Jigsaw (d. Spierig and Spierig), is the third-lowest grossing entry in the series—it

was clear that audiences were looking for something different in horror cinema.

Arguably, two major trends marked the shift away from the neo-grindhouse cycle.

The first involved major studios attempting to create blockbuster franchises out of horror

properties. Beginning in the late-2000s with Paramount’s box office successes

2Unless otherwise stated, all production budgets and box office information are sourced from The
Numbers (https://the-numbers.com), and box office figures reflect worldwide grosses.
6
Cloverfield (d. Reeves, 2008) and Paranormal Activity (d. Peli, 2009),3 these franchises

pivoted away from the hyperviolence of the neo-grindhouse in favor of more tame and

tasteful scares. Paramount and Warner Bros., in particular, found financial success from

this shift, with Warners generating a blockbuster cinematic universe out of its hit film

The Conjuring (d. Wan, 2013). Universal, too, put resources into rebooting its stable of

“Universal monsters” in the hopes of finding blockbuster success. Its 2017 reimagining

of The Mummy was both a critical flop and a box office disappointment,4 and Universal

subsequently retooled its “Dark Universe” slate. This resulted in The Invisible Man (d.

Whannell, 2020), a significantly lower-budget film than The Mummy which managed to

turn a healthy profit ($134 million off a reported $7 million budget) despite being

released at a time when theaters worldwide were beginning to shutter due to the COVID-

19 pandemic.

The second major trend, elevated horror, contrasted the neo-grindhouse by using a

more art-house aesthetic: cutting less frequently, using more wide shots, using more

realistic color grading, etc. These films were also markedly less violent than the neo-

grindhouse, focusing instead on atmosphere and character psychology to produce the

intended horror effect.5 By the same token, the elevated horror cycle functioned as

counter-programming to the blockbuster horror franchises mentioned above. Major

3 These films were coming at the tail-end of a cycle of “found footage” horror which launched after the
massive success of The Blair Witch Project (d. Myrick and Sanchez) in 1999, and which fell out of favor
after multiple poorly received films such as The Devil Inside (d. Brent Bell, 2012).
4 This was a particularly notable failure when compared to Universal’s 1999 The Mummy (d. Sommers),
which was very profitable and spawned two sequels and a spinoff film.
5 Most elevated horror films do contain violent sequences, but these are much more restrained than the set
pieces of the hyperviolent neo-grindhouse films.
7
studios have released a small number of films that could be considered part of the corpus

of elevated horror—Universal distributed Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Paramount

distributed Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018) in the United States. However, the

narrative and stylistic characteristics of elevated horror stand in contrast to most of the

horror released by the major studios. Generally speaking, elevated horror films tend to

present themselves as containing more serious, thematically rich material than that of

blockbuster cinema.

Some journalists in the popular press deny that elevated horror films are

connected by common narrative or stylistic traits (Ehrlich, 2019; Nicholson, 2019).

However, I argue that there are a set of shared traits which these elevated horror films

display, and these traits comprise the house style of A24’s horror product. These traits

include an emphasis on shot composition and an atmospheric mood over the traditional

“jump scare” mechanics common of major studio horror; a reliance on psychological

states instead of, or in conjunction with, traditional horror monstrosity; deliberate pacing

that gives way to a more rapidly paced (and oftentimes more violent) climax; discordant

musical scores; and the use of visual symmetry and slow camera movement. Films in the

elevated horror category employ some, if not all, of these traits. Elevated horror films

also tend to be genre hybrids, blending the elevated horror aesthetic with traditional

horror conventions as well as elements from genres other than horror (e.g., family drama,

psychological thriller, science fiction).

Clearly, there were horror films released prior to the 2010s which contain similar

aesthetic qualities to the elevated horror cycle. Rosemary’s Baby (d. Polanski, 1968),
8
which is often cited as a significant precursor to these contemporary prestige horror films

(Franich, 2015; Bui, 2018; Bradley, 2019), contains similar narrative preoccupations

involving deliberate pacing and psychological horror. One could also make comparisons

to films like Don’t Look Now (d. Roeg, 1973), Images (d. Altman, 1972), and The

Exorcist (d. Friedkin, 1973), among others. In fact, a few significant developments that

were occurring in Hollywood during the period in which these films were being released

fostered an environment in which elevated horror could be produced. The emergence of

the New Hollywood coincided with more director-driven product, which allowed for

more narrative experimentation (Schatz, 2009, pp. 161-162). And the development of the

MPAA ratings system, one year prior to Rosemary’s Baby, correlated with Hollywood

embracing more suggestive content (Schatz, 2009, pp. 162). What makes the elevated

horror films of the 2010s unique from these earlier films is that the journalistic discourse

has grouped these films into a distinct category. I argue that this delineation of certain

2010s horror films as being “elevated” indicates that a cycle has developed around the

trend.

This project examines the elevated horror cycle from an industry studies

perspective using a combination of textual analysis, discourse analysis, and reception

studies. Through this multi-faceted analysis of three case study films—Under the Skin,

The Witch, and Midsommar—I illustrate how the characteristics of elevated horror

manifest in A24 horror and how they are emblematic of the company’s house style.

Looking at the films along with A24’s marketing materials for them further demonstrates

how genre is used to sell elevated horror to mainstream moviegoers. There are
9
discrepancies between how genre functions within the films and how genre is presented

in the films’ marketing This is a key recurring component of A24’s distribution strategy

which sells elevated horror in a specific, mainstream fashion.

Using discourse analysis of relevant trade and popular press publications, as well

as a critical reception study on each case study film, I assess the extent to which A24 has

influenced the popularization of the elevated horror trend. For this analysis, I used The

Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline to trace how the trades reported on A24 from

its launch in 2012. I also looked at the various profiles written about the company by

press outlets such as The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and GQ—articles which

propped A24 up as a dominant new player in American independent cinema. These

outlets, alongside articles written in the independent film blog IndieWire and reviews

from major publications (e.g., The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Chicago

Tribune), allow me to situate A24 horror films within the larger discursive context of

contemporary horror cinema. Specifically, these critics’ reviews show how the

company’s horror films were consistently met with critical plaudits, even as some of

those critics were vocally opposed to the elevated horror trend.

THE EMERGENCE OF ELEVATED HORROR

The remainder of this chapter briefly outlines the significant releases in the

elevated horror cycle. Doing so illustrates how a handful of independent films that were

financial and/or critical successes led to replication of the elevated horror format. This

replication occurred, occasionally, at the level of major studio releases, but these releases

10
were rarely successful at the box office. In most cases, elevated horror found a niche

audience through independent studios distributing films in specialty release with a longer

life on streaming platforms. As this project contends, A24 is notable for how it diverged

from this model. A24 distributed its elevated horror properties in wide theatrical release

in an attempt to expand the audience for the cycle.

Before proceeding with this history, we should note the extent to which these

cycles of horror, and genre cycles more generally, are situated within national

boundaries. The neo-grindhouse cycle, and “torture porn” more specifically, has been

discussed in the context of post-9/11 America. Matt Hills, for one example, has written

about how the Saw franchise provides indirect symbolism of “righteous torture” in the

face of debates over the legality of torture during the George W. Bush administration

(2011, pp. 107-123). Readings like this tie the neo-grindhouse specifically to contexts of

American society after 2001. Similar trends of hyperviolent exploitation films that

intersect with the timeline of the neo-grindhouse occurred in non-American entertainment

industries prior to 9/11. A cycle of transgressive art-house cinema with exploitation and

horror influences, what James Quandt coined the New French Extremity (2004), began in

the mid-1990s and continued through the 2000s.6 Select films coming out of Japan—the

Guinea Pig series (1985-1990), the Tetsuo trilogy (d. Tsukamoto, 1989-2009), Audition

(d. Miike, 1999), Battle Royale (d. Fukasaku, 2000), and Ichi the Killer (d. Miike, 2001),

among others—also pushed the boundaries of excessive violence in exploitation cinema

6Films of the New French Extremity include Sombre (d. Grandrieux, 1998), Criminal Lovers (d. Ozon,
1999), Trouble Every Day (d. Denis, 2001), Irréversible (d. Noe, 2002), Twentynine Palms (d. Dumont,
2003), Frontiere(s) (d. Gens, 2007), Haute Tension (d. Aja, 2003), and Martyrs (d. Laugier, 2008).
11
from the late 1980s into the early 2000s. Still, Wharton and others view the neo-

grindhouse cycle through the lens of post-9/11 Hollywood. While this can be a limiting

approach to viewing genre, given how globalized the film industry has become, it is

somewhat fundamental to cycle studies. Given that a cycle is defined by the interactions

between an industry and its audience, it is difficult to categorize a cycle that is not

confined to a single nation’s entertainment industry. Although Wharton labels certain

non-American films as neo-grindhouse, such as the Canadian film Hobo with a Shotgun

(d. Eisener, 2011) and the Australian-American Rogue (d. McLean, 2007), the cycle is

viewed as primarily a product of American independent cinema (Wharton, 2013, pp.

198).

The elevated horror cycle, too, is transnational in terms of its corpus. As this

project’s case study films were released by a singular U.S. distributor, I will nevertheless

focus on how the cycle functions within the American film industry. Tracing the U.S.

distribution of elevated horror films, even those produced outside of the U.S., allows for a

coherent (if not incomplete) industrial view of the cycle. While I am reticent to dismiss

the internationality of some of these films, and future studies could benefit from taking

these transnational dimensions into account, isolating the present study to an American

film industry perspective allows for a more cohesive analysis.

The Babadook was the first standout film to give visibility to the elevated horror

trend. The 2014 film, produced by Screen Australia and distributed in the U.S. by IFC

Midnight, was a modest financial success, grossing approximately $7.4 million

12
worldwide on a $2 million budget. More importantly, it won resounding critical acclaim,

with some critics stating that what made the film one of the best horror movies in years

were the elements of elevated horror that set it apart from the exploitation horror of the

previous decade (Kenny, 2014; Dowd, 2014; Rooney, 2014; Rothkopf, 2014). Trade

publications and the popular press fueled the narrative that The Babadook was bringing

something different and “metaphorically rich” to the horror table (Dowd, 2014). The

Hollywood Reporter quoted one of the film’s producers, Kristina Ceyton, as saying that

The Babadook was “trying to do more” than franchises like Saw (Bulbeck, 2014), and in

a Rolling Stone interview, director Jennifer Kent stated that her interest in making the

film a horror movie had little to do with “things-that-go-bump-in-the-night genre

filmmaking” and more to do with the psychology of the film’s protagonist (Adams,

2014). Some of the same journalists singing the praises of the film were also setting it

apart from the neo-grindhouse, as well as the film’s mainstream contemporaries like

Insidious (d. Wan, 2010) and The Conjuring (Rooney, 2014; Kenny, 2014).

Indeed, The Babadook looks and feels different than these other films, with its

moody atmosphere and lack of traditional scares. Even the film’s eponymous monster

functions differently than the average horror movie monster, despite its folklore-inflected

backstory and shadowy figure which calls to mind distorted, angular imagery from

German Expressionism. The Babadook monster presents an externalization of the

protagonist’s tumultuous internal state, acting as a metaphor for grief and depression.

This is not to say that horror cinema of the past has not used its villains as metaphors.

Some sci/fi-horror films from the 1950s, for example, used extraterrestrial beings as
13
stand-ins for the threat of Communism. Toho’s Godzilla was symbolic of the effects of

nuclear weapons following the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Frankenstein’s

monster, in the 1931 film Frankenstein (d. Whale), can be read as a metaphor for the

ramifications of science encroaching on the natural realm.7 Such metaphorical readings

had become less commonplace by the turn of the century when the fad of self-reflexive

horror sought to look inward on the genre itself rather than outward at the horrors of the

real world. The neo-grindhouse, in some ways, carried on this tradition of looking

inward, in that the violent extremes of the genre became the attraction, and any social

commentary was an inadvertent by-product rather than part of the creative intent.

In March 2015, four months after the U.S release of The Babadook, another

horror film with a metaphorical monster was released to similar critical praise. It Follows

was initially planned for a small platform release. Then, after returning unexpectedly high

per-screen averages, mostly generated by positive word of mouth, distributor RADiUS-

TWC widened the release from 32 to 1,218 theaters (Mendelson, 2015). Again, an

elevated horror film was receiving buzz from critics who praised its formalism and

themes. It Follows presents a stalking, zombie-like monster which is passed from person

to person through sex. This monster descends on a group of teenage characters,

functioning as a metaphor for the slow, inevitable process of aging that first becomes

apparent at the onset of sexual maturity. At the same time that this monster presents an

external threat to the characters, it also presents an internal one by representing a

7As Paul O’Flinn argues, the 1931 film version radically shifts some key themes of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and effectively waters down the theme of scientific conquest into one of “reactionary
moralizing about the dangers of meddling with the unknown” (1983/2002, pp. 109-110).
14
psychological stress about the impending expiration date for their childhood. This

thematic material is complemented by director Mitchell’s heightened aesthetic—marked

by his use of a slow 360-degree pan—and musician Richard Vreeland’s moody, synth-

infused score.

After the release of It Follows, some journalists were already noticing a trend.

Darren Franich at Entertainment Weekly wrote a piece in March 2015 which grouped The

Babadook and It Follows together as being part of a nascent horror trend. He recognized

it as an explicitly independent phenomenon—major studios would not foray into the

elevated horror aesthetic for another few years—in which the combination of low budgets

and ambitious directors allowed for innovative twists on one of the most recognizable

genres. Without a large body of films to assess, though, Franich could not isolate the

formal characteristics which linked these films together. Instead, he grouped the two

films in with the trend of “mumblegore” and the television program The Walking Dead.

One independent company, A24, clearly recognized that elevated horror had growing

critical cachet and a viable audience. The company also saw elevated horror as an

aesthetic that fit perfectly with their branding as an art-house indie label appealing to a

cinephile audience. And it was A24’s 2016 film The Witch that, arguably, popularized the

concept of elevated horror.

The Witch was, at the time of its release, the biggest financial success that A24

had had as a distributor. The company started in 2012 as a small, New York-based outfit

that picked up director-driven films from festivals, aiming to release 8-10 films per year

(Fernandez, 2012). After making high-profile deals with DirecTV and Amazon in 2013
15
(Ramachandran and Fritz, 2013; Lewis, 2013), and receiving a $50 million line of credit

from Comerica and Union Bank of California in 2014 (McNary, 2014), A24 broke into

the prestige film scene at the 2016 Academy Awards. The studio earned seven

nominations, and they garnered three wins—Best Actress for Brie Larson in Room (d.

Abrahamson), Best Documentary Feature for Amy (d. Kapadia), and Best Visual Effects

for Ex Machina (d. Garland). The weekend prior to the Oscar ceremony, The Witch

debuted theatrically in the U.S. to $8.8 million, on its way to a final worldwide gross of

$40 million.

The Witch firmly established the aesthetics that A24 would refine in future horror

films, and these aesthetics are the defining characteristics of the elevated horror cycle.

With a premise similar to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—although the events of The

Witch take place roughly sixty years prior to the Salem witch trials—Robert Eggers’ film

taps into the paranoia of superstition, the psychological ramifications of religious

persecution, and the inner turmoil of physical isolation. The film contains violent

sequences and abject imagery, but most of the horror comes from the psychological

trauma caused by a household breaking down from spiteful accusations. Eggers contrasts

this narrative of a family falling apart at the seams with a restrained style, relying on slow

tracking shots and centered compositions to capture the isolated frontier life of the

family. The result is a film with the appearance of a series of portraits depicting the ironic

moral degradation of Puritanical life in colonial New England.

A24 would go on to release a number of similar horror films, including Trey

Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night (2017), Ari Aster’s films Hereditary (2018) and
16
Midsommar (2019), Eggers’ second film The Lighthouse (2019), and Rose Glass’ Saint

Maud (2021). By the end of the 2010s, the press came to associate the company with

elevated horror. During this time, larger companies started distributing elevated horror

films. Early in its foray into media distribution, Amazon co-distributed The Neon Demon

(d. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016) with Broad Green Pictures. Amazon Studios gave the

film a summer 2016 release in 783 theaters, where it grossed just $3.5 million on a

reported $7.5 million budget. Looking solely at these box office numbers, the film was a

financial failure, but for a massive tech company like Amazon the losses for distributing

a low-budget flop would likely be easily recouped. Moreover, The Neon Demon provided

a more intangible benefit than box office profits: a film from a well-known auteur

filmmaker that could be put exclusively on their online streaming platform. And that is

what many of Amazon Studios’ first year of titles were. Household names like Spike Lee

and Woody Allen, along with directors with art-house credibility like Refn and Kenneth

Lonergan, provided Amazon Prime Video with titles which could bring consumers into

the fold of Amazon’s online shopping infrastructure. While The Neon Demon appeared to

fail at the box office, it actually provided evidence for the viability of these elevated

horror films, and independent film more generally, in the streaming space.

This case for streaming as a potential home for elevated horror was bolstered even

more by the release of Annihilation. Alex Garland’s follow-up to the science fiction

thriller Ex Machina flopped at the U.S. box office in February 2018, grossing just north

of $32 million on a $55 million budget. Prior to this, though, distributor Paramount sold

all international rights to the film (outside of the U.S., Canada, and China) to Netflix. Part
17
of the decision behind this deal involved the increasing difficulty for studios to profit

from midbudget films. But the main source of concern that led to the Netflix sale,

according to Borys Kit, who broke the story of the sale at The Hollywood Reporter, were

early test screenings that went poorly due to audience perception that the film was “too

intellectual” (Kit, 2017).

Annihilation, I would argue, is part of the elevated horror cycle. It is a science

fiction-horror hybrid which features a narrative involving psychological trauma in

conjunction with images of monstrosity, deliberate pacing throughout, visual symmetry,

and a dominating discordant score during its climax. Its case also speaks to a potential

ceiling for elevated horror in the theatrical market. Zack Sharf at IndieWire argues that

the financial failure of Annihilation had to do with the mainstream moviegoer being

unwilling to give “weirder, auteur-driven” films a chance at the box office (Sharf, 2018).

If this is the case, then the Annihilation sale shows that major studios may have grown

averse to distributing elevated horror. Given that streamers like Netflix and Amazon aim

to aggregate a diverse library of content, streaming may be a more likely location for

elevated horror. Even A24, which relies heavily on theatrical distribution, has benefited

from lucrative streaming deals with Amazon, DirecTV, Apple, and Showtime.

Annihilation was one of the few instances of a major studio attempting to

distribute elevated horror films to a wide, mainstream audience. Before Annihilation,

Paramount distributed Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017). The film fits most of the

criteria for elevated horror: a style that includes centered composition and slow camera

movement; a discordant score; a lack of violent content punctuated by a rapidly paced,

18
violent climax; and a narrative focusing on the psychological torment and anxieties of its

protagonist. Mother! failed to reach audiences—it underperformed at the box office and

received an F score from audience polling company CinemaScore (Mendelson, 2017)—

making it another example of elevated horror not working when in the hands of a major

studio.

That is not to say that major studios were wholly unsuccessful at releasing films

which fit under the umbrella of elevated horror. The biggest financial success of the

elevated horror cycle to date was Get Out (d. Peele, 2017), which was produced by the

independent company Blumhouse and distributed by Universal. Blumhouse made a name

for itself through founder and CEO Jason Blum’s low-budget business model in which

films are produced for under $5 million. In doing this, the company only requires one or

two hits in a year to make up for any losses incurred from its other films. This low-budget

model yields many horror films, most of which fall into traditional categories of theatrical

horror such as teen screams, slashers, and supernatural films. This model also allows for

Blum to comfortably hand over much of the creative control to the films’ directors,

which, in the case of Jordan Peele, resulted in a massively profitable horror film. The film

resonated with audiences to the tune of $252 million worldwide, high critical acclaim,

and an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Although Peele calls it a “social thriller” (Yuan and Harris, 2017), Get Out also

satisfies most of the criteria for elevated horror, and it provides evidence that a major

studio can back an elevated horror film and give it the resources to cross over to

substantial mainstream success. That said, as of this writing no major studio has
19
distributed an elevated horror film since Get Out. Universal went on to distribute Peele’s

follow up, Us (2019), which does not fit the criteria for elevated horror as neatly as Get

Out does. In any case, it is possible that Get Out was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for

Blumhouse and Universal. Given the specificity of the film’s authorial vision and how

that was adopted into American culture—the concept of “the sunken place,” for example,

became part of the American cultural lexicon—the success of Get Out arguably has less

to do with genre and more to do with what the film is saying about race in America.

Peele’s use of the horror genre is crucial to how he delivers this message, but it is

difficult to argue that the elevated horror aesthetic contributed substantially to the film’s

impact on American audiences.

The year 2019 was a key one for A24 and its relationship to the elevated horror

cycle. The company released Ari Aster’s Midsommar in July and Robert Eggers’ The

Lighthouse in October. Both films were second features from directors whose debuts

were also distributed by A24. The company marketed these films heavily as auteur

vehicles. In doing so, A24 crafted a narrative that the films were audacious passion

projects from visionary directors, and this narrative was perpetuated in the press. A24’s

summer release for Midsommar showed the company’s confidence that this auteur

discourse would allow the film to compete against tentpole blockbusters. The film proved

to be profitable, earning $46 million worldwide off a $9 million budget. Additionally,

Midsommar experimented with genre in a way unlike previous films in the cycle. Most

notably, it incorporated humor. This is uncommon in elevated horror, which generally

relies on grave tones and weighty themes. As such, Midsommar presents a notable
20
departure from the elevated horror aesthetic, which Chapter 3 of this project will examine

in greater depth.

The elevated horror cycle is still in progress, and it has grown in notoriety to the

point where it has become a hotly contested talking point in horror circles. The critical

discourse around elevated horror has progressed, generally speaking, from one of praise

for individual films’ uses of the elevated horror aesthetic to one of resentment toward the

“elevated” terminology. The debate over the merits of calling these films elevated has

carried over from blogs and the trades to the popular press. Some are adamant that

elevated horror does not exist at all (Knight, 2018; Ehrlich, 2019), thereby choosing to

ignore the cycle and look at its films as discrete horror properties. Others view elevated

horror as a smug descriptor that separates the few, elite elevated horror properties from

the necessarily low-quality non-elevated ones (Ehrlich, 2019).

My view on elevated horror diverges significantly from these critics. I do not see

the existence of elevated horror as producing a clear and absolute taste hierarchy

distinguishing between elevated and non-elevated. The example of Robin Wood’s

comparative analysis of The Omen (d. Donner, 1976) and The Texas Chain Saw

Massacre (d. Hooper, 1974) may provide some clarification on this point (1978/2018, pp.

94-95). By Wood’s description, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is “raw” and

“unpolished” by design, but that does not mean it is any less of a work of art than The

Omen, which Wood describes as having “glossy production values.”8 The two films

8In fact, Wood makes the case that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is more artistically ambitious than The
Omen (1978/2018, p. 95).
21
contrast in aesthetic, not necessarily in quality. Elevated horror, similarly, is not

categorically more artistically valuable than other horror; it is merely an aesthetic. Given

the elevated horror cycle’s impact on the discourse of contemporary horror cinema, I

think dismissing the trend entirely on the grounds of taste politics, as some have, would

be a mistake.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This project examines the progression of the elevated horror cycle through case

studies of three A24 horror films—Under the Skin, The Witch, and Midsommar. Through

a combination of discourse analysis and textual analysis, I look at how A24 employed the

aesthetics of elevated horror in its films and how those films were used to perpetuate the

company’s branding as part of an indie taste culture. A24’s house style for theatrically

released films, I will argue, depended in part on the “elevated” qualities of its horror

films. These qualities, outlined at the beginning of this chapter, received praise in popular

press critical discourse which helped to bolster the company’s position in the independent

film market.

I also endeavor to use these case studies to establish the common elements that

link films of the elevated horror cycle together. Textual analyses of each film present a

continuity of stylistic, narrative, and generic characteristics. Elements of the elevated

horror aesthetic are present in these films, as well as elements which are more

conventional of the horror genre. Additionally, all of the films discussed in this project

exercise some level of genre hybridity.

22
 Under the Skin, which A24 acquired U.S. distribution rights for in 2013 and

released in 2014, came at a time when the still relatively new company was making

moves to expand its operations and output. Under the Skin also showed the company

moving in the direction of non-mainstream genre films. The film was an early example of

what the company sought out in its genre films—cerebral, psychological films with an

art-house style. Chapter 1 looks at how Under the Skin fit into A24’s business strategy,

and how the company carefully marketed genre films to distinguish itself from other

independent studios. Under the Skin presented A24 as a studio desiring to release cutting-

edge genre films which would appeal to a cinephile audience. At the same time, A24 also

desired to expand the audience for these films by distributing them wide and marketing

them as more conventional genre fare. Through a comparative analysis of A24’s

marketing for Under the Skin and the marketing for the film by its U.K. distributor

StudioCanal, Chapter 1 illustrates these marketing and distribution tactics at work. The

chapter also examines how Under the Skin is representative of the elevated horror

aesthetic, despite it being released before use of the term “elevated horror” became

commonplace to describe this cycle of films. Using textual analysis, I show how the film

uses both an elevated style and traditional elements of horror to tell its story, as well as

the ways in which the film functions as a genre hybrid.

Chapter 2 focuses on the 2016 release of The Witch, looking particularly at how

the film’s success factored into the development of the elevated horror cycle. I would not

argue that The Witch is the cycle’s “originary film”— the term Amanda Ann Klein uses

to describe the first major success of any given cycle (2011, pp. 4). However, The Witch
23
succeeded both financially and critically to a degree that earlier films in the cycle had not.

This is due in part to A24’s aggressive release of the film. The film opened wide, and it

achieved the highest worldwide gross of any film A24 had distributed up to that point. As

such, the film is a marker of growth for both A24 and the elevated horror cycle. As

previously mentioned, 2016 was a remarkable year for A24. With the company’s

breakout performance at that year’s Academy Awards, the box office success of The

Witch, and the release of Moonlight (d. Jenkins, 2016)—the film which would win the

Best Picture Oscar in 2017—2016 was arguably the year where the seeds of A24’s goals

began to bear fruit.

Chapter 3 focuses on Midsommer, released in 2019, which was something of a

watershed year for A24. The company distributed more films in 2019 than it had in any

previous year. Among this slate of films was the first film acquired alongside Apple for

the tech company’s newly minted streaming platform, as well as the first films produced

by A24 in partnership with HBO. A24 also made an exclusive streaming deal with

Showtime for an undisclosed sum (Low, 2019). The various deals that were moving

A24’s content into the streaming space showed a diversification of the company’s

revenue streams, which provided it the means to continue distributing its highest profile

films wide theatrically. Given that the theatrical revenue for even the highest grossing of

these films is modest, these partnerships are crucial to the company’s continual push for

brand name relevancy in the indie market.

Of the 13 films that received a theatrical release from A24 in 2019, three were

made by directors who were working with the studio for the second time—Midsommar,
24
The Lighthouse, and Uncut Gems (d. Safdie and Safdie, 2019). And Trey Edward Shults’

Waves marked the director’s third collaboration with the studio. Given their formal

ambition, all four of these films could make compelling case studies in an analysis of

authorial autonomy within an independent studio. As it pertains to the current project,

though, the ambition of both Midsommar and The Lighthouse present a heightening of the

elevated horror aesthetic that is worthy of closer study. Midsommar, in particular, is a key

case when looking at the marketing and distribution strategies of A24 horror product. The

film was given a wide, 2,700-theater release in the heart of the summer season. A

director’s cut of the film was then released six weeks later in over 600 theaters. Clearly

A24 was banking on the credentials of their brand and Aster, coming off the success of

Hereditary, to drum up enthusiasm over multiple cuts of the film. The director’s cut did

not necessarily pay off for A24, as the four-week-long release netted under $1 million.

However, it speaks to the stock A24 places in their brand name and stable of directors to

cultivate a loyal audience. Chapter 3 will look in-depth at this relationship between A24

and directors like Aster, addressing to what extent discourses of auteurism factor into

their market strategy.

With this project, I have a vested interest in continuing the historicization of the

horror genre. In doing so, I have chosen as my focus a production cycle that is very much

still ongoing and a studio whose impact on the American entertainment industry will only

be properly and exhaustively measured from a future point of retrospection. Both A24

and the elevated horror cycle are works in progress. Nevertheless, and as this introduction

has laid out, I find that the contemporary trend of elevated horror fits neatly into the
25
periodizing method of cycle studies. Furthermore, I believe A24 to be a crucial object of

study when it comes to both American independent cinema and horror cinema of the

2010s.

26
 Chapter 1: A24 and the Presentation of Genre in Under the Skin

This chapter examines the generic dimensions of the 2013 film Under the Skin (d.

Glazer). Although its release predates the contemporary usage of “elevated horror,”

Under the Skin anticipates the elevated horror cycle with its narrative, style, and genre

hybridity. This chapter aims to establish Under the Skin as a precursor to the elevated

horror cycle and A24’s involvement in the cycle’s popularization. A24 served as the U.S.

distributor for Under the Skin, and the company reconstructed the film’s genre elements

in its marketing materials. I argue that this marketing tactic, which A24 used to sell

Under the Skin and its future horror films to mainstream audiences, greatly influenced the

conversation around the elevated horror cycle. Assessing how genre was presented in

Under the Skin, A24’s marketing for the film, and the film’s critical reception is thus an

effective place to begin when discussing A24 and its relationship to elevated horror.

Before this discussion of Under the Skin, I will briefly outline the industrial

environment from which A24 originates. Entire books have been written about the

independent boom that began in the early-1980s, the Sundance-Miramax era, and the rise

of Indiewood. These accounts do a thorough job of articulating the many variables in the

roughly 40-year lifespan of contemporary independence. What I hope to do here is

provide a brief historical survey of American independent cinema from which A24

emerges.

The “independent” in American independent cinema has been a descriptor for

films produced, distributed, and/or exhibited outside of the Hollywood studio system and
27
major theater chains (Newman, 2011, p. 3). The Poverty Row companies—Republic and

Monogram (later known as Allied Artists), most notably—were alternatives to the major

studios during the classical era. As Tzioumakis outlines, following the Paramount decree

Republic, Allied Artists, and a number of newer independents shifted their market

strategies to weather the storm of economic recession, the end of the exhibition practice

of double bills, and the rise of television programming “modelled on the B film” (2017,

pp. 124-125). From the 1950s to the end of the 1960s, these “low-end independents”

tapped into the youth market, ushering in a new genre of exploitation “teenpic” films

(Tzioumakis, 2017, pp. 133-134). Chief among them was American International Pictures

(AIP). AIP co-founders Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson adopted a shrewd

marketing approach labeled the “Peter Pan Syndrome,” in which they reasoned that

targeting the 19-year-old male would result in catching the largest young audience

(Tzioumakis, 2017, pp. 138-139).

Tzioumakis continues his account by noting the turbulence of American society in

the late-1960s and, by extension, an existential crisis moment for the film industry:

While the country was in social and cultural upheaval, the American film

industry had to face its own set of severe problems as well as keep up with

the transformations in the American social and cultural fabric. These

problems included: the financial overexposure of the majors … the

continual audience decline, which reached an ultimate low of 15.8 million

people a week in early 1971[sic]; the decrease in the number of theatres;

the entrance of the television networks into the theatrical market, which
28
 increased competition and contributed to a glut of product; and an

extremely outdated (despite substantial revisions) Production Code, which

the industry was still trying to enforce at a time of sweeping changes in

sexual mores. (2017, pp. 155-156)

What came out of this period of volatility was the “Hollywood renaissance,” which

brought into the mainstream elements characteristic of exploitation and European art-

house cinemas. Films like Easy Rider (distributed by Columbia) were part of the

conversation of independence at the same time that American International Pictures

continued “leading the way” in exploitation cinema and another emergent trend, the

“New American Cinema,” was coming to the fore (Tzioumakis, 2017, pp. 156-158).

Films of the New American Cinema were released at the margins, produced and

distributed outside of the Hollywood structure (Tzioumakis, 2017, pp. 158).

This ethos of independence from the studios would later be adopted by indie

filmmakers of the 1980s, with notable releases like Stranger than Paradise (d. Jarmusch,

1984) and She’s Gotta Have It (d. Lee, 1986) leading the charge. This indie movement

was “off-Hollywood” both in its economic contexts of being produced outside of

Hollywood and being distributed by “genuine independents,” as well as in its

geographical distance from Los Angeles, with the movement’s “epicenter” being New

York City (Schatz, 2013, p. 128).

As Newman argues, independent cinema since the 1980s has held a different

connotation than these previous iterations (2011, p. 24). For Newman, from the 1980s

onward independent cinema “assumed a place and function in American film culture that
29
it never before had” (2011, p. 24). This new situation of independence was due in large

part to an industrial infrastructure that rose up to support independent filmmaking, an

“institutional base” which Geoff King argues helped the independent sector grow in ways

that the New American Cinema of the 1960s was not able (2005, p. 21). The introduction

of film festivals, most prominently the U.S. Film Festival (later known as Sundance), the

creation of a number of “small-scale distributors,” and the rapid growth of the home

video market all contributed to the success of independent cinema throughout the 1980s

(King, 2005, pp. 19-23).9

This institutionalization of independence continued into the 1990s. The profile of

Sundance increased to the point where the festival resembled a marketplace. An increase

in journalists covering the event and industry actors in attendance looking for talent and

acquisitions coincided with an increase in film submissions (Perren, 2012, pp. 156-157).

This raised the barrier to entry for unknown shoestring budget filmmakers. Meanwhile,

the Hollywood majors were making moves to diversify their output, which had become

increasingly hit-driven since the late-1970s. Their solution to distributing films “not

broadly targeted to all moviegoers” was to establish subsidiary indie divisions (Perren,

2012, p. 56). In 1992, Sony recruited former Orion executives Michael Barker, Tom

Bernard, and Marcie Bloom to launch Sony Pictures Classics, the first of these subsidiary

divisions (Perren, 2012, p. 57). 20th Century Fox followed suit with Fox Searchlight. In

1993, Disney purchased Miramax and the Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) purchased

9 As Thomas Schatz points out, at the height of the 1980s indie movement home video was seen as a boon
for the independents, but by the end of the decade the home video market would show itself to be more
dedicated to hit-driven product, a trend that ultimately hurt the independent movement (2013, p. 129).
30
New Line (Schatz, 2013, p. 133). Barry Diller acquired October Films and Gramercy

Pictures in 1999, folding them into USA Films, which itself became part of a merger that

resulted in Universal’s indie division Focus Features (Perren, 2012, pp. 216-218).

With these institutional changes, the major studios firmly inserted themselves into

the indie conversation, and consolidation made it difficult for “true independents” to

compete. This period of consolidation brought with it, according to Newman, a notion of

independent cinema that “achieved a level of cultural circulation far greater than in

earlier eras, making independence into a brand, a familiar idea that evokes in consumers a

range of emotional and symbolic associations” (2011, p. 4). Even as the Indiewood wave

started to wane in the late-2000s, this concept of indie branding remained a critical part of

the independent film scene.

For independent companies that launched in the 2010s like Neon and A24,

establishing the brand is a top priority in the pursuit of prestige. Neon, founded by Tom

Quinn and Alamo Drafthouse theater chain co-founder Tim League, distributes a mix of

prestige dramas, arty genre films, documentaries, and international films. The latter two

categories rarely see financial success at the domestic box office—with notable

exceptions like Fahrenheit 9/11 (d. Moore, 2004) and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

(d. Lee, 2000) more or less proving the rule. Still, the company uses the theatrical release

as part of their market strategy, even for these types of films. In a 2019 interview with

Screen Daily, EVP of acquisitions and production Jeff Deutchman articulates that the

theatrical release is the best “model to chase real upside, both financial and in terms of

cultural impact” (Kay, 2019). “[P]reserving the traditional theatrical window,”

31
Deutchman says, “can be the best possible advertisement for the film’s life on

[streaming]” (Kay, 2019). By focusing on the advertisement of a film’s “cultural impact”

in theatrical venues, Neon is effectively gearing its distribution strategy, from the outset,

toward prestige accolades that will undoubtedly help their brand name recognition. It is a

tactic that proved successful in their distribution of Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture-winning

Parasite in 2019, which spawned headlines like “‘Parasite’ has shocked the box office,

helped by an upstart studio” (The New York Times, November 27, 2019) and “‘Parasite’

Oscars are a huge win for Neon. Why the scrappy indie bet on Bong Joon Ho” (The Los

Angeles Times, February 10, 2020).

Neon’s efforts towards company branding are evident, too, in its awards season

“for your consideration” (FYC) campaigns. At the end of the calendar year, various

voting bodies receive “screeners” of a company’s films for awards consideration. This

can often take the form of a cheaply produced cardstock sleeve displaying the film’s

poster and containing a DVD copy of the film (see Fig. 1.2). Neon’s annual FYC

screeners, on the other hand, are bound together as a book (Fig. 1.1). Emblazoned on the

front of the book is the flashy and appropriately neon-tinted company logo. With other

studios’ screeners, the company logo appears as a small insignia on the front or back of

the sleeve, positioned as secondary information. Neon, on the other hand, positions the

titles of their films on the back of the book. While most companies present individual

films as awards-worthy, Neon foregrounds its corporate branding. Thus, it presents itself

as a prestige studio whose annual release slate is emblematic of this prestige brand.

32
Fig. 1.1: The Neon FYC book prominently features the company’s branding (Weber,
2019).

33
Fig. 1.2: The Dunkirk screener from Warner Bros. does not display studio branding
(Ehrlich, 2017).

A24 was brand-focused from the beginning. According to a Los Angeles Times

profile (written less than one year after the company’s 2012 launch), one of A24’s

driving goals was “to rewrite the indie-movie playbook by erasing the divide between art-

house cinema and the multiplex” (Lee, 2013). Speaking of the “art-house ghetto,” the

piece illustrates the indie space as one where creativity is suffocated by a lack of

visibility, and it presents A24 as a company which can remove the shackles of indie

stigma by providing its films with “hard-won cultural exposure” (Lee, 2013). This frames

A24 as similar to the biggest indie brand of the 1990s, Miramax, and it narrativizes A24

as a beacon of hope in the desolate desert of independence. This positions the company’s

theatrical goal as a noble pursuit. However, I would argue that the theatrical distribution

of its product serves a goal beyond this rose-colored narrative of saving indie cinema.

“Erasing the divide” by bringing art-house cinema to multiplexes is a means of

34
cultivating brand recognition. By claiming its films as art-house fare with mainstream

appeal, the company situates itself as an alternative to both the art-house theater

environment and the big-budget blockbuster product that dominates the multiplexes.

“A GLIMPSE INSIDE” A24: THE BEGINNING

David Fenkel left Oscilloscope Laboratories in May of 2012 (Kilday, 2012). The

film distribution arm of the company, Oscilloscope Pictures, which Fenkel co-founded

with Adam Yauch in 2008 with the aim of releasing “unique, independently produced

films” (Oscilloscope, n.d.), was responsible for distributing films like Wendy and Lucy

(d. Reichardt, 2008), Polytechnique (d. Villeneuve, 2009), Meek’s Cutoff (d. Reichardt,

2011), and We Need to Talk about Kevin (d. Ramsay, 2012). On August 20, 2012, Fenkel

announced his next venture: a distribution company headquartered in New York City that

would acquire finished films in the festival market as well as finance and produce its own

projects (McNary, 2012a).

Fenkel co-founded A24 with fellow industry veterans Daniel Katz and John

Hodges. Hodges was coming from Big Beach Films, which had produced Little Miss

Sunshine (d. Dayton and Faris, 2006), Away We Go (d. Mendes, 2009), Our Idiot Brother

(d. Peretz, 2011), and Safety Not Guaranteed (d. Trevorrow, 2012). Before serving as

head of production and development at that company, Hodges was an acquisitions

executive at Focus Features (Fernandez, 2012). Katz, meanwhile, worked in the film

division of Guggenheim Partners, which co-financed Twilight (d. Hardwicke, 2008),

Zombieland (d. Fleischer, 2009), and The Social Network (d. Fincher, 2010) (Fernandez,

35
2012). The studio-heads-to-be each carried professional expertise in one of the three

areas in which they hoped A24 would be able to excel: Fenkel in distribution, Hodges in

production, and Katz in financing. Similar to Oscilloscope’s ambitious annual slate, the

plan for A24 was to distribute between eight and ten films per year, and, even more

ambitious still, some releases would be positioned for wide theatrical release (Kay,

2012).

A24’s first acquisition was for the U.S. theatrical rights to A Glimpse Inside the

Mind of Charles Swan III (d. Coppola, 2013), a deal made in the lead-up to the 2012

Toronto International Film Festival. This came just 10 days after the founding of the

company was announced (Fleming, 2012). At Toronto, the company picked up the North

American rights to Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa (2013) (McNary, 2012b). Later that

year, it partnered with Annapurna to domestically release Spring Breakers (d. Korine,

2013) (McNary, 2012c). A24 ended 2012 with these three deals in place, which signaled

what brand of film the company was interested in releasing and what its goals for such

films were. All three were films from directors with an indie track record. Roman

Coppola had co-written The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 2007) and Moonrise

Kingdom (Focus Features, 2012) with director Wes Anderson. Potter was best known for

Orlando (1992), which was distributed by the conglomerate-owned indie division Sony

Pictures Classics. And Harmony Korine was well-known in the indie scene for his

subversive films, which had been distributed by indie divisions like Fine Line Features

and more esoteric independents like the record label Drag City.

36
 A24 seemed to be pursuing talent which had previously attracted the attention of

conglomerate-owned indie divisions—this at a time when most of them had fallen by the

wayside or had been folded into their major studio parent company as the majors focused

their resources on franchise filmmaking (Schatz, 2013, pp. 137-138). And, in a decade

where streaming was a rapidly growing sector and becoming a viable new release

strategy for independent film, A24 seemed to be boldly doubling down on theatrical

distribution. Spring Breakers received a wide release, topping out at over 1,300 theaters

in the U.S. The Spectacular Now (d. Ponsoldt, 2013) had a platform release, topping out

at 770 theaters. Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) released to 650 theaters. A24’s

aspirations of having prestige releases with high visibility and awards-season buzz

followed the company right out of the gate—even if those aspirations did not

immediately bear fruit. Aside from Spring Breakers, none of A24’s 2013 releases paid

off at the box office, and its early hopes of awards-season accolades for these films

petered out quickly. Ginger & Rosa, which the company initially slated for awards

consideration in late 2012 (McNary, 2012b), instead was released in March 2013 to little

fanfare. And while the rigorous and unique “consider this shit” FYC campaign to net

James Franco a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Academy Awards may have

attracted the attention of the trade and popular presses (Keegan, 2013; Gray, 2013;

Dockterman, 2013), it did not ultimately generate significant awards-season

consideration outside of a handful of film critics associations.

These storylines may not have ended exactly how A24 intended, but it is telling of

how the company was dedicated early on to establishing itself as a notable entity in the
37
indie space while simultaneously pushing for box office hits. The company’s desire to be

a bullish disrupter both at the box office and during the awards season—a two-pronged

tactic exercised by Miramax before it—is evident in its decision to put its resources

behind a film from a veteran yet non-mainstream director like Korine.10 It is perhaps

emblematic of A24’s balancing act between on the one hand branding based on

Hollywood opposition and on the other the economic drive for a theatrical hit that none

of the films Korine had directed before Spring Breakers grossed more than $200,000 at

the box office (Simpson, 2013). Not to mention its “for your consideration” efforts for

Spring Breakers played out, in part, on the company’s “irreverent” social media (Gray,

2013). This functioned both to provide an offbeat FYC campaign that could drum up

publicity and to court a young, cinephile audience looking for an alternative to the

Hollywood mainstream. This social media presence paints A24 as being an active

participant in this oppositional tone, although the company’s financial goals are in line

with those of other Hollywood studios.

Michael Z. Newman identifies an “indie culture” which is positioned in

opposition to the mainstream (2009, p. 16). He views “indie” as a “cinematic and cultural

category that is not determined by the industrial definition … it is a contradictory notion

insofar as it counters and implicitly criticizes hegemonic mass culture, desiring to be an

authentic alternative to it, but also serves as a taste culture perpetuating the privilege of a

social elite of upscale consumers” (2009, p. 17). Newman claims this “taste culture”

10Korine’s own career was launched by Miramax with Kids (1995), a film he wrote which fueled
controversy and a cult following.
38
niche is “mainly young … white, educated, affluent, and urban” (2009, p. 22). A24, as

Newman suggests of indie culture, seeks both to differentiate itself from the

homogenized mainstream of Hollywood and to embrace the commercialism of the

entertainment industries. This is, to be sure, not unlike other independent studios. A24

has amassed its niche audience out of this “indie culture” sector, playing into the aspects

of its products that present an opposition to the mainstream and profiting off the young

(i.e., millennial and gen Z) cineaste consumer. The indie taste culture is a key component

of the company’s brand identity, and I believe it is an identity carefully cultivated in such

a way that an oppositional attitude is not taken at the expense of the profit motive.

The company’s deal to co-finance films with DirecTV is one facet of its market

strategy that exemplifies this careful brand construction. The deal, announced in

September 2013 and carrying an initial $40 million price tag, gave DirecTV exclusive

rights to some of A24’s future content for use on DirecTV’s on-demand service 30 days

prior to any theatrical release (Spangler, 2013). The windowing practices that most major

theater chains insist on would, in practice, make theatrically distributing films under this

deal difficult. Given A24’s commitment to theatrical distribution, this deal bifurcated the

company’s slate into two camps: the theatrical on the one hand, and the streaming and

VOD on the other. Films under the DirecTV deal might receive limited theatrical runs in

venues outside of the major theater chains, but they would not receive the wide releases

of A24 films which were not part of the deal. In addition, DirecTV’s nascent foray into

original VOD content was limited to DirecTV subscribers and offered at an additional

premium cost (Spangler, 2013). Given the limited reach of these releases, it would be
39
difficult for A24 to garner significant brand recognition from films under the DirectTV

deal. The deal offered A24 an additional revenue stream, but the films released through it

were traditional genre fare not associated with the company’s prestige brand. A24

reserved its prestige content for theatrical distribution, where the company could present

its brand to a wider audience.

It is not hard to see, in retrospect, this branding tactic at work. Films released

theatrically by A24 are integral pieces of its house style—they are presented as being

cutting edge art-house content from directors whom the company positions as auteur

talent. The company’s top-grossing films—Hereditary (d. Aster, 2018), Lady Bird (d.

Gerwig, 2017), Moonlight (d. Jenkins, 2016), Uncut Gems (d. Safdie and Safdie, 2019),

Midsommar (d. Aster, 2019), The Witch (d. Eggers, 2016), and Ex Machina (d. Garland,

2015)—illustrate this brand quite well. Meanwhile, films released under the DirecTV

deal are, by and large, lesser-known films which are not afforded this upper-tier

presentation—films such as Son of a Gun (Avery, 2014), Equals (d. Doremus, 2015),

Barely Lethal (d. Newman, 2015), and Backstabbing for Beginners (d. Fly, 2017). As

A24 became a prominent player in indie cinema, it was the theatrical output that

exemplified what an A24 film looked like; the DirecTV films released as a means of

diversifying A24’s revenue streams were absent from this conversation.

Under the Skin was an early attempt by A24 to cultivate its brand identity by

theatrically releasing prestige genre cinema. Given the film’s unique presentation of

genre, it serves as a prime example of both an elevated genre property and the type of

content A24 uses to satisfy its niche fanbase while simultaneously courting a more
40
mainstream audience. Coming a few years before “elevated horror” was a hot button

phrase in the discourse of horror cinema, Under the Skin was an early example of the

aesthetic that would come to define the elevated horror cycle.

THE 13-YEAR JOURNEY OF UNDER THE SKIN

Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin was optioned in November 2000 by

production company and management firm Industry Entertainment (Lyons, 2000). The

book, Faber’s first, received some critical accolades, including being shortlisted for the

United Kingdom’s prestigious Whitbread Award (now the Costa Book Awards) for Best

First Novel (“Whitbread Prize,” 2000). In it, an alien named Isserley is hired by a

corporation to harvest human males for their meat. Traveling along Scottish highways,

she picks up hitchhikers and drugs them, taking them back to an isolated, rural location

where other alien workers farm them like cattle.

Film4 (FilmFour, at the time) was brought on to develop the project, and Jonathan

Glazer was tapped to direct the adaptation (Lyons, 2000). Glazer was known at that time

for directing music videos for Radiohead, and his feature film debut was two months

away from its initial UK release. This debut, Sexy Beast (2000), was a critical darling.

Co-star Ben Kingsley earned Best Supporting Actor nominations at the Golden Globes,

the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the Academy Awards, and Glazer received a

BAFTA nomination for Best British Film. The accolades and critical acclaim for Sexy

Beast made the prospect of a Glazer-directed Under the Skin adaptation look promising.

41
However, it would take over a decade for Under the Skin to finish production and receive

a theatrical release.

While the first pass at an adaptation of Under the Skin was being written by

novelist-turned-screenwriter Alexander Stuart (Wiseman, 2014), Glazer moved on to

another project, Birth (2004), which was a substantial disappointment. The film was

booed at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival and, lacking the critical support it

needed to sell audiences on its inaccessible premise, subsequently fell into obscurity

(Robey, 2017). Glazer then returned to Under the Skin and the Stuart script (Leigh,

2014). This script was a “relatively faithful rendition” of the book, according to producer

James Wilson (Wiseman, 2014). This version did not interest Glazer much, although he

was not sure at the time what was missing (Leigh, 2014). Months of re-writing ensued.

Glazer cycled through writing collaborators, first Milo Addica and then Walter Campbell

(Leigh, 2014). Campbell and Glazer would end up with final writing credit on the film.

By 2008, Glazer and Campbell were finishing a script that came with an estimated

production budget of $40 million (Wiseman, 2014). Brad Pitt was brought on to give the

film a marketing boost in the form of A-list talent; he was to play one half of an alien pair

who pretended to be a husband and wife in the Scottish countryside. Pitt moved on from

the project before production began, resulting in changes to the script which focused

solely on the female alien (Leigh, 2014). Scarlett Johansson was tapped for the role.

According to Glen Basner, whose company FilmNation handled the film’s sales,

“[Johansson] gave the film a commercial backbone,” resulting in pre-sales at the 2010

American Film Market of around $4.5 million (Wiseman, 2014). The film was thus sold
42
in large part on Johansson’s star persona, a somewhat ironic prospect given the ways in

which the film actively downplays her star status. The character’s hair, costuming, and

English accent, as well as the “extended Kuleshov experiment” that is her lack of

significant facial expressions (Herzog, 2016), strip away the star image for the purposes

of capturing “real” interactions with non-actors. In one scene, Johansson’s character trips

and falls onto the pavement, where she is helped up by real-life bystanders who “appear

not to recognize her” (Herzog, 2016). The filming of this scene, however, was observed

by “paparazzi and pedestrians who [did] recognize Johansson as Johansson” (Herzog,

2016). I think this example nicely illustrates how the film was both sold on Johansson as

a marquee star and filmed with the intent to undercut the notion of a “star vehicle” by

shooting non-actors who did not realize they were interacting with an A-list actor.

Under the Skin premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival and then screened at

Venice, to a warmer reception than Birth yet still a decidedly mixed response. U.S.

distribution rights for the film were acquired by A24 within 24 hours of its next

screening, which took place at the Toronto International Film Festival. The deal carried a

price tag that was just north of $1 million (Fleming Jr., 2013), and it would be A24’s first

science-fiction/horror release.

Glazer’s finished product is not easily confined to one genre. Glazer himself

comments on how science fiction was a “starting point” for the project but not a wholly

satisfying label for it (Sartin, 2014). Johansson has said that the film is not a genre film at

all, but instead something which is harder to define (StudiocanalUK, 2014c). Despite

Johansson’s comments presenting the film as something which is not describable through
43
genre means, Under the Skin does contain generic traits. The film carries some

recognizable conventions of the science fiction genre, but ultimately it is a genre hybrid.

This genre hybridity, along with the film’s style and psychological narrative, fit quite

nicely into the definition of elevated horror outlined in this project’s Introduction. The

film has in some cases been retroactively placed within the corpus of elevated horror—

David Church, in his book on “post-horror” (a common synonym for “elevated horror”),

places Under the Skin as the earliest example of the cycle’s “primary/core texts” (2021, p.

14).

The film’s aesthetic, stripped-down narrative, and genre hybridity produced an air

of inaccessibility that made its commercial prospects questionable. As much as Film4,

A24, and UK distributor StudioCanal sold the film on Glazer’s reputation, the delayed

production made marketing Under the Skin on the success of Sexy Beast a difficult task.

The companies foregrounded other selling points of the film in their marketing materials,

resulting in trailers which were in many respects similar, but which differed in a few key

areas. Highlighting these differences helps to show A24’s intentions for the film vis-a-vis

their brand identity. A24 deployed Under the Skin in a manner which both presented the

film as an art-house project geared toward a cineaste audience while simultaneously

showcasing the elements of the film which made it more commercially viable. This is the

first instance of A24 marketing elevated horror as part of its house style and brand, and it

is a signal for how the company would use elevated horror as a key part of its business

strategy moving forward.

44
RECONSTRUCTING GENRE IN THE UNDER THE SKIN MARKETING
Under the Skin was distributed in the U.S. by A24 and in the U.K. by

StudioCanal. The “teaser trailer” for Under the Skin, which StudioCanal and production

company Film4 featured on their YouTube accounts but A24 did not (Film4, 2014;

StudiocanalUK, 2014a), very prominently emphasizes the more avant-garde, abstract

imagery of film. The first 52 seconds of StudioCanal’s 83-second advertisement comes

from one of the first images of the film. It is an indiscernible spherical object, resembling

an inhuman pupil filling with inky blackness, which then cuts to a human eye in extreme

closeup (Fig. 1.3). It is an image that calls to mind the notion of gazing, as well as a

connection between the human and the non-human which plays a key role in the film’s

narrative. This image, however, does not sell the film to the consumer in a traditional

way. They are not images which establish the basic elements that a trailer would

normally foreground: premise, character, setting, creative talent, etc. The names of

Johansson and Glazer are not foregrounded, and there are no depictions of events from

the film which would establish a narrative premise. The names of Johansson and Glazer

do appear at the end of the trailer, but this follows imagery which establishes almost no

information about the film itself. Glimpses of Johansson are seen in the trailer’s final few

seconds, but these shots are shown so briefly that one could watch them and not even

discern that the woman is in fact the A-list actor.

45
Fig. 1.3: More than half of the runtime of the teaser trailer for Under the Skin features
these two ambiguous shots.
46
 StudioCanal’s teaser trailer sells Under the Skin as an art-house or even avant-

garde take on a horror-thriller. A24’s marketing materials also display this art-house

inaccessibility, but not nearly to the same extent. A24’s theatrical trailer also begins with

the film’s difficult-to-parse opening shots, but it shows them much more briefly (A24,

2014a). Very quickly, Johansson becomes the centerpiece of the trailer, thereby selling

the film as a star vehicle in a way that the StudiocCanal trailer does not. Images of

Johansson in A24’s trailer are then followed by images of her character’s potential

victims, which are shown while being underscored by foreboding music. Voiceover

dialogue establishes Johansson’s character as seducing the men she picks up in her van.

Glazer’s name appears, alongside his previous credits. Then A24’s trailer turns to sex

appeal marketing with images of Johansson in lingerie. The trailer then cuts to a few brief

shots of less-accessible imagery such as Johansson’s disembodied face in a field of

orange light and liquid shooting down a conveyer belt. These more abstract images,

however, are crosscut with quotes from critics’ reviews which paint the film as “strangely

erotic” and terrifying. Then, Johansson’s character is positioned as a more prototypical

horror movie villain, standing on a beach looking on coldly as two people struggle to

swim against the tide. A shot of her emotionless face as the people in the water are

evidently drowning ends with a violently dissonant musical sting that is typical of a

horror movie trailer. She is then shown engaging in sexual activity with a man. The end

of this A24 trailer increases the pace, amplifying the propulsive score and showing

Johansson’s character being kidnapped and running through a forest, culminating in a

shot of a fiery figure in the woods.

47
 Comparing the two trailers shows that StudioCanal’s marketing was aimed at the

art-house crowd, while A24’s attempted to appeal to both the art-house and the

mainstream. A24’s trailer does not distance itself from the less accessible elements of

Glazer’s film. It adopts in its trailer similar imagery to the StudioCanal teaser trailer,

imagery which would sell the film to an audience looking for something less mainstream

than what major studios generally produce. But A24 also foregrounded elements of the

film which would sell to a wider audience (e.g., Johansson’s star persona and familiar

generic traits). The trailer presents the film as erotic, sensual, horrifying, and action

packed. Not only did A24 foreground these generic elements, but in some instances it

exaggerated them. Perhaps the most prominent example of this is in the depiction of the

film’s sexuality. While the element of sex is ingrained into the film’s horror conceit and

is thus portrayed in the film as more insidious than erotic, the depiction of sex in A24’s

trailer sells the film on the partial nudity and sexual situations involving Johansson. It

places some of these moments out of their insidious context in such a way as to position

the film as something closer to an erotic thriller than a science fiction film.

A featurette on A24’s YouTube channel featuring Johansson also works to

exaggerate this eroticism (A24, 2014b). In it, Johansson describes her character as having

a “darkness” and a “hunger” while the featurette cuts to images of her character

undressing. While Johansson seems to be describing the character’s arc as an alien whose

drives and curiosity lead her to become something resembling human, the featurette is

marketing the “darkness” and “hunger” as relating directly to the character’s sexuality. In

fact, the majority of the footage pulled from the film for this featurette depicts sexuality
48
and Johansson’s character seducing men, despite Johansson speaking in her interview

about other aspects of the film related to the production process, the film’s themes, and

her character’s development. As a point of contrast, StudioCanal’s marketing also

utilized a video featurette discussing Johansson’s work on the film (StudiocanalUK,

2014c). This featurette shows clips of the film that suggest Johansson’s character

seducing men, but it does not directly market Johansson’s performance on sex appeal in

the way A24 does.

A24’s employment of Johansson’s star person in its promotional material

involved a rather traditional approach to marketing sex appeal. It takes the film’s more

nuanced interpretation of the male and female gazes and reduces it to a piece of

marketing in which the male gaze is the selling point. At the same time, the interviews on

the A24 featurette from Johansson, Glazer, and producer James Wilson are attempting to

speak to the craft of portraying this alien character as being a triumph and something

unlike what is seen in mainstream Hollywood films.

These marketing materials reinforce two points. First, they are demonstrative of

A24’s efforts to acquire, distribute, and sell films which appear to be outside of the

mainstream. In doing this, they strive to court a cinephile audience, one which subscribes

to the indie taste culture as outlined by Newman. Second, the trailer and interview

featurette show that A24 does not want this cinephile niche to come at the expense of a

wider, mainstream audience. The company wants to present itself as a hip indie studio

that is giving a cinephile audience the movies that they want to see but cannot find

anywhere else. However, the company also welcomes a “crossover” hit wherever they
49
can find it. As co-founder David Fenkel stresses in the Los Angeles Times profile, A24

“wants all [of its] films to cross over” (Lee, 2013). Part of this balance between a non-

mainstream acquisition like Under the Skin and the company’s mainstream aspirations is

a marketing approach that involves both showcasing stylistic novelty and foregrounding

genre conventionality. This marketing aims to serve two masters—to construct and

maintain their brand, and to sell their product.

In the case of Under the Skin, the marketing did not amount to a crossover hit. Far

from it, the film grossed just $2.6 million domestically. In the United Kingdom, the film

made $1.9 million (USD) in 84 theaters (Box Office Mojo, n.d.), performing well with

the art-house crowd. That the film performed only marginally better in the U.S. shows

A24’s failure to draw in mainstream audiences in the numbers it had hoped to.

Nevertheless, the company would replicate these marketing tactics with future horror

releases, and these releases would help propel the discourse surrounding the elevated

horror cycle.

APPROACHING ELEVATED: GENRE AND UNDER THE SKIN

The marketing of Under the Skin by A24 might portray Scarlett Johansson’s

unnamed character as a succubus-inspired horror villain, but the character’s role in the

film itself is that of the protagonist. This is true of the book, as well, which mainly

situates its narration within the subjectivity of the alien character, who is called Isserley.

Both the novel and the film take a hybrid approach to genre—mixing elements of science

fiction, horror, and psychological thriller—and at their core they are both character

50
dramas. With this blending of genres, it is difficult to categorize Under the Skin as merely

a science fiction film. Given, too, the long production history outlined above, I argue that

it is similarly difficult to place the film within the corpus of the elevated horror cycle.

With the film’s story being both an adaptation and developed prior to the popularization

of the neo-grindhouse cycle in 2004 with Saw, the film stems from a different context

than the films of the elevated horror cycle.11

However, Under the Skin remains relevant to the present conversation of A24 and

elevated horror in that it is representative of the horror films A24 would go on to

distribute. These later films, beginning with The Witch in 2016, would influence the

trajectory of the elevated horror cycle. The Witch, some have argued, began the

conversation of the elevated horror cycle (Crump, 2019), and that film’s success led to

major studios trying their hand at releasing elevated horror. As previously mentioned,

Under the Skin has been retroactively added to the cycle’s corpus by David Church

(2021, p. 14), as it exemplifies the style, narrative, and tone that would come to be

associated with elevated horror. I argue that the film’s focus on character psychology and

its spare depictions of violence, along with elements of style which this section will

engage with, meet the parameters of elevated horror. The film certainly belongs in a

conversation of the cycle, even if its release predates the use of the term “elevated

horror.”

11 See the Introduction for a discussion of how the neo-grindhouse cycle of the 2000s gave way to the
elevated horror cycle.
51
 It should be noted, too, how genre hybridity functions within the elevated horror

cycle more broadly. Many films of the cycle engage with some form of genre hybridity.

As will be discussed in Chapters Two and Three, both The Witch and The Lighthouse (d.

Eggers, 2019) contain elements of historical drama with their period piece settings and

the acute attention paid to the period accuracy of their dialogue. A Girl Walks Home

Alone at Night (d. Amirpour, 2014), as critic Sheila O’Malley attests to, infuses multiple

generic influences into its vampire narrative: “Spaghetti Westerns, 1950s juvenile

delinquent movies, gearhead movies, teenage rom-coms, the Iranian new wave”

(O’Malley, 2014). The engagement with traits from multiple genres in Under the Skin,

then, does not preclude it from discussions of elevated horror. On the contrary, it

enhances the film’s connection to the cycle.

While not solely horror narratives, the book and film adaptation of Under the Skin

both engage with recognizable conventions of the horror genre. First, and perhaps

paramount to any definition of horror, is the existence of the monstrous within the

narrative. As Noel Carroll argues, the presence of a monster is not in and of itself an

indication that a story is part of the horror genre. The monster in horror, for Carroll, must

fulfill specific characteristics. The monster in horror presents or represents a disturbance

of “the natural order,” breaching “the norms of ontological propriety presumed by the

positive human characters in the story” (Carroll, 1990, p. 16). Carroll focuses on the

affective responses of characters to this disturbing monstrosity.

This is an idea which Glazer complicates in Under the Skin. The character of

Isserley is an alien monster by the Carrollian definition, but Isserley is made to appear as
52
a human. Characters coaxed into Isserley’s vehicle are not horrified by her image,

because Isserley has been medically reconstructed to resemble what they recognize to be

a human woman. Underneath this human disguise, Isserley is a black, featureless figure.

People are lured into the orbit of Isserley through her manufactured appearance of

normalcy. Nevertheless, Isserley disturbs the natural order through this disguise, and the

reader/viewer has the knowledge to identify this disturbance where most characters in the

book/film do not. Using Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger as a guide, Carroll presents

monstrosity as being something which is a sort of “category mistake,” a creature which is

interstitial and thus exists as categorically impure (1990, pp. 31-32). Isserley is visibly

represented as both human and alien, as existing between the boundaries of the known

and the unknown, the worldly and the otherworldly. While this defines Isserley as a

monster under Carroll’s definition, both the book and the film use the interstitial space of

the character’s identity and the impurity it elicits to present themes of belonging,

isolation, and (for lack of a better term) humanity.

Second, both the book and the film present images of visceral and abject bodily

harm. They do so in different ways, but both are adequately grotesque enough for the

genre of horror. The film depicts the capture of Isserley’s male victims as them sinking

into a pool of black liquid. Underneath the surface they float, trapped, as if marinating in

the inky pool as their bodies mutate to resemble something boneless and inhuman. In the

book, the function of their capture is made more explicit. The victims are penned like

cattle underground. They are explicitly referenced as “livestock,” as they are harvested

53
for their meat, which is considered a delicacy on this race of alien’s home planet. Over

time, they are mutated to maximize the production of meat:

The few remaining monthlings [human victims] were huddled together in a

mound of fast-panting flesh, the divisions between one muscle-bound body and

the next difficult to distinguish, the limbs confused. Hands and feet spasmed at

random, as if a co-ordinated response were struggling vainly to emerge from a

befuddled collective organism. Their fat little heads were identical, swaying in a

cluster like polyps of an anemone, blinking stupidly in the sudden light. You

would never guess they’d have the cunning to run if released.

All around the monthlings, their thick spiky carpet of straw glistened with

the dark diarrhoea of ripeness. Nothing which might cause the slightest harm to

human digestion survived in their massive guts; every foreign microbe had been

purged and replaced with only the best and most well-trusted bacteria. They clung

to each other, as if to keep their numbers undiminished. There were four of them

left; yesterday there had been five, the day before, six. (Faber, 2000, p. 181).

Where the film adaptation is more abstract in its depiction of the victims—one shot of

liquid human remains draining down a conveyer belt is the most explicit image of their

fate—the book presents a more direct and disturbing timeline of the victims’ grisly fate.

Both adhere to what Julia Kristeva articulates as eliciting the abjection at the heart of

horror, as the depictions of humans being made cattle disturbs “identity, system, order”

(Kristeva, 1980, p. 4).

54
 On both points, the depiction of the monstrous and the depiction of the abject,

Under the Skin is revealed to be a narrative about interstitiality and boundary

transference. Unlike traditional interstitial monstrosity, which often manifests physically,

the interstitiality of Isserley is manifested both physically and psychologically. In this

way, Under the Skin is a horror narrative about psychological states, as per the definition

of elevated horror I have outlined. In the film, Isserley is an alien sent to lure men into a

van for the purposes of farming them as mentioned above. Through the course of doing

this work, she becomes curious about the nature of human life and, eventually, absconds

from her duties. After failed attempts to properly assimilate into human life through acts

like eating and sex, Isserley is assaulted and set on fire in the woods. The character’s arc

could be viewed as a shift from alien to human.12 The categorical impurity that defines

her as a horror monster in the first half of the film is re-negotiated in the second half as an

unfixed boundary. Her character is shown not to be a static interstitial between the

recognizable human and the alien Other. Instead, her story is one of reconciling the

boundary between the two and attempting to realize her identity and the extent of her

agency within her environment.13

This shift is evidenced in the film with a pair of rather overt images that come after

Isserley sets one of her victims free. The first is a closeup of her looking in a mirror—it is

a somewhat Lacanian recognition of her human appearance (Fig. 1.4). The second is an

extreme long shot of her abandoning her van in the foggy road and walking out of the fog

12 One could also make the case for the film as a feminist text. Although, Glazer himself has commented
on his intentions to make a film reflecting a human experience rather than a gendered one (F.S., 2014)
13 Another worthwhile reading pertaining to categorical boundaries in the Under the Skin book comes from
Sarah Dillon (2011).
55
(Fig. 1.5). In these shots, Isserley is shown as identifying as a human woman instead of a

featureless alien and walking, literally and figuratively, towards clarity. Of course, her

attempt to broach this boundary and become part of human society is unsuccessful. She

attempts and fails to coexist, and she remains a cold observer of humanity, unable to fully

comprehend human emotion. This is much different from the book, in which the

interiority provided to the character shows the physical and emotional suffering that has

resulted from her transformation into a human figure and the isolation that comes with it.

The book also juxtaposes this sympathetic read on the character with brief glimpses at the

internal monologues of her victims, who are by and large depicted as dehumanizing and

unsympathetic figures. In doing this, Faber depicts Isserley as a sympathetic protagonist

from the outset, whereas Glazer’s film makes this protagonist status less clear-cut.

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Fig. 1.4: Isserley recognizes her human face in the mirror.

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Fig. 1.5: Isserley’s path is clear as she abandons her kidnapping duties.

Unlike a traditional horror narrative, there is in Under the Skin a graying of moral

culpability and a complication of audience alignment. Without the internal monologuing

of the novel, the moral implications of Isserley’s actions are harsher and more

pronounced in the film. At the same time, the narrative presents a character arc for

Isserley that allows the viewer to shift their alignment as the alien character transforms

from an antagonist to a protagonist. These complications emphasize the psychological

dimensions of Isserley’s character. Rather than relying on the depiction of the alien Other

as being monstrous, the film depends on the audience engaging with the Carrollian

monster as something more psychologically complex. Thus, the narrative of Under the

Skin is a signal of the elevated horror narratives to come.

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 The film version of Under the Skin is also stylistically adherent to the

characteristics of elevated horror (i.e., an emphasis on mood and shot composition rather

than on “jump scare” mechanics, deliberate pacing often leading to a rapidly paced

climax, a discordant soundtrack, symmetrical or otherwise centered framing, and the use

of deliberate camera movement).

Given the noticeable absence of scare tactics, Under the Skin is not a traditional

horror film. Instead, Under the Skin is a mood piece. Glazer uses the climate and natural

surroundings of Scotland as an atmospheric mood setter. The Scotland Isserley finds

herself in is dreary, gray, wet, and frigid. There is little about the environment that would

be inviting to an outsider like her. The realism that is introduced through this use of

natural locations is at odds with the artificial and somewhat inexplicable monochromatic

voids that Glazer inserts into the film. The white void in which Isserley is introduced,

stripping the clothes off a corpse, is an abstract and alien space, and it is unclear where

this space is in relation to other locations in the film. The black void to which Isserley

brings her victims is contained within an earthly space, given that she leads the men into

a building before the film cuts to the tar-colored pool of liquid (Fig. 1.6-1.7). However,

the room looks unnatural, and it feels out of place inside a manmade structure. Both the

natural and alien settings provide an uninviting atmosphere, which helps to establish an

uncomfortable and off-putting mood. This mood is amplified by Mica Levi’s unsettling

score, which incorporates distorted strings and spare percussion rhythms. It is a

soundtrack which occasionally approaches the feeling of a melodic line but that relies

heavily on the absence of harmony and the dead space between notes.
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Fig. 1.6: One of Isserley’s victims looks into the void.

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Fig. 1.7: An alien space inside a manmade structure.

Camera movement plays a small yet notable role in the film. The first time we see

Isserley within human society, she is walking through a crowded mall. A slow tracking

shot captures this moment for a substantial amount of time, showing Isserley blending

into the human world. At this point in the film, she is positioned as an unknown threat, a

creature walking among people in the same sinister way that the aliens in They Live (d.

Carpenter, 1988) are wolves in sheep’s clothing. We are then introduced to her van and,

shortly thereafter, her modus operandi. Deliberate pans from Isserley’s POV show her

scanning men as they walk by, searching for her first victim. It is, as a large portion of the

film will be, an illustration of Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory. Her potential victims, once

inside the van, will exercise the male gaze, oblivious to the fact that she was the first to

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gaze upon them. The camera’s alignment with her gaze is a telling reversal of the male

gaze, and it sets up Isserley’s later attempt to shed from her identity the interstitiality that

defines her as a monster. The camera, and thus the viewer, is situated within Isserley’s

gaze, implicating the viewer in her villainous actions. This is similar to the usage of POV

in traditional horror narratives, in which the camera positions itself behind the eyes of the

masked killer. In the case of Isserley’s arc of attempting to shed this monstrous

interstitiality from her identity, the use of gazing and POV suggests a further

complication of traditional horror tropes.

Glazer often employs centered compositions when shooting outside of the van.

Inside the van, there is one camera setup which symmetrically frames the driver and

passenger, but most of the other angles are more tightly framed and sharply angled by

necessity, given that the camera placements within the van were accomplished using

discreet, tiny digital cameras (Connor, 2016). The sequences in the van, as J.D. Connor

puts it, were a “throwback to a sort of verité guerrilla filmmaking” in pursuit of “real”

interactions with Glaswegian men (2016). This verité style is less adherent to the style of

elevated horror, but Glazer returns to the elevated horror aesthetic with austere centered

compositions in locations like the black void. Using POV again, the camera centers on

the images of Isserley and her victims as they slowly disrobe and walk towards the dark

pool that will ensnare the men. These repetitive sequences culminate in Isserley releasing

one of her victims, in which the centered shot on Isserley is no longer her fabricated

human form but her black, featureless alien body. This shot dissolves into a

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superimposition of the inky body over her human face (Fig. 1.8), illustrating once again

her desire to separate the categorical impurity which defines her identity.

Fig. 1.8: The duality of Isserley’s identity superimposed.

As this analysis shows, the elements of style which are shared with elevated

horror play directly into the psychological bent of the film’s narrative. If Under the Skin

is to be viewed as a sort of proto-elevated horror film, this interrelation of narrative and

style illustrates the points of divergence from non-elevated horror. Traditional horror

films released in the same decade as the elevated horror cycle—films like Paranormal

Activity 3 (d. Joost and Schulman, 2011), The Conjuring (d. Wan, 2013), and A Quiet

Place (d. Krasinski, 2018)—do not produce the same aesthetic. These films create

tension around set pieces which often culminate in jump scares and rely on narratives

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with external conflicts involving common forms of Carrollian monstrosity. Elevated

horror is grounded in the traditions of horror, in that it often engages with notions of

monstrosity and abjection. However, it does so through non-traditional means. The

“monsters” in The Babadook and It Comes at Night (d. Shults, 2017) are manifestations

of characters’ disturbed psyches. In The Witch, the monster is not the central horrifying

object of the film, but a catalyst for the psychological torment which is the central horror.

Depictions of the abject are present in films like The Witch, Raw (d. Ducournau, 2017)

and Midsommar (d. Aster, 2019), but they are used sparingly in comparison to the Grand

Guignol sensibilities of the “neo-grindhouse” (Wharton, 2013). Even Suspiria (d.

Guadagnino, 2018), an elevated horror remake of a giallo film very much in the Grand

Guignol tradition, builds most of its horror through atmosphere until the indulgent,

violent climax. In all of these cases, elevated horror is a reconfiguration of horror

conventions that emphasizes psychological narratives and style over scares. The

characteristic style of elevated horror sets these films apart from other contemporary

horror cinema.

A FILM FOR THE “COGNESCENTI:” A RECEPTION STUDY

A divisive film from its festival appearances onward, Under the Skin was met by

critics with much anticipation and a variety of opinions. Not all critics found the

psychological premise described above compelling. Todd McCarthy at The Hollywood

Reporter called the film a “purely visual experience without dramatic, emotional or

psychological substance” whose “approach to the subject [of shared traits between

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species] is so shadowy and imprecise … as to strip it of much tangible meaning at all”

(McCarthy, 2013). Scott Foundas at Variety saw no psychological depth underneath the

surface of the film, comparing seeing the world through the eyes of an alien to that of a

sociopath with “Johansson doing her best to convey varying degrees of blankness and

incomprehension at her own actions and those of others” (Foundas, 2013). Scott

Feinberg, too, saw no psychological substance in the film, which he called “plotless and

pretentious” (Feinberg, 2013). Justin Chang, writing of the film’s screening at the Venice

Film Festival for Variety, labeled Under the Skin “the most polarizing picture of the

[2013] festival season so far, variously hailed as a masterpiece or dismissed as an

abomination, depending on whom you’re talking to” (Chang, 2013). According to his

account, one of the film’s screenings at Venice was met with “a smattering of boos mixed

in with enthusiastic applause” (Chang, 2013).

The divisive spread of the critical reception carried over from its festival run to its

initial theatrical release. There was certainly not enough rapturous critical praise to cross

Under the Skin over into a mainstream hit. Audiences, it seemed, did not know what to

make of the film. Using the internet archiving tool “The Wayback Machine,” one can

trace a small initial buzz of anticipation in the U.S. prior to the film’s release, which

peters out into a mixed response as the film made its way in and out of theaters. On

March 31, one week before the film’s U.S. release, review aggregator site Rotten

Tomatoes logged that 94% of 7,519 users expressed interest in seeing the film (Fig. 1.9).

Following the weekend of April 4—the film’s limited opening in Los Angeles and New

York—62% of 9,551 viewers liked the film (Fig. 1.10). By the end of the film’s U.S.
65
theatrical release in August, that number had dropped to 54% out of 27,723 viewers (Fig.

1.11). The film’s Rotten Tomatoes user score as of this writing is 55% out of 36,574

viewers. 14 Its IMDb user score: a 6.2 rating out of 10 based on 128,017 user votes. The

film-centric social media platform Letterboxd gives the film a user score of 3.7 out of 5.

Letterboxd caters to a more cinephile audience than aggregator sites like Rotten

Tomatoes and Metacritic, with users writing reviews that Scott Tobias at The Ringer

describes as “casual, personal shorthand that’s aimed squarely at the cognoscenti”

(Tobias, 2020). This may explain its slightly elevated rating for Under the Skin.

Fig. 1.9: Rotten Tomatoes, March 31, 2014

14 Numbers in this section were last accessed on November 19, 2020.

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Fig. 1.10: Rotten Tomatoes, April 07, 2014

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Fig. 1.11: Rotten Tomatoes, September 06, 2014

Speculating on these numbers, I extract two main points. First, that the avant-

garde aspect of the film, which A24 downplayed in its marketing, led to a mixed reaction

by critics and moviegoers alike, impacting its meager box office returns. Many critics

seeing the film at festivals, even those who enjoyed the film, made comments in their

reviews prognosticating that the film’s box office ceiling was low (Feinberg, 2013;

Chang, 2013; Foundas, 2013; McCarthy, 2013). Eric Kohn at IndieWire, curiously

enough, claimed that the film would “yield solid box office returns on opening weekend”

while also admitting that word of mouth on the film was mixed (Kohn, 2013). The film

totaled $7.2 million worldwide, with only $2.6 million coming from North America. This

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leads to a second important point: while Under the Skin proved to be a mark against the

A24 founders’ “anything can crossover” philosophy, the company appeared undeterred

by the film’s inability to transcend minor critical acclaim and a small cult fanbase. Under

the Skin would instead be emblematic of A24’s approach to genre cinema moving

forward. This is not surprising, considering the stylistic approach to genre is what most

critics were drawn to.

Critics referenced a vast array of antecedents to Glazer’s formalist take on genre

in Under the Skin—citing directors like David Lynch, Nicolas Roeg, and Stanley

Kubrick. Some, like Foundas and Matt Zoller Seitz, linked the van sequences to Abbas

Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997). Yet the generic novelty of the film remained at the

forefront of most reviews. “It doesn’t move or feel like most science fiction movies—like

most movies, period,” Seitz claimed (2013). Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips

commented on how what he described as “a blend of gritty neorealism … and modestly

scaled, elegantly wrought fantasy” rendered the science fiction unconventional and

unpredictable (2014). Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian commented on the fear and

eroticism of the film, while also making mention of a “dog-whistle of absurdist humour

… inaudible for some American reviewers” (2014). McCarthy said of the film, “the

mood is quiet and strong, pregnant with threat, not of horror film-like violence but of

unexpected images and psychosexual freakiness” (2013), illustrating the moody, style-

driven brand of horror that would become synonymous with elevated horror. Both those

critics who lauded the film and those that disparaged it agreed that the elusiveness of its

genre was one of its most prominent features.

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 The genre hybridity of Under the Skin—which A24 did not depict in its

marketing, instead presenting something slightly more generically conventional—played

a prominent role in the film’s critical reception. The importance of genre to the

production, promotion, and reception of the film marks the release of Under the Skin as a

crucial point in the timeline of A24 despite the film’s mixed reception and lack of

financial success. Moving forward, genre hybrid films continued to be a major part of

A24’s library and house style. Furthermore, as this chapter has outlined, A24’s

reconceptualization of genre in its marketing points to branding practices that the

company continued to exercise as it gained a loyal core fanbase and increased notoriety

in the independent sector.

CONCLUSION
Ultimately, Under the Skin can be viewed as a significant precursor to a number

of developments relevant to this study. First, it presented many of the formal aspects

which would become standard for the elevated horror cycle. The psychological

interpretation of horror conventions, most notably, is a narrative trait contained within

most elevated horror films. It could be argued that this is the trait which effectively

“elevates” the horror genre by presenting itself as something more substantive and

serious than a cut-and-paste monster story. The narrative’s play with genre is also an

element which carries over into other films of the elevated horror cycle. The film also

implements elements of style—a moody atmosphere, symmetrical shot compositions, and

a dissonant score—which will crop up in future elevated horror films.

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 Second, A24’s marketing of the film is demonstrative of tactics the company

continued to employ with their genre films moving forward. The company’s marketing

for Under the Skin presented the film as something more akin to an erotic thriller than an

art-house genre film about human identity. Trailers for A24’s horror films continued to

exploit the presentation of genre as a means of courting audiences beyond their cinephile

niche in the pursuit of crossover hits. They did so, however, in a way that also aimed to

prevent alienating this niche. The trailer for a film like It Comes at Night (d. Shults,

2017), for example, carefully used imagery from the film to suggest that there is a

monstrous and perhaps supernatural force that terrorizes the characters at night. In the

film’s actual diegesis, the only “Its” that come at night are familial strife, psychological

stress, and the fear of the Other. The film was not the monster movie the title and trailer

suggested; it was a psychological horror film about fear, paranoia, and self-preservation.

By repurposing the iconography in these films for their promotional materials, A24

reconstructed the films to appear more mainstream than they actually were. The

commercial incentives of the company are clear in this respect.

It is not a novelty to use marketing to present a product as something that it is not,

but A24 does it in such a way as to not sacrifice its brand identity as a caterer to a more

exclusive and “in the know” cineaste audience. The marketing materials for Under the

Skin may attempt to reach for a broader audience by presenting something generically

recognizable, but the film itself challenges the confines of genre in a way that the casual

moviegoer may not appreciate. The disparity between the Letterboxd and Rotten

Tomatoes user scores bear this distinction out—although I admit these sites’ abilities to
71
survey audiences are limited in scope. The Letterboxd user who meticulously rates and

logs all the films they watch is perhaps more likely than the casual Rotten Tomatoes user

to identify as part of the indie taste culture to which A24 brands itself. Thus, the average

user score for Under the Skin being higher on Letterboxd reflects an appreciation of this

challenging genre hybridity on the part of A24’s core, niche fanbase. It also is indicative

of the company’s failure to sell the film to a mainstream audience.

Third, Under the Skin can be viewed as a template for future horror films

distributed by A24. Genre is a crucial component to the company’s output. Elevated

horror, more than any other genre, is at the core of the company’s house style. This

chapter has outlined the traits of elevated horror present in Under the Skin, traits which

will reappear in future A24 horror films. The company’s commitment to the elevated

horror aesthetic will be assessed in more depth in the following chapters, starting with

one of the elevated horror cycle’s biggest success stories, The Witch (d. Eggers, 2016).

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 Chapter 2: The Witch and the Cultural Emergence of Elevated Horror

This chapter examines the outcomes of the financial and critical success of The

Witch (d. Eggers, 2016), assessing the extent to which the film and A24’s involvement in

its release influenced the cultural visibility of elevated horror. Through analyses of trade

and popular press discourses surrounding The Witch and other elevated horror films

released around the same time period—namely, It Follows (d. Mitchell, 2015) and Get

Out (d. Peele, 2017)—I make the case that the cultural awareness of the nascent elevated

horror trend was accelerated by the release of The Witch. In addition, I argue that A24’s

marketing and distribution strategies are crucial to consider when looking at the elevated

horror cycle. Using textual analyses of The Witch and A24’s marketing materials for the

film, as well as a discourse analysis of articles written about the elevated horror trend,

A24’s centrality to the cycle can be effectively illustrated.

The Witch premiered at Sundance on January 27, 2015 to much fanfare. To critics

who reviewed it, it was a smart blend of supernatural horror and psychological drama

(Chang, 2015; Smith, 2015; Kohn, 2015). The initial reviews heralded the film as an

accomplished debut for writer-director Robert Eggers. This praise was affirmed when

Sundance awarded Eggers its Directing Award, citing his work on the film as “a

consistent and excellently rendered vision … masterfully executed” (Sundance Film

Festival). A24 swooped into a bidding war for the film which included IFC and Magnolia

(Kit, 2015), ultimately securing U.S. rights for the film for a reported $1.5 million (Lang

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& Setoodeh, 2015). With this deal, one of the “most-buzzed about” films of Sundance

2015 was going to receive a sizeable theatrical release with a substantial marketing

campaign (Tallerico, 2016).

This whirlwind of events was about as good a debut as a first-time feature director

could hope for. Eggers began his career in theater working as a director, production

designer, and costume designer, then he moved into film production in the mid-2000s.

His first two films as a director were shorts adapted from the Edgar Allan Poe gothic

“The Tell-Tale Heart” and the fairy tale “Hansel & Gretel.” These short films reveal the

theme that Eggers is most fascinated by as a filmmaker: the past. The Witch embodies

this fascination quite clearly. The premise—a family is cast out of society for their radical

religious views and sets out for a remote cabin, where they are preyed upon by a witch

who resides in the nearby woods—is reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. The

Witch is a folklore-inspired horror story which depicts Puritanical New England in the

1630s with intricately researched period-accurate language, a facet which made the film

stand out from other contemporary horror cinema. The film is as much a period piece and

a family drama as it is a horror film, and Eggers would likely be the first to point this out.

He describes his inspiration for the film as wanting “to make this archetypal New

England horror story … a nightmare from the past, like a Puritan’s nightmare that you

could upload into the mind’s eye” (Bitel, 2016). When asked, following the release of

The Witch, if he would continue making horror films, Eggers responded, “the past is the

genre I am most enamored with … if that’s a genre” (Weston, 2016). With the praise

bestowed upon him by critics and the goodwill built with A24 through the box office
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performance of The Witch, Eggers would be given the opportunity to make even more

ambitious films in the “genre” of the past, The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman

(currently in post-production).

The reception of The Witch at Sundance may have been overwhelmingly positive,

but critics nevertheless predicted that the film would struggle to draw a mainstream

audience. As with A24’s previous genre film, Under the Skin (d. Glazer, 2013), aspects

of The Witch which would categorize it as elevated horror were deemed less accessible

than traditional horror. Todd McCarthy wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that “Eggers’

debut feature impresses on several fronts … but the overall effect is relatively subdued

and muted, probably too much so for mainstream scare fans” (2015). He predicted the

film would achieve cult status and “nice [box office] returns in smartly judged

specialized release” (2015). Justin Chang at Variety remarked similarly, speculating that

the film’s “formal, stylized direction and austere approach to genre” would “translate

appreciative reviews into specialized box-office success” (2015). The New York Post’s

Kyle Smith claimed the film’s “arty elements (slow pace, British accents, that

impenetrable dialogue) prevent it from being sold as a straight-up horror show” (2015).

In all of these cases, doubt was cast on the mainstream potential for this horror trend,

which was not yet being called elevated horror. Brian Tallerico had dubbed films like It

Follows, The Babadook, and The Witch as a “new wave horror movement,” while other

writers threw out the term “renaissance” (Tallerico, 2016).15 The formal elements of

15 There is evidence to suggest that talk of a trend in “elevated horror” began in the months following the
release of The Witch. The term “elevated horror” is, at least as it pertains to use by spectators and popular
press writers, relatively new to the discourse of horror cinema. Articles appearing as early as 2017 directly
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elevated horror in The Witch were viewed by critics as too restrained when compared to

the heavily punctuated, cacophonous scare tactics of the film’s contemporaries—e.g., The

Conjuring (d. Wan, 2013); Sinister (d. Derrickson, 2012); and the Paranormal Activity

franchise.

In the case of Under the Skin, this doubt proved to be well-founded, as that film

was a substantial failure at the box office. The Witch, however, experienced a much

different theatrical life. The film turned a healthy profit with a worldwide gross of $40.4

million, making it, at the time, the biggest financial success story of this “new wave

horror” trend.16 The film debuted in 2,046 theaters, the most for any A24 film to that

point (Lang, 2016), defying the critics’ expectations with a more ambitious distribution

strategy than all previous films in the elevated horror cycle. Even Eggers commented that

prior to A24 acquiring the film, he anticipated it would receive a limited theatrical release

in Los Angeles and New York before being shopped to streaming services (Tallerico,

2016). Instead, A24 took a big swing with a non-traditional genre property, which fits

into their M.O. as a disruptor in the indie scene.

The result of this swing may have been financially fruitful, but the audience

response to the film was not unilaterally positive. Again, A24 cornered itself into a

similar marketing trap as it had with Under the Skin. As will be discussed in more detail

in the following section, the company marketed The Witch as a somewhat standard

address the rising popularity in the phrase to describe films like The Babadook (d. Kent, 2014), The Witch,
mother! (d. Aronofsky, 2017), and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (d. Lanthimos, 2017) (Zeitchik, 2017;
Shepherd, 2017).
16 Unless otherwise stated, box office information is taken from The Numbers (https://www.the-
numbers.com/).
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monster story. Audiences expecting to see a traditional horror film were met with

something that instead required more patience to fully enjoy. CinemaScore, a company

which polls theatrical viewers’ reactions to films, scored The Witch a C- (Sharf, 2018). In

general, CinemaScore grades are viewed as a barometer for whether a film meets the

expectations of opening night audiences, which are often comprised of those most excited

to see the film. Low CinemaScore scores are a fate that befalls many films of the elevated

horror cycle which receive a wide theatrical release 17—It Comes at Night (D), mother!

(F), Annihilation (C), Hereditary (D+), Midsommar (C+), Gretel & Hansel (C-). In the

case of The Witch, the marketing is the likely culprit for some audience members’

expectations going unmet. And while CinemaScore is too small of a sample size to gauge

a consensus audience reaction, low ratings are often highly publicized in a manner that

can stigmatize a film and harm its word of mouth. For The Witch, the C- was low enough

for some journalists to take note, particularly when it came to box office analysis. Scott

Mendelson at Forbes and Brent Lang at Variety both mentioned the score in their box

office reporting (Lang, 2016a; Mendelson, 2016), with Mendelson saying that, despite

the film performing well in its opening weekend, he was “genuinely surprised it didn’t

get an F [from CinemaScore]” (2016).

For A24, low audience scores are not necessarily a detriment to its branding.

Given that the company’s stated goal is to bring art-house movies into the multiplex (Lee,

2013), this appears to be a paradoxical claim. However, when it comes to this goal, the

17CinemaScore does not poll films which release on under 1,500 screens unless contracted by a private
entity (CinemaScore, n.d.).
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company has two separate audiences, and the strategies by which they court each

audience is quite different. On the one hand, for A24 to be presentable as a prestige, hip

indie studio it must ingratiate itself to the “indie taste culture” niche. This requires the

company to acquire and distribute content which is “cutting edge” and oppositional to

mainstream cinema. Its horror content certainly fits this bill, and this contributes to those

films’ lack of mainstream audience appeal. On the other hand, the “taste culture” brand

identity does not require the endorsement of mainstream moviegoers, but the company

nevertheless wants that audience to purchase tickets to its films.

This idea is put into a more explicit context by film critic David Ehrlich, whose

profile of A24 in 2015 references dissatisfaction from consumers over misrepresentation

of the film Spring Breakers in online marketing. “[I]t became clear when I spoke to the

company’s employees,” Ehrlich writes, “[that A24] saw Spring Breakers as a Trojan

horse for progressive cinema—the company was less concerned about the nine kids who

found the film too weird than they were the one kid who went home and rented Gummo”

(2015). In this hypothetical equation, one viewer became part of A24’s niche fanbase

after seeing Spring Breakers, nine did not, but nevertheless all 10 paid to see the film.

The viral marketing campaign succeeded in piquing people’s interests, even if it did so by

selling the film as something it was not. Of course, the more business a film does in

theaters, the more attractive it appears as part of the company’s growing library of indie

titles, whose rights can be sold off to streaming services at high premiums. Add to this

critical praise and the potential for accolades like Academy Awards, and A24’s brand

name begins to become synonymous with quality, further cementing the lucrative status
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of its library and putting the company in a good position to become a significant player in

the independent sector.

2016 was a watershed year for A24 in this regard. This was the first year the

company walked away from the awards season with Oscar gold. Three films from A24’s

2015 slate won Academy Awards—Amy (d. Kapadia) won Best Documentary Feature,

Ex Machina (d. Garland) won Best Visual Effects, and Brie Larson won Best Actress for

her performance in Room (d. Abrahamson).18 Room was also nominated for Best Picture,

Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. This success at the Academy Awards likely

increased the visibility of A24’s brand. The cachet these awards carry often reflects the

attitude that an award-winning indie film is “more legitimate” and “mature” than its

mainstream multiplex counterpart (Newman, 2011, p. 48). Winning awards helps to

confirm a film’s alternative status to mainstream blockbuster cinema, which allows A24

to court the desirable, young indie taste culture audience. At the same time, the primetime

television platform provided by the Academy Awards can also increase the mainstream

visibility of a film and its studio.19 This works to satisfy A24’s other branding goal,

which is to attract the attention of a broader audience made up of more casual moviegoers

than the indie taste culture niche. Becoming a household name through a consistent slate

of award-winning product is one way of convincing the mainstream moviegoer to see the

company’s films in theaters.

18 In an awards season campaign that ultimately made her an A-list star, Larson also won the Golden
Globe, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild, and Indie Spirit awards for the role.
19 The Oscars telecast also reaches an older demographic than the company’s targeted online marketing, an
audience more likely than gen Zers to be tuning into a live televised event.
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 The release of The Witch was also a sizable step forward for A24 in terms of

attracting these two audiences and establishing itself as a significant independent

company. The critical praise for the film, matched with the successful theatrical run that

made it the company’s highest-grossing film at the time, proved to be a boon for both

A24 as a brand and elevated horror as a recognizable style. To put it another way, A24

pursuing its corporate mandates with The Witch inadvertently accelerated the visibility of

elevated horror to the point where, in a matter of years, it became a recognizable

subgenre and a crucial talking point in the discourse of contemporary horror cinema.

PSYCHOLOGY, MONSTROSITY, AND THE MAINSTREAMING OF THE WITCH

A24 often engages in offbeat forms of viral marketing to promote their films.

While promoting the film Ex Machina (d. Garland, 2014) at SXSW, the company created

a fake profile on the dating app Tinder featuring a bot resembling the android character

from the film, played by Alicia Vikander (Plaugic, 2015). To coincide with the release of

Midsommar (d. Aster, 2019), the company released an upbeat online advertisement for a

children’s toy of a bear locked in a cage—a toy which it sold on its online shop for $42.

A24 received minor publicity for two marketing stunts involving The Witch. One was an

endorsement of the film from the Satanic Temple. The second was a Twitter account with

tweets “authored” by the film’s embodiment of evil, Black Phillip the goat. Stunts like

these have provided A24 some publicity, mostly in the trade press, and they are

marketing ploys aimed at the company’s core cineaste audience who appreciate their

ironic tone.

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 To reach an audience beyond this niche, A24 markets its films more traditionally.

The theatrical trailer for The Witch presented the film as one of the scariest modern

horror films. The advertisement quoted critics describing the film as “one of the most

genuinely unnerving horror films in recent memory,” “a nightmarish picture that will

make your blood run cold,” and “unforgettable, disturbing, [and] terrifying” (A24, 2015).

Other promotional trailers used similar language from critics: “a new horror classic”

(A24, 2016a), “a full-blown demonic possession fright fest” (A24, 2016b), and “you feel

[watching the film] as if you’ve genuinely stepped into a nightmare” (A24, 2016c).

Quotes like these increased expectations for the film by presenting it as the best and most

terrifying horror movie of the year. This marketing also omitted certain aspects of the

film which critics highlighted, aspects which may not have played to a broad audience. A

number of critics described the film with terms that distanced it from contemporary

blockbuster horror— “atmospheric,”20 “slow-burn,”21 “dread,”22 “moody.”23 These

descriptors painted The Witch as a much more deliberate and understated horror piece

than the “fright fest” of which the trailer boasts.

The trailer does not shy away from the period setting of the film nor Eggers’

colloquial dialogue, elements which could turn away mainstream viewers. However, it

does situate The Witch as a “cabin in the woods” style supernatural horror. In doing so, it

foregrounds the external threats of the film’s diegesis and downplays the psychological,

20 This term is used to describe the film in Chang, 2015; Kohn, 2015; Grierson, 2016; Callahan, 2016;
Persall, 2016; Savlov, 2016; Bishop, 2016; Toppman, 2016.
21 Used in Hoffman, 2015; Savlov, 2016; Lewis, 2016; Bishop, 2016
22 Used in Kohn, 2015; Grierson, 2016; Cataldo, 2016; Callahan, 2016; Abele, 2016; Savlov, 2016; Lewis,
2016; Bishop, 2016
23 Used in Abele, 2016; Nashawaty, 2016; Abrams, 2016; Anderson, 2016; Truitt, 2016

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internal conflict posed by the film’s family drama dimension. Quick cuts over a

thunderous score depict the intensity of potential external conflicts, with the family’s

patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) drawing a rifle at an unseen target and his son Caleb

(Harvey Scrimshaw) approaching a foreboding hovel in the woods (Fig. 2.1). It also

shows shots from a scene in which Caleb is possessed, which culminates in the line

“there’s evil in the wood” over a black screen followed by an image of the witch. This

sequence of shots, juxtaposed with the critics’ quotes, pitches a terrifying monster story

about a witch who haunts and attacks an isolated family.

Generally speaking, that illustration is accurate. The film’s plot involves a witch

who kidnaps and murders the family’s newborn and, later, curses Caleb with an illness

that ultimately kills him. But the presentation of the narrative in the marketing leaves out

the element of psychological drama which lies at the heart of The Witch. The majority of

the film centers on Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the family’s eldest child, who is

accused of practicing witchcraft and doing the evil deeds that caused her siblings’ deaths.

Suspicion and persecution are the main sources of conflict and tension, and the

ramifications they have on the family build to the film’s climax. During this sequence,

Thomasin and her surviving siblings Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson)

are locked in a shed by their parents, who fear the devil may have come in the form of

their goat Black Phillip and corrupted them. Black Phillip then gores William, killing

him, and Thomasin is attacked by her mother Katherine (Kate Dickie), whom Thomasin

kills in self-defense. Her family now dead, Thomasin decides to sign the devil’s book and

join the coven of witches of which she was previously accused of being a part. The
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psychological toll of the events on Thomasin are as important to the narrative as the

existence of a monstrous witch. It is in large part this psychological angle that

preoccupies Eggers, and the folkloric monster in the woods functions as a catalyst for this

drama. The witch of the title appears in only three brief scenes, with most other scenes

depicting the increasing tensions among the family as supernatural occurrences raise

characters’ suspicions of one another.

The rapid sequencing in the trailer, which shows armed characters in the woods as

though they are hunting the witch (Fig. 2.1), presents the film as more action-packed and

tightly paced than it is. In the film itself, these scenes are quiet and deliberate, adding to

the atmospheric quality which the marketing does not sell. Those who chose to see the

film because of the trailers would be understandably disappointed when the film proved

not to be an exciting, good-versus-evil monster movie, but instead a deliberately-paced

examination of alienation and religious extremism in Puritanical New England and their

effects on a family.

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Fig. 2.1: These images from A24's official trailer exaggerate the extent to which the
film’s narrative is propelled by external conflict.

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 The Witch is a good illustration of the characteristics of elevated horror laid out in

this project’s Introduction. The narrative is concerned with the psychological states of its

characters in conjunction with depictions of the monstrous. The characters’ choices

ultimately lead the protagonist, Thomasin, to sign the devil’s book and convene with a

coven of witches in the woods in the film’s denouement. And the climax features a

Carrollian monster in the form of Black Phillip (it is a worldly creature inhabited by an

otherworldly evil presence, thereby presenting as an interstitial impurity).24 However,

most of the narrative is driven by the characters’ contrasting desires and how those

desires are temptations which run counter to their religious beliefs. Mercy and Jonas,

Thomasin’s younger siblings, wish to punish their sister for her strict care of them. Thus,

they perpetuate lies involving her exercising witchcraft and dealing with the devil,

sowing distrust among the family. Thomasin, meanwhile, attempts to act honestly and in

accordance with the family’s religious precepts, only to find herself pushed to the brink

by the accusations levied against her. This results in her abandonment of Puritanism and,

in the wake of her family’s death, an embrace of Paganism. Knowing that they are

viewed as sins against God, Caleb attempts to suppress pubescent sexual urges.

Following an incident with his father that causes him to lie to his mother (another sinful

action), Caleb finds himself in the heart of the woods in the presence of the witch, who

appears to him as a woman in her 20s. Caleb is seduced by this Pagan evil—he is,

according to the screenplay, drawn in by “her hypnotic amber eyes” (Eggers, 2019 p. 80).

He gives into temptation, allowing the witch to kiss him, an act which ultimately costs

24 See: Carroll, 1990.

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him his life. Katherine, the family’s matriarch, suffocated by their exile and desiring to

return to England, pushes back against the patriarchal structure of their household. She

also admits to losing her faith in God after her baby, Samuel, is kidnapped. And William,

the patriarch, quietly deceives Katherine in an effort to downplay the financial hardship

they are facing due to the anemic yield of their crops. Having sold Katherine’s silver cup,

a prized family heirloom, he allows Thomasin to bear the brunt of the accusations as to

its whereabouts.

In all of these cases, Eggers is presenting internal conflicts which are defined by

the characters’ strained relationships to both their religion and their immediate family,

which rise to the surface in the wake of an external yet largely unseen monstrous

presence. In this way, The Witch adheres to the elevated horror narrative, which relies on

character psychology even when the monstrosity common to the horror genre is present.

Only when the film reaches its climax does the pacing quicken and the conflict become

more external and violent. This adheres to the general narrative framework of the

elevated horror film, in which the deliberate pace and lack of excessive violence gives

way to a rapid and oftentimes bloody climax.

The film’s opening sequence establishes the elevated horror aesthetic quickly.

Most shots in this opening are symmetrically framed, establishing each member of the

family as they are tried for heresy to the Church (Fig. 2.2). The first shot that breaks from

the pattern of straight-on, symmetrical shots comes when William accepts their

banishment—the shot shows Thomasin in profile looking over at William in disbelief.

This is a pointedly jarring shift in shot composition used by Eggers to punctuate the
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severe implications of William’s prideful action to go against the Church. It is the film’s

inciting incident, and it is depicted in a way that draws the viewer’s attention to the film’s

style. From the outset, Eggers is foregrounding a style-over-scares approach. Unlike the

tactic of many contemporary horror films to begin with a death which establishes its

monster, The Witch begins with a staid, expository sequence. The elevated horror

aesthetic is made readily apparent from these first few shots.

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Fig. 2.2: The opening scene introduces the family with centered, symmetrical
compositions, a pattern which is broken several shots later.

The film continues with the family’s exodus from society. An initially

harmonious string score becomes increasingly discordant as the family reaches the

woods, with the strings producing a feverish crescendo and a choral wailing bubbling to

the surface of the soundtrack. In the following scene, slow pans and tracking shots

establish the setting of their new home, a ramshackle farmhouse on the edge of the
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woods. The camera delicately pushes in on Thomasin as she prays forgiveness for her

sins. This prayer ends with a shot featuring a similar camera move, a foreboding push-in

on the woods.

These elements of style come into play throughout the film, particularly in key

moments of the plot. The game of peek-a-boo during which the baby Samuel is

kidnapped by the witch plays out in a long take centered on Thomasin’s face. An

ominous tracking shot around the corner of the farmhouse reveals an angered William

chopping wood next to the woodpile against which he will later perish. A centered push-

in shows Mercy and Jonas lying prone in bed play-acting being petrified by the

supernatural powers of a witch. Centered framing depicts Thomasin’s final decision to

sign the book and venture naked into the wood where she joins a coven of witches.

The overall pace of the film is slow, allowing for the tensions between characters

to grow in a manner which produces dread. This is done in lieu of set pieces common to

the horror genre, which build tension rapidly and release that tension with a jump scare or

which culminate in the bloody death of a character. The Witch does not release its tension

until the final frames, when Thomasin joins the witches communing in the woods and is

lifted into the air with a look of jubilation on her face. This pacing produces a much

different viewing experience than those of many other contemporary horror films, and it

differs from the experience promised by A24’s marketing.

These formal elements situate The Witch firmly within the template for the

elevated horror film. Eggers makes his stylistic choices very apparent, and they are used

to convey a deliberately-paced story about predominantly internal, interpersonal conflict.

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It is worth noting here how the external conflict presented by the film’s eponymous witch

plays into the elevated horror narrative. While I argue that elevated horror relies more on

the psychological states of its characters than the presence of a prototypical horror

monster, most elevated horror films nevertheless present the type of interstitial

monstrosity that is defined by Noel Carroll. Chapter 1 addresses how this works in Under

the Skin. In The Babadook, the titular monster is a fairy-tale specter that haunts the film’s

protagonist, Amelia (Essie Davis), which yields a more allegorical reading in which The

Babadook is a manifestation of Amelia’s grief, parental anxiety, and depression. The

monster in It Follows which stalks the teenage characters represents both an external

physical threat of death, as well as an internal, existential fear of aging which comes with

the transition into adulthood. The Transfiguration (d. O’Shea, 2017) tells the story of a

teenage boy cursed with vampirism—the interstitial identity of the vampire becomes a

reflection of the character’s isolation. The horror conceit in Get Out of having another’s

consciousness supplant one’s own introduces an interstitial dimension. This process, as it

is described in the film, would relegate the mind of the protagonist Chris (Daniel

Kaluuya) to the “sunken place,” where he would no longer have agency over his actions.

The conceit is a metaphor for larger social concerns, what director Peele refers to as a

“state of marginalization … [a] dark hole we throw black people in” (Lopez, 2017).

Annihilation (d. Garland, 2018) presents many depictions of the interstitial, with the

film’s alien setting combining genetic components of differing species. These genetic

couplings present objects merging and splitting apart like cancerous cells, presenting a

literalization of the “impulsive self-destruction” of the characters (Sragow, 2019).

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 As this section has outlined, the titular monster of The Witch is not the sole source

of the film’s horror and tension. Rather, her role functions in tandem with the

disintegration of the family unit at the center of the film—which prompts Eggers to call

this a “family drama” in the same breath that he calls it a “horror movie” (Bitel, 2016).

This differs from other narratives centering on witches in the 17th century, most notably

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), which present the hysteria and paranoia surrounding

accusations of witchcraft where no actual witches reside.25 Eggers’ film instead presents

an actual witch, but he nevertheless tells a story about hysteria, paranoia, and religious

persecution in Puritan America. In this sense, Eggers is presenting a historical fiction

dimension to the film while still adhering to key archetypes of the horror genre.

This genre hybridity and the extent to which these films function as traditional

horror narratives are important aspects of the elevated horror cycle. There is a dimension

of novelty in the elevated horror aesthetic, enough so to warrant a cultural discussion

over these films’ place in the horror canon. The sense that these films are fresh, and that

they are revitalizing a genre which had hit a fallow period, is a consistent point made in

the discourse about the cycle. It is worth noting that this sense of newness comes about

by reconfiguring what is old. We have seen in Chapter 1 how common genre tropes—the

age-old threat of the science fiction alien Other and the traditional notion of the

monster—are resituated in Under the Skin to present a narrative which appears novel.

Similar comparisons could be extended to other films in the cycle. Get Out, for example,

25
Miller wrote The Crucible as an extended metaphor for similar accusations being made during the era of
McCarthyism and the HUAC hearings (see: Miller, 1996).
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has a kinship with The Stepford Wives (d. Forbes, 1975) and Invasion of the Body

Snatchers (Siegel, 1956; Kaufman, 1978), films in which the horror stems from the fear

of losing agency over one’s own body. The novelty of Get Out comes from how this

familiar narrative premise is used to express fears and frustrations from the perspective of

the African American community (a perspective historically under-represented in the

horror genre). The Witch is a rather obvious example, given that it is a story inspired by

folklore and written by a filmmaker with a vested interest in the past. Eggers’ “genre of

the past” idea blends with horror in a manner that feels novel, even though there is a

sense of familiarity to the premise of accusations of witchcraft and the “cabin the woods”

setting.

A24: “PUSHING HORROR INTO NEW REALMS”

Days before the 2016 Academy Awards, it was announced that A24’s line of

credit, provided by a consortium including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, and SunTrust,

had been raised from $50 million to $125 million (Lieberman, 2016). This was due in no

small part to the success of The Witch in its opening weekend, as well as the seven Oscar

nominations the company netted that season (Lang, 2016b). A24 said it would use the

financial cushion to “build upon its core film-distribution business, as well as to expand

its film development/production and television businesses” (Lieberman, 2016). The

company had ventured into production and financing for the first time the previous

summer when it partnered with Plan B to produce Moonlight (d. Jenkins, 2016) (Jaafar,

2015), a film that would go on to win the Best Picture Oscar in 2017. The boost in

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available funds likely helped finance the robust marketing, distribution, and Oscar

campaign for the film. The increased line of credit would also make it easier to release

films on 2,000-plus screens. Effectively, these benefits reinforced the company’s goals,

helping to increase brand awareness through wide theatrical releases and award season

contenders.

This development also highlights the importance of elevated horror to A24’s

business model. The praise and accolades for The Witch at Sundance gave A24 the

confidence to give the film a risky wide release, and that risk paid off. For all the talk of

poor audience response and bad word of mouth, A24 generally fares well with its horror

content. The Witch was a profitable venture and would be followed by other financial

successes in the genre: Hereditary (d. Aster, 2018), Midsommar, and, to a lesser extent, It

Comes at Night (d. Shults, 2017). These films typify A24’s house style: they are auteur

vehicles, made with a steady and apparent sense of style, with ambitious narratives which

reach beyond the conventions of their respective genres. All of A24’s horror films have

fit the definition of elevated horror, and the company has released elevated horror content

consistently ever since the success of The Witch—putting out at least one elevated horror

film per year.26

It is not surprising, then, that elevated horror has become synonymous with A24

in the press. Much of the discourse surrounding elevated horror mentions A24 by name

26 2020 is the notable exception. Saint Maud (d. Glass) was slated for release in spring of 2020, but its
release was moved to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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and states the company’s key role in popularizing the trend,27 and even those which do

not address the company’s influence on elevated horror still mention the A24 titles that

populate the cycle’s corpus. There is a general agreement among the press that the

company helped give rise to the “elevated” label through how it handled its horror films.

A 2018 BBC article stated that “if [negative] connotations [attributed to horror] have

become less negative lately, it’s largely down to two independent companies, Blumhouse

… and A24 … both of which champion idea-based rather than gore-based horror”

(Barber). The Guardian wrote in 2017 that “[i]t is telling that It Comes at Night, The

Witch, and A Ghost Story were all put out by A24 Films, a young company that has

already found Oscar success … if anyone’s pushing horror into new realms, it’s [A24]”

(Rose). An op-ed in the pop culture blog The Mary Sue addressed the elevated horror

trend by saying that “[l]ately, more directors, especially through A24, have been pushing

the boundaries of horror with slow-burn stories that focus more on thematic terror rather

than jump scares” (Gardner, 2019). A24 has been at the forefront of the discourse

surrounding elevated horror, with the company becoming something of a poster child for

elevated horror due to its continual and consistent contributions to the cycle.

What this discourse about elevated horror illustrates is that, just as elevated horror

is important to A24’s brand, A24 has been key in the development of the elevated horror

cycle. Much of this has to do with marketing and distribution, where A24 taking risks

with theatrical distribution shines a bigger spotlight on elevated horror films than most

other companies that have released films in the cycle (e.g., IFC Films, Radius-TWC,

27 For some examples, see: Rose, 2017; Barber, 2018; Gardner, 2019; Crump, 2019; Bradley, 2019.
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Amazon Studios). As the company’s brand name became more prominent over the latter

part of the 2010s, this spotlight only grew brighter.

Jacob Knight, in a pointedly-worded critique of elevated horror and A24’s role in

it, calls the company’s marketing and distribution strategy “the A24 effect,” a “sort of

terror sophistry” in which the company’s advertising misrepresents art-house films to

appeal to audiences beyond the film festival crowd (Knight, 2018). As the previous

section outlines, the marketing of The Witch expanded the audience for these films,

eliciting backlash from some viewers but ultimately giving a visibility to the elevated

horror cycle that no film prior to The Witch was able to achieve. The only antecedent to

The Witch which could make a claim to expanding the audience for the cycle is It

Follows. It Follows generated the positive critical buzz that could have raised the profile

of elevated horror. “Credit critics with lifting this one out of the arthouse and into the

mainstream,” Variety reported (Lang, 2015). Michael Rechtshaffen opened his Los

Angeles Times review with the rhetorical, “[c]ould we be on the cusp of a new golden age

of horror films?” (2015). However, Radius’ haste to expand the release of It Follows kept

the company from fully capitalizing on this positive word of mouth. In its debut in New

York and Los Angeles, the film achieved a remarkable $40,000 per screen average across

four theaters. This prompted Radius to hold off on the film’s planned VOD release in

favor of a wider theatrical rollout (McNary, 2015). The company expanded the release,

first to 1,218 theaters then to 1,655 the following weekend. This was a substantially

wider release than previous films of the elevated horror cycle, Under the Skin (176

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theaters at its peak), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (d. Amirpour, 2014) (19 theaters)

and The Babadook (80 theaters).

As the expansion for It Follows was unplanned, it was carried out with “little in-

theater advertising and few TV spots” (Mendelson, 2015a). What is more, it was the first

time the small distributor was attempting a release of this magnitude (Mendelson, 2015b).

As Mendelson speculates—and I am inclined to agree—the release of It Follows in a

different distributor’s hands may have equated to a more substantial hit at a time when

horror was struggling at the box office (Mendelson, 2015b). If the film had been given a

more structured release with a well-planned marketing campaign, rather than the

impromptu one Radius provided, than it may have been a hit on the level of The Witch

with articles written about how it jump-started the elevated horror phenomenon. Instead,

articles were written with titles like, “How ‘The Witch’ Accidentally Launched a Horror

Movement” (Crump, 2019).

Laura Bradley at Vanity Fair claims, similarly to Knight, that “clever marketing

had its part to play in [the elevated horror trend]. After the generally uninspired horror of

the 2000s, horror’s image had hit a low point. And Blumhouse and A24 both had a hand

in turning that ship around” (2019). Blumhouse’s involvement in the elevated horror

cycle was with Get Out, which the company partnered with Universal to release. That

film’s marketing campaign did go a long way in promoting a new, innovative figure in

horror, Jordan Peele. The film’s trailer, which presented the film as from “the mind of

Jordan Peele,” was viewed online over 60 million times between its October 2016

premiere and the film’s March 2017 release (Marich, 2017). The trailer also played in the
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multiplex before both horror films and prestige dramas like Fences (d. Washington,

2016) (Marich, 2017). It is very unusual for a horror film to advertise before non-horror

films, let alone an Oscar contender. This campaign certainly aimed to present the film as

straddling the line between horror genre fare and serious prestige picture, inviting

audiences that would not normally watch horror to give this more “elevated” genre piece

a chance.

The major difference between the Get Out marketing campaign and A24’s

marketing for horror is that Get Out benefitted from the resources of a major studio.

Blumhouse’s first-look deal with Universal allows the small independent studio

opportunities to put select films—The Purge (d. DeMonaco, 2013), Unfriended (d.

Gabriadze, 2014), Get Out etc.—on a larger stage. Universal’s rollout of Get Out would

be prohibitively costly for an independent to undertake (an estimated $30 million in

marketing costs, more than six times the film’s production budget) (Fuster, 2017). It is

more than Blumhouse would have been willing to spend if released through their own

distributing arm, BH Tilt, which provides “semi-wide releases” with “minimal marketing

and carefully selected theaters” (Mendelson, 2017). It is similarly unlikely that A24,

which relies heavily on lower cost targeted online marketing, would provide its horror

films with such a robust marketing budget. Universal’s sole foray into the elevated horror

cycle proved to be the cycle’s biggest success story. Get Out grossed over $250 million

worldwide and received numerous accolades including four Academy Award

nominations and one win (Peele for Best Original Screenplay). In large part, the

reasoning behind this success can be traced back to Peele using the horror genre to
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produce trenchant commentary on the illusion of a “post-racial” America and, in doing

so, tapping into contemporary social concerns in a novel and resonant way. At the same

time, one cannot downplay the importance of a major studio’s influence in amplifying

this elevated horror film to mainstream visibility, especially as it compares to the many

independently distributed films in the cycle.

Entire books could be (and certainly will be) written about the cultural impact of

Get Out. I discuss it here only to emphasize that few films in the elevated horror cycle

have achieved any sort of mainstream crossover success. These include, albeit to

differing degrees, It Follows, The Witch, Get Out, Hereditary, and Midsommar (the latter

two will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3). The other films maintain niche

horror fan appreciation (e.g., The Babadook, Raw, Tigers are Not Afraid), art-house

appeal (e.g., Goodnight Mommy, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lighthouse), or had

failed attempts at crossover success (e.g., Annihilation, mother!, Gretel & Hansel).

CONCLUSION
The Witch is a textbook example of elevated horror. Eggers prominently displays

the elements of style associated with the elevated horror aesthetic, and his script presents

a generically hybrid narrative that showcases both psychological and monstrous horror.

The presentation of this aesthetic, paired with the film’s successful wide release, makes

The Witch one of the most visible examples of elevated horror. With The Witch, the

elevated horror cycle was provided its first substantial hit, and while it is not the first film

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in the elevated horror cycle, it could be described as the cycle’s prototype. It is one of the

first films that commentators point to when discussing elevated horror.

A24’s rise to prominence in American independent cinema coincides with the rise

in popularity of the elevated horror cycle. I believe this correlation is no coincidence. No

company has done more to promote elevated horror and give filmmakers working with

that aesthetic a platform to present their work. Blumhouse is rightfully part of the

elevated horror conversation, and the success of Get Out went a long way in expanding

the cultural awareness of what elevated horror is and what it can accomplish. But unlike

A24, Blumhouse has not, at the time of this writing, gone on to release more elevated

horror films. The elevated horror aesthetic is also not a central element of Blumhouse’s

house style as it is with A24. As Amanda Ann Klein points out, film cycles are “bound to

the whims of contemporary tastes …. Once interest in a particular set of semantic

elements wanes, the corresponding film cycle will cease to make money at the box

office” (2011, p. 16). Cycles are short-lived commodities that rely on the support of the

audience. Few elevated horror films see a wide theatrical release, with distributors instead

focusing on achieving cult status for their films via streaming and VOD. In terms of

visibility, A24 has been at the forefront of the elevated horror conversation. A24 has been

the most consistent distributor of elevated horror in the theatrical space, and the increase

in the company’s brand recognition over the course of the decade has provided these

films an ongoing appeal on streaming services. As such, the horror films of A24 are

carrying the mantle for elevated horror, pushing the cycle into the mainstream.

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 The next chapter examines how this visibility and brand recognition has translated

into valuable exposure for filmmakers releasing elevated horror with A24. This

necessitates a conversation about authorship, including the extent to which filmmakers

like Eggers and Aster are positioned as auteur horror directors and whether the corporate

authorship of A24’s brand supersedes or otherwise complicates this auteur label. With

the arrival of The Witch at Sundance, Eggers was immediately viewed by some critics as

a director with remarkable talent and a promising future in filmmaking. Two years after

the release of The Witch, Aster’s work on Hereditary was met with an even warmer

reception. Chapter 3 takes as its case study Midsommar, Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary,

as a means of looking at the progression of his directorial style and how his employment

of the elevated horror aesthetic changed from one film to the next.

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 Chapter 3: Midsommar: Genre Hybridity, the Horror Auteur, and the
Self-Seriousness of Elevated Horror

Following the company’s big win at the 2017 Academy Awards, where its film

Moonlight (d. Jenkins, 2016) took home Best Picture, A24 was under a brighter spotlight

than ever. A24 had been a buzz-worthy entity in the trades since its inception, and its

reputation had grown considerably since then. The prevailing discourse around its Best

Picture win was that the company was now a major indie player. Publications like The

Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Vanity Fair made comparisons to Miramax, the

most successful (and brand-focused) indie of the 1990s and early-2000s (Weiner, 2017;

Desta, 2017; Rose, 2017). GQ published an “oral history” of A24, featuring interviews

from talent which praised the company for having an approach that favors the artistic

ambitions of its filmmakers over the financial bottom line. “Hollywood is run by

accountants at this point. And so anytime you speak with someone who’s not a pure

accountant … [i]t’s exciting,” director Harmony Korine said, insinuating that A24 was

not solely profit-motivated (Baron, 2017). The company was profiled in this way in the

press and would continue to be throughout the remainder of the decade, which helped to

solidify its brand as an indie distributor releasing cutting edge, auteur-driven material.

At the same time, the divisive discourse around elevated horror was amplifying.

The 2017 release of Jordan Peele’s Get Out by Universal and its subsequent awards

season campaign brought about debates over definitions of horror. After the film was

classified as a comedy by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which

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placed it in the category of Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the Golden

Globes, Peele pushed back. In making the case that “what [Get Out] is about is not

funny,” Peele also mentioned that while he set out to make a horror film, he ultimately

categorized it as a “social thriller” (Kohn, 2017). The conversation thus shifted from

commentators championing the rare horror film that breaks into the prestigious awards

season circle to debates about what does and does not constitute a horror film. “It was

supposed to be the year horror finally got some respect,” wrote Jason Zinoman in The

New York Times, contending that the “long history of movies being too good to be

considered horror” does a disservice to the genre (2018). This sentiment would be

reiterated in numerous pieces bemoaning the concept of elevated horror, with critics

claiming that “elevating” some horror properties necessarily relegated others to a lower

status (e.g., Knight, 2018; Ehrlich, 2019). Arguments like these, alongside the box office

failures of the big studio elevated horror films mother! (d. Aronofsky, Paramount, 2017)

and Annihilation (d. Garland, Paramount, 2018), perpetuated a negative discourse over

elevated horror that would continue through the end of the decade. It was a discourse that

stuck to Ari Aster’s feature debut Hereditary (2018), which became a flash point in the

conversation over what constitutes a horror film and whether elevated horror

unnecessarily complicates such distinctions (Knight, 2018).

Aster’s career provides an illuminating case study in the conversation of the

elevated horror cycle. Following the critical and commercial success of Hereditary, the

director was dubbed the “poster child” for elevated horror by The AV Club (Dowd &

Rife, 2020), and his 2019 film Midsommar presents a notable inflection point in the
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development of the cycle. Midsommar was seen as an ambitious passion project, and it

contains a level of genre hybridity unlike previous films of the cycle. This chapter

addresses the ways in which this genre hybridity was and was not considered within the

popular press discourse surrounding Aster upon the film’s release. It also examines how

the film’s use of humor and its self-aware use of slasher tropes present a potential

evolution of the elevated horror cycle. The cycle has been criticized for being snobbish

and overly self-serious (Ehrlich, 2019), and I argue that Midsommar displays the

characteristics of elevated horror while also acting as a departure from the cycle’s

perceived self-seriousness.

Continuing the conversation initiated in earlier chapters about A24 and its

relationship to the cycle, the case study of Aster’s work also looks at how auteurism

factors into A24’s business strategy and how marketing Midsommar around the

perception of Aster as an auteur influenced the discourse. I argue that A24 worked to

perpetuate the discussion of Aster as a horror auteur by presenting the film to critics and

audiences as a singular and unique “vision.” Using Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse

(2019) as a point of comparison, I will assess A24’s impact on the elevated horror cycle

through the manufacturing of auteur discourses and the company’s marketing and

distribution practices. Ultimately, the differences in the release strategies for Midsommar

and The Lighthouse show how profit motives and marketability allow some A24 horror

films more mainstream exposure than others.

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ARI ASTER: HORROR’S “GOD OF MISCHIEF”
Ari Aster’s filmmaking has always been provocative. His American Film Institute

thesis film, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, became an internet curiosity in 2011

when it circulated on Facebook in posts with the caption, “Have you heard about the

Johnsons?” and a link to the video titled, “The Strange Thing About the Johnsons – Don’t

Ask, Just Watch!” (Harris, 2011). The short film engendered controversy due to its taboo

subject matter (sexual abuse, incest) and its depiction of a dysfunctional African

American family from the perspective of a white director (Harris, 2011). It also taps into

the discomforting tonality of human horrors, which Aster captures with both a roving

mobile camera and picturesque still shots (a style he would later employ in his feature

films). This short is often used as a point of comparison to Aster’s first feature-length

film Hereditary, given that both films have narratives which engage with disturbing

secrets within a family. The Strange Thing About the Johnsons is about an abusive

relationship between a father and son. In Hereditary, a woman named Annie (Toni

Collette) uncovers that her deceased mother had affiliations with an occult group who

attempt to use Annie’s children, Charlie (Milly Shapiro) and Peter (Alex Wolff), as

vessels for the demon “god of mischief” Paimon. Both films produce horror by exploring

the effects of trauma on a family.

The director’s third short film, Munchausen (2013), also depicts familial drama

through a horror lens, but it does so with a tinge of irony. It initially plays out as a parody

of a coming-of-age narrative. In a montage underscored with a triumphant score, the film

begins by telling the story of a young man going off to college and meeting the love of

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his life. This provides a layer of sentimentality akin to the emotional arcs of Pixar films

(e.g., the final scene of Toy Story 3 or the prologue of Up), which establishes a comedic

premise. This premise is then undercut by the horror premise of a mother poisoning her

son to prevent him from moving out of her home.

This sense of comedic irony is another element that recurs in Aster’s films.

Between the release of these shorts, Aster made a comedy sketch for the website Funny

or Die, entitled “TDF Really Works.” It is a faux advertisement whose combination of

low production value, cringe comedy, and crude depictions of visceral bodily harm blur

the line between body horror and juvenile comedy. His 2011 short Beau also mixes

horror with comedy by juxtaposing the protagonist’s (Billy Mayo) tense anxiety and

agoraphobia with the blunt, aggressive outbursts levelled at him by others. C’est La Vie,

made in 2016, consists of a bleak monologue which confronts the harsh realities of Los

Angeles homelessness, but it is edited to present gallows punchlines, such as a hard

transition where the homeless narrator is hitchhiking, then seen after the cut burying the

driver’s body in a roadside ditch. This blend of horror and comedy, as I will illustrate

later in this chapter, is a central talking point in the discourse of Midsommar.

According to one source, A24 “discovered” Aster through the controversy and

provocation of The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen (Lattanzio,

2020). In truth, Aster was beginning to gain notoriety with his short films, both online

and on the festival circuit (Bishop, 2018; Kohn, 2018), well before A24 entered the

picture. A24 came on board Hereditary after the scripting phase. The script tells a story

of demonic possession from the vantage point of Annie and her son Peter. Following the
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untimely death of Annie’s daughter, Charlie, Annie is convinced by a member of her

grief support group (Ann Dowd) to conduct a séance to communicate with Charlie’s

spirit. Unbeknownst to Annie, the support group is populated with members of an occult

sect formerly run by her late mother, and the séance connects Annie not with Charlie but

with a demon named Paimon. This demon possesses Annie and, in seeking a male human

host, attacks Peter. The demon kills Annie and possesses Peter, and the film ends with

Peter entering the family’s treehouse, where the occultists are worshipping at an alter

dedicated to Paimon.

A24 ushered the finished film through its usual distribution scheme—a premiere

at Sundance and showings at other select festivals (in this case, SXSW and the horror-

themed Overlook Film Festival), followed by a wide theatrical rollout. The festival

screenings served their intended purpose, drumming up positive word of mouth and

sufficient buzz over the work of Aster and the film’s star Toni Collette (for whom critics

were attempting to plant seeds for a future Oscar nomination, an outcome that would

ultimately not come to pass). The rapturous praise for Aster’s direction, as well as

comparisons being made between his first feature and horror classics, jumpstarted a

conversation about Aster’s prospects as a “horror auteur.”

“Hereditary takes its place as a new generation’s The Exorcist,” wrote critic

Joshua Rothkopf after screening Hereditary at 2018’s Sundance Film Festival. “[F]or

some, it will spin heads even more savagely” (Rothkopf, 2018). Thus began the lofty

expectations for Aster’s film, which would debut domestically that June in an expansive

2,964 theaters. Critics cobbled massive shoes for Hereditary to fill, foregrounding it as
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that year’s greatest horror discovery and placing its impact alongside those of canonical

horror texts such as The Exorcist, The Shining and Psycho.28 A24 exacerbated these

expectations even further in the film’s theatrical trailer, quoting Rothkopf’s The Exorcist

comparison alongside another call for the immediate canonization of the film from USA

Today, which heralded the film as “a modern-day horror masterpiece” (A24, 2018a). An

online promo from A24, aptly titled “Hype,” similarly stoked the flames of anticipation

with quotes from Rolling Stone (“Get ready for a new horror classic”) and The AV Club

(“Believe the hype”) (A24, 2018b), the latter piece of praise stylized with “hype” in bold

capital letters encircled by the names of high circulation publications which had given the

film positive reviews (e.g., The New York Times, TIME, Entertainment Weekly) (Fig.

3.1).

28Mark Kermode, in his June review of the film, criticized his critic colleagues for making such
comparisons, which he claimed did the “frightening yet ultimately frustrating chiller few favours” (2018).
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Fig. 3.1: A24’s marketing for Hereditary assured audiences that the massive hype for the
film created by critics was warranted.

Hereditary was a sizeable hit for A24. It became, at the time, the company’s

highest-grossing film worldwide (at $81 million) and its second highest-grossing film

domestically (at $44 million—$5 million less domestically than top earner Lady Bird [d.

Gerwig, 2017]). The film received some negative publicity stemming from disappointed

mainstream audiences—notably a D+ CinemaScore that was reported in the trades and on

film blogs. Aster later commented on his lack of concern for disappointing audiences,

stating that, “[If] people walk out and they’re like, ‘That wasn’t scary. That was boring,’

[then] God bless them …. Maybe it will stick with them for another day or two” (Sharf,

2019). In saying this, Aster acknowledged that the film did not play to a mainstream

audience like other blockbuster horror. As I outlined in previous chapters, the publicity
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over low CinemaScore ratings and negative audience reviews online is par for the course

with the elevated horror cycle. The predominant reason for this is exactly what Aster

acknowledges: that audiences expecting to see a mainstream horror movie with

traditional scare tactics are often let down by what elevated horror provides.

Despite the negative reaction from audiences, Hereditary is one of A24’s biggest

successes, and it affirms multiple points of the company’s strategy. For one, the film is

another example of A24’s ambitious distribution strategy panning out in the company’s

favor. The theatrical release of Hereditary, at its widest, reached nearly 3,000 theaters

nationwide.29 This competitive release during the summer movie season, along with the

“hype” surrounding that release, positioned Aster at the forefront of the horror cinema

conversation. Critics called his filmmaking “gifted” (Dowd, 2018; Rothkopf, 2018) and

“accomplished” (Sims, 2018), particularly for a first-time feature director. Even some

reviews that were less laudatory, like that of Mark Kermode, recognized Aster’s talent

behind the camera (Kermode, 2018). A24 started as a company wishing to work with

auteur talent of the 1990s and 2000s (e.g., Sally Potter, Sophia Coppola, Harmony

Korine) as a means of establishing its indie brand; now it was striving to promote young

filmmakers with budding talent (e.g., Aster, Greta Gerwig, Trey Edward Shults, Robert

Eggers, the Safdie brothers) and to establish them as a new generation of auteurs.

Hereditary proved to be a launching point for the conversation of Aster as a horror

auteur, and Midsommar cemented this label.

29For comparison, the release size for major studio horror films of that year ranged from 3,038 theaters
(Universal’s The First Purge [d. McMurray]) to 3,990 theaters (Universal’s Halloween [d. Green]).
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 Midsommar was released on Independence Day weekend 2019 in 2,707 theaters

nationwide. Unlike many of its elevated horror (and A24) contemporaries, the film did

not screen at any film festivals prior to release. Instead of launching on the festival

circuit, A24 leaned on its own brand name and the reputation that had formed around

Aster following the success of Hereditary. Midsommar follows Dani (Florence Pugh), a

graduate student agonized by the recent deaths of her parents and sister. Following this

tragedy, Dani’s boyfriend of four years, Christian (Jack Reynor), who was on the verge

of ending their relationship, instead feels begrudgingly obligated to invite her to a

summer vacation in Sweden that he had been planning with his friends Mark (Will

Poulter), Josh (William Jackson Harper), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). In Sweden, the

travelers stay at Pelle’s hometown of Hårga, a small, isolated village surrounded by

woods. Here they witness a series of pagan rituals which disturb them and endanger their

lives. In conventional slasher fashion, the travelers are killed off one-by-one, and Dani

becomes accepted into the Hårgan community following a ceremony that crowns her as

the “May Queen.” Having witnessed Christian having sex with a Hårgan woman, Dani

chooses Christian to be immolated in a cleansing ritual, and the film ends with Dani

smiling as she watches the fire burn.

Midsommar opened at number six at the U.S. box office, earning $6.5 million on

its way to a $27 million domestic total ($46 million worldwide). It trailed Warner Bros.’

Annabelle Comes Home (d. Gary Dauberman), the third entry in the Annabelle franchise

that itself is part of the larger “Conjuring universe” of blockbuster horror films. That

film, which would go on to gross $74 million domestic, received a significantly more
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tepid critical response than Midsommar. By some online metrics, audiences favored

Midsommar, as well (IMDb user scores for Midsommar average 7.1 out of 10, and for

Annabelle Comes Home they average 5.9 out of 10).30 The two films’ CinemaScore

ratings were also similar (Midsommar: C+; Annabelle Comes Home: B-).

Looking at CinemaScore alone, Midsommar fared better with opening weekend

audiences than Hereditary, yet Midsommar did not replicate its predecessor’s box office.

The C+ CinemaScore still underscores the divisiveness that comes with elevated horror,

but it is also a higher score than most films in the cycle. And the 7.1 IMDb user score is

slightly higher than other central elevated horror texts The Babadook (6.8), It Follows

(6.8), and The Witch (6.9). These numbers illustrate that something about Midsommar

made it more accessible to general audiences than previous elevated horror. I argue that

the genre hybridity of the film differs from other elevated horror films, in that it employs

humor. Aster’s playful use of horror conventions could explain these higher user scores.

GENRE EXPERIMENTATION AND HUMOR IN MIDSOMMAR

Despite the overblown critical praise calling Hereditary the next great horror film,

a counterargument surfaced online upon the film’s release that it was not a horror movie

at all – that it was not overtly scary enough to be placed within the genre. This social

media backlash likely stemmed from the same audiences who contributed to the film’s

low CinemaScore. One piece of evidence in this argument was Aster himself, who was

quoted in an interview with ScreenCrush saying that he avoided using the phrase “horror

30 Online user scores last accessed May 5, 2021.

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film” in pitch meetings or around crew members on set (Hayes, 2018). Aster did not

mean to say that he believed Hereditary to not be a horror film. He claimed that he was

being misquoted by those citing the interview, saying that he could not understand how

someone could see Hereditary and not identify it as a horror film (Aster & Eggers, 2019).

This distancing of Hereditary from a traditional “horror” label does bring up a

fruitful question regarding certain directors (i.e., Aster and Eggers) and their relationships

to elevated horror. To what extent do these directors’ films engage with the horror genre

versus other genres? Previous chapters of this project have considered how genre

hybridity functions in the elevated horror cycle—many films in the cycle combine the

elevated horror aesthetic with traditional elements of the horror genre, and they have

narratives which borrow from other genres such as science fiction, domestic drama, and

psychological thriller. However, as I will argue here, the films Aster and Eggers released

in 2019 complicate this hybridity, blurring the lines of genre categorization. Aster has

called Midsommar, albeit hesitantly, “horror-adjacent,” describing it as a “perverse wish

fulfillment fantasy that is ultimately a fairy tale” for its protagonist, Dani, and a “folk

horror” film for the other characters who visit the Swedish village of Hårga (Aster &

Eggers, 2019). Eggers, similarly, views his 2016 film The Witch as a clear horror movie

which uses tropes of the genre and his 2019 film The Lighthouse as more akin to the

literary subgenre of “weird fiction” popularized by H.P. Lovecraft (Aster & Eggers,

2019). Weird fiction, with its expressions of the macabre, has roots in the horror genre,

but it often also has ties to the fantasy genre.

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 Both Hereditary and Midsommar engage in a level of genre hybridity. Hereditary,

in particular, sees Aster leaning into the “art-house” connotations of the elevated horror

cycle. The film is a domestic drama with a supernatural angle, combining a narrative

about grief with one about demonic possession. Collette has described it as “The Ice

Storm as a horror film” (Fear, 2018). Aster cited Mike Leigh and Ingmar Bergman as

central influences on Hereditary, and he encouraged the film’s cast to watch Leigh’s All

or Nothing (2002) and Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) to prepare for their roles

(Kohn, 2018). As with Cries and Whispers, Hereditary depicts with plenty of stillness the

weight of existential dread brought on by the death of a central character.

All the same, it is not a stretch to say that Hereditary has more mainstream

aspirations than the filmographies of Leigh or Bergman. For one, the film utilizes stylistic

conventions common to mainstream horror. This is evident in the use of a lingering

camera pointed toward dark corners to induce uncertainty over what might be hiding in

the shadows, as well as the deployment of sound design to startle the audience with

phantom tongue clicks. The narrative also adheres to certain recognizable conventions of

the horror genre, with tropes like a Biblical evil, possession, séances, and the cursed

object filling out the story of this family and its relationship to radical evil in the form of

a demon.

Beyond the use of these conventions, however, Hereditary does present itself as

an elevated horror film. Aster and his cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski augment most

shots with measured, deliberate movement that makes the camera appear like a roving

observer. Pivotal moments in the plot are depicted with characters and objects centered
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within the frame, such as the reaction shot of Peter immediately following the car

accident that kills his sister Charlie, the image of Charlie’s funeral, and shots of the

family performing a séance in the dead of night (Fig. 3.2). The score, which is initially

used sparingly, reaches in intense moments a buzzy, atonal frequency that produces a

disquieting mood. And the narrative relies heavily on family dynamics and the

psychological dimensions of its grieving characters, particularly Annie and Peter,

throughout the first two acts. The more external, monstrous threat of possession becomes

more pronounced during the film’s faster-paced climax. Still, this climax is linked

directly to Aster’s thematic concerns involving what one inherits from their family and

the unsettling reality that such inheritances are out of one’s control.

Fig. 3.2: Aster and Pogorzelski use centered framing in Hereditary during key moments
of the plot.
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Fig. 3.2, cont.

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 Midsommar, too, contains stylistic techniques common to the elevated horror

film. Scenes early in the film which introduce the two lead characters, Dani and her

boyfriend Christian, center the characters in frame. These scenes are part of a prologue

which establishes the two characters’ failing relationship and a traumatic experience for

Dani—the deaths of her sister and parents—which will inform her character’s actions and

motivations for the remainder of the film. This prologue concludes with a shot of Dani

sobbing on a couch and Christian holding her, a symmetrical shot that centers the two of

them accompanied by a long, slow camera move which pushes in on them before moving

out of the window behind them into the snowy night—a camera move which transitions

the scene into the opening credits (Fig. 3.3). From this prologue alone, the

cinematography (centered compositions, deliberate camera movement) and narrative (a

horror film rooted in the psychological state of its protagonist) are conveying the

characteristics of elevated horror. And these elements of style will continue throughout

the film. In particular, symmetrical and centered compositions are used in abundance

once the characters reach the remote village of Hårga (Fig. 3.4).

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Fig. 3.3: Symmetrical framing and deliberate camera movement are prominently featured
in the prologue to Midsommar.

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Fig. 3.4: Examples of camerawork demonstrative of elevated horror in Midsommar.

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Fig. 3.4, cont.

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 The film does use more conventional devices of the horror genre. First, the “folk

horror” aspect of the film works in a somewhat traditional slasher movie fashion, with

characters being killed off one-by-one over the course of the film. The main difference is

that most of these deaths do not occur on-screen, which preserves the restraint toward

violence characteristic of elevated horror while still playing into the slasher trope of a

group of young victims being slowly picked off. Second, the narrative conceit of the film

involves what Carol Clover refers to as the “city/country axis.” Clover proposes that an

“enormous proportion of horror takes as its starting point the visit or move of (sub)urban

people to the country,” where “people from the city” are endangered by a “threatening

rural Other” (1992/2015, p. 124). In Midsommar, four characters from Brooklyn (as well

as two minor characters from London) travel to a remote area in Sweden’s countryside

where they find themselves disturbed and ultimately mortally harmed by the rural

community’s customs. Urban characters are presented with the horrors of an exoticized

country locale.

Nevertheless, Aster inverts the “city/country” concept. Clover’s notion of the

city/country axis presents a juxtaposition of the hegemonic upwardly mobile, civilized,

and clean-cut city lifestyle to the unkempt, uncivilized, impoverished, and predominantly

male country lifestyle (1992/2015, pp. 124-126). Aster’s Hårga, on the other hand, is a

depiction of country living that is apparently hygienic, ruled by a strict religious code,

and predominantly female. Dani’s character arc, too, complicates the dichotomy of city

protagonists and country antagonists which undergirds the city/country convention. At

the end of the film, Dani makes the choice for Christian to be killed in a sacrificial fire, a
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choice which effectively severs her last connection to the urban American society which

has caused her immense grief and trauma.31 Aster also undercuts the slasher movie

framework through the pointed lack of darkness. The majority of the film occurs in broad

daylight, presenting an ironic subversion of the “things that go bump in the night”

tradition of horror.

Midsommar also has a morbid sense of humor which complicates its relationship

to elevated horror. Hereditary displays this sense of humor as well, albeit to a far lesser

extent. That film’s tonally clashing end credits song, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,”

contains lyrics which could be construed as Aster making light of the film’s conclusion in

which Peter finds himself in the doomed position of being the vessel for the demon

Paimon (“So many things I would have done / but clouds got in my way”) and posing an

ironic reference to the film’s possessed characters (“But now old friends they’re acting

strange / and they shake their heads, they say I’ve changed”). For as dismal as

Midsommar is at the outset, both visually with its washed-out gray palette and narratively

with its bleak and unsettling depictions of mental illness and death, the film also contains

shifts in tone which produce distinct moments of comedy. Mark, for instance, is

presented as an unseemly comic relief character who puts himself into situations of

culture clash faux pas (e.g., a scene in which he urinates on Hårga’s ancestral tree). There

is also a sense of deadpan humor to the subplot involving Christian stealing fellow

graduate student Josh’s thesis idea.

31 It is worth noting, too, how the shifting relationship Dani has between the “city” and the “country” is
established from the beginning of the film through the motif of medicinal substances. Dani’s prescription of
Ativan and her use of sleeping pills are contrasted with her use of Harga’s herbal hallucinogens, with the
former producing no recognizable benefits and the latter producing progressively more euphoric effects.
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 Many reviews of Midsommar remarked on this humor, giving a different tenor to

the critical reception of the film compared to other elevated horror. Where the critics’

responses to previous elevated horror often dwelled on the films’ weighty themes, some

critics called Midsommar “a delicious prank of a film” which is “barely serious … except

when it absolutely means business” (Robey, 2019), an “outrageous black-comic carnival

of agony” (Bradshaw, 2019), a “folksy slasher film with a wry sense of humor” (Sims,

2019a), and a film in which Aster is, colloquially speaking, “taking the piss” (Hans,

2019). This discourse shaped the cultural perception of Aster’s goals in Midsommar, and

it arguably called into question the film’s placement as part of the elevated horror trend.

Infusing humor into horror is clearly not a novel concept in contemporary media—satire,

parody, the comic relief character archetype, and an entire subgenre of horror comedy

had existed within horror long before the elevated horror cycle began. But humor was not

common of elevated horror prior to Midsommar. As David Church claims, elevated

horror distances the viewer from horror conventions (where the possibility for meta-

humor or self-parody arises) by intersecting with “more ‘respectable’ genres that are not

necessarily associated with a humorously fun time” (2021, p. 38). Humor being identified

as a prevailing tone in Midsommar, as well as Aster’s self-reflexive subversion of horror

tropes, broadens the genre categorization of the film in a way that differs from the genre

hybridity of this project’s previous case studies.

To make this point more clearly, we might pose the question: how does the genre

hybridity in Midsommar differ from that of prior films in the cycle? Previous films

discussed in this project have engaged with genres other than horror, but these other
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genre signifiers complement the characteristics of elevated horror present within those

films. Under the Skin engages with science fiction elements, but it does so in order to

establish psychological complexities in its protagonist which are common in elevated

horror. The period piece family drama of The Witch produces internal conflict which

works in tandem with the supernatural horror elements to produce an elevated horror

narrative. In the case of Hereditary, the humor in the end credits song is extra-diegetic.

The narrative of the film itself carries a much graver tone, combining the tensions of a

domestic drama with the horrors of a possession film.

As Aster himself described it, the multiple genres at work in Midsommar do not

coalesce into one unified horror story, but rather they stand apart as discrete narrative

entities (Aster & Eggers, 2019). The characters of Christian, Mark, and Josh are in a folk

horror slasher. Dani is in a “wish fulfillment fantasy” and a fairy tale. The humor is at

odds with the distressed psychological states associated with the elevated horror film, yet

Midsommar deals with both. The film’s story has a dark tone as it relates to Dani and her

trauma, and this is a narrative familiar to the elevated horror corpus. However, the

aspects of the narrative which play into the folk horror subgenre rely on the self-

reflexive, humorous tone which many critics were drawn to. Midsommar does not read

explicitly as a comedy, but comic elements are used in a way unique to elevated horror,

which raises questions about how this film is interacting with the cycle.

Amanda Ann Klein, in her book American Film Cycles, grapples with the effects

of generic parody on the genre cycle. In her account, many critics view the emergence of

genre parody—as in Scary Movie (d. Wayans, 2000) lampooning the slasher cycle or
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Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (d. Barclay,

1996) lampooning the “1990s ghetto action cycle”—as a signal that a genre cycle has

become saturated to the point where it “is no longer able to satisfy the needs of its

audience” (Klein, 2011, p. 176). Klein, meanwhile, expresses the possibility that the

existence of parody facilitates “the perpetuation of a film genre or film cycle in a revised

form … [weeding out] cliched conventions ‘in order to allow for the canon’s continued

healthy growth’” (2011, p. 176). While Midsommar is not a parody of elevated horror in

a traditional sense, Aster exercises within the film a self-awareness of both the traditional

slasher and the elevated horror cycle that could be functioning in a way similar to what

Klein suggests. The director said as much during press interviews for the film, claiming

to be consciously “having fun with cliches and tropes” of both the horror genre and the

“breakup movie” (Sims, 2019b). In terms of making comedy out of the horror genre, he

added that “there’s a certain sort of joy to be had in making [a horror film] where [the

audience] knows where you’re going [with the plot]” (Sims, 2019b). This points to

Aster’s acknowledgment of an audience awareness of both slasher and elevated horror

conventions, an awareness that he is consciously tapping into when he blends humor and

horror in Midsommar.

Midsommar pushing generic horror tropes to the point that the audience is aware

of how the plot will unfold situates the film similarly to the parodies that Klein describes.

By juxtaposing the emotionally dense psychological narrative of elevated horror with

self-aware humor, Aster is implicitly addressing the self-seriousness of the elevated

horror cycle. As the discourse critical to elevated horror amplified between 2017 and
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2019, a perception arose that elevated horror took itself too seriously for its own good.

Three months prior to the release of Midsommar, film critics debated the “evils of

‘elevated horror’” on the industry news site IndieWire. Several of these critics claimed

that the art-house seriousness of the term “elevated horror” assumed imagined and

detrimental distinctions of taste within the horror genre (Ehrlich, 2019). Aster was in a

sense extending an olive branch to those critics by releasing a film with the aesthetic of

an elevated horror film but without the art-house pretentions of “elevating” the genre.

Another elevated horror film released in 2019, The Lighthouse, makes a similar

case for a departure from or evolution of the cycle. The film, which was Oscar-nominated

for Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography, certainly looks like an elevated horror film. Shot on

35mm black-and-white film with vintage lenses and custom filters reportedly meant to

emulate early-1900s orthochromatic stock (Thomson, 2020), the look of the film mirrors

Eggers’ pursuit of time-period verisimilitude (the film is set in the 1890s). The 1.19:1

aspect ratio narrows the frame, making centered compositions more visually distinctive.

And the narrative concerns the psychological deterioration of two characters while

employed in isolation as lighthouse keepers. The depiction of this deterioration relies as

much on humor as it does on horror. As critic A.A. Dowd put it, the film “is more

satisfying when viewed through the prism of its pitch-black humor; it’s fine as a thriller,

borderline brilliant as a comedy of cabin fever and competitive machismo” (2019).

Again, this is an instance of a film working within the stylistic confines of elevated horror

but doing so in a way that challenges elevated horror’s prevailing grim tone and self-

seriousness.
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MANUFACTURING AND SELLING THE HORROR AUTEUR
It is worth addressing how the discourses surrounding Aster’s work have afforded

the director the opportunity to make a film like Midsommar, which experimented with

genre and stretched the boundaries for elevated horror. They are discourses manufactured

by both A24 and the press and which were bolstered by the financial success of

Hereditary. A number of critics writing on Midsommar commented that it was an

“ambitious” and “audacious” film from Aster.32 This audacity, whether critics found it

appealing or overly excessive, certainly perpetuated the idea that Aster was an auteur

director. With both Hereditary and Midsommar, the critical reception often focused on

Aster’s skill as a filmmaker and his ability to control tone. This perception was fueled by

A24, whose press kit for Midsommar sold the film to critics as a “dread-soaked cinematic

fairy tale” from the “visionary mind” of Aster (A24, 2019d, p. 4). The press notes

marketed the film to critics through the frame of auteurism, describing Aster as an artist

who “concocts” the sinister story and “imagine[s] a [deep] mythology” in the film’s

visuals and language (A24, 2019d, pp. 8, 11). This was done within sentences that also

briefly noted key collaborators on the film, DP Pawel Pogorzelski and production

designer Henrik Svensson, but much of the creative agency was placed on Aster. The

brief mention of other people working on the film provided A24 the ability to

acknowledge the multiplicity of creative actors that exist within any given film project

while nevertheless championing Aster as one of the company’s star auteurs.

32 For some examples, see Bahr, 2019; Edelstein, 2019; Lawson, 2019; Kohn, 2019.
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 The ways in which these discourses of auteurism were and were not qualified

through considerations paid to the collaborative nature of the form show a similar

favoring of the writer-director auteur. Many critics reviewing Aster’s two feature films

mentioned the cinematography of Pogorzelski. In the case of Hereditary, some also

praised the music of Colin Stetson and the production design of Grace Yun (Bradshaw,

2018; Dowd, 2018; Wolfe, 2018), and many mentioned the score of Midsommar

composed by Bobby Krlic. The lead actors of Hereditary and Midsommar, Toni Collette

and Florence Pugh, respectively, were also given a lot of credit for their work. There is an

argument to be made for these actors giving shape to the films through their

performances, giving them some degree of authorship in the final product. The same

could be said for Stetson and Krlic, whose scores do some heavy lifting in terms of

establishing tone. However, despite critics paying lip service to these key collaborators,

the most prominent theme from the critical discourse surrounding these two films was

that Aster was a “visionary” and “gifted” young filmmaker delivering on the promise of

his high-profile short films. The ambitiousness of the projects was credited to him alone,

tipping the scales in the critical discourse around the films’ authorship to favor the writer-

director as an auteur (as is oftentimes the case in Hollywood).

A24’s stake in shaping this discourse is telling. In framing Midsommar for the

press, the company not only positioned Aster as an auteur talent, but it also highlighted

Hereditary as “acclaimed by critics … the biggest ever opening for A24, as well as A24’s

highest-grossing film worldwide” (A24, 2019d, p. 24). The company centered Aster’s

credibility on profits and accolades, presenting Hereditary as a bona fide hit proving the
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director’s worthiness as a creator. As with many films from established directors, the

company foregrounded this bona fide in the marketing for Midsommar, with the films’

theatrical and online trailers opening with title cards reading “From Ari Aster … director

of Hereditary” (A24, 2019a; A24, 2019b). These marketing and press materials presented

Hereditary as something of a calling-card film—a previous success which establishes a

degree of trust and familiarity between the director and the audience. In doing this, A24

created a discursive space where Aster’s experimentation with Midsommar was not only

permissible but actively encouraged. With this framing of the director as a “horror

auteur,” Aster was given the latitude for experimentation and “audacious” filmmaking, as

experimenting with the traditions of Hollywood in order to carve out a distinctive and

personal style of one’s own is a prominent feature of auteurism. This, coupled with the

imagery A24 used to market the film, put A24 in a position where it could sell

Midsommar as a potential summer blockbuster. In turn, Midsommar was given a chance

to shape the conversation of the elevated horror cycle—more so than Eggers’ The

Lighthouse, whose release was not as wide nor as heavily promoted.

A24’s distribution strategy for Midsommar is worth examining here in more

depth. More precisely, the discrepancy between how the company released Midsommar

and how it released The Lighthouse shines some light on which ambitious “horror auteur”

passion projects the company deem as marketable to mainstream audiences. Midsommar

was given a wide release in the heart of the summer season. The July release date fit

thematically with the film’s setting of a Swedish village bathed in near-constant summer

sunlight. It also showed A24’s confidence that Aster’s film would be effective
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counterprogramming to tentpole blockbusters like Spider-Man: Far from Home (d.

Watts), Aladdin (d. Ritchie), and Toy Story 4 (d. Cooley), as well as sizable competition

to the horror franchise sequel Annabelle Comes Home and the horror franchise reboot

Child’s Play (d. Klevberg). Clearly, the company was targeting the multiplex crowd with

the 2,707-theater release during the busiest month in the theatrical release calendar.3334

The Lighthouse involved a comparatively more conservative release. After a limited

opening on October 18 in eight theaters, the film expanded to 586 theaters the following

weekend. It would expand again the next weekend to 978 before being pulled from

theaters slowly over the course of November. This domestic release was substantially

smaller than that of Midsommar during a less fertile period in the release calendar. The

Lighthouse proved mildly profitable—it grossed $18 million on a $4 million production

budget—but it was not treated by A24 as the horror blockbuster that Midsommar was.

This discrepancy could come down to a number of factors. Midsommar, for one,

deals in traditional slasher tropes which would read familiar to a mainstream audience

and which were marketed in A24’s trailer alongside distinctive, eye-catching imagery of

the film’s rural setting of Hårga. The marketing downplayed Aster’s playful take on these

tropes, instead presenting the film’s small village community as an ominous and present

threat to the travelers. The images of Dani running through the woods, of her reacting in

fear to a face she sees in a mirror, of her gasping in horror at an off-screen threat, and of

33 Only recently has December grown to compete with July as the most profitable month of the calendar in
terms of theatrical grosses, with December releases like Star Wars: The Force Awakens (d. Abrams, 2015)
and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (d. Johnson, 2017) propelling December grosses high enough to eclipse
July’s grosses for those years.
34 A24 would later target their niche fanbase more directly with an August 2019 re-release of Midsommar
which included footage cut from the original theatrical version.
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Josh’s limp body falling to the ground—all of these sell the film as an earnest slasher

(Fig. 3.5).

Fig. 3.5: Images from A24’s trailer for Midsommar which sell the film as a slasher.
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Fig. 3.5, cont.
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 The Lighthouse, on the other hand, has a less marketable narrative and aesthetic.

The black-and-white, 1.19:1 presentation looks more akin to an art-house offering than a

genre blockbuster. And while the trailer displays some of the “weird fiction” imagery that

may appeal to a genre crowd (the brief image of Robert Pattinson’s character punching

Willem Dafoe’s while a sea creature’s tentacle wraps around his neck is the most overtly

“genre” image in the trailer), there is little about it which would sell to a wide audience.

Pattinson’s star persona may have been a selling point to the mainstream, but by 2019

Pattinson had fully divorced his star image from his teen blockbuster roles in Harry

Potter and the Goblet of Fire (d. Newell, 2005) and the Twilight franchise (2008-2012)

through taking leading roles in small indies like Cosmopolis (d. Cronenberg, 2012), The

Rover (d. Michod, 2014), and Good Time (d. Safdie and Safdie, 2017). Additionally, The

Lighthouse trailer foregrounded its director just as Midsommar’s did, calling Eggers the

“acclaimed director of The Witch” (A24, 2019c).35 However, the recency of Hereditary,

which had been released one year before Midsommar, as well as its superior box office

performance to that of The Witch made it more likely that mainstream audiences would

recall Aster’s prior work over Egger’s.

The differing distribution and marketing strategies for the two films illustrate that

while A24 aspires to maintain its brand identity as the studio merging the art-house with

the multiplex, not all of its films are sufficiently “commercial” enough to receive the

multiplex treatment. There is apparently a limit to how wide a release for something like

35 A24’s press notes for The Lighthouse also make similar claims to the press notes for Midsommar in
terms of authorship. The press kit overtly labels Eggers as “one of cinema’s most exciting contemporary
auteurs” and a “visionary filmmaker" (A24, 2019e, pp. 4-6).
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The Lighthouse, which presents as more of an art-house film, can be. While A24 appears

willing to allow directors working under its banner to experiment with genre and style, it

allocates more of its resources to films which it believes will fare well at the box office.

With The Witch, the company could craft a marketing campaign that made the film

appear as a more conventional horror film, something it was unable to do with The

Lighthouse.

As we have seen, A24’s marketing and distribution choices for its horror

properties helped to give mainstream exposure to the elevated horror cycle. The

company’s U.S. distribution of The Witch was a key moment of increased visibility to the

elevated horror aesthetic, and this was followed by major studios attempting to market

and release elevated horror in a similar way (with varying degrees of success). A24

leading the charge with elevated horror gave the cycle a platform, as well as some

important names in Eggers and Aster. At the same time, A24’s choices as a distributor

affect which of its elevated horror films receive the most exposure. Statements in the

press, like the one from Harmony Korine which opens this chapter, might portray A24 as

a company that is more focused on the art than the commerce of cinema, and this makes

for good publicity. But the truth of the matter is that A24, just like any other studio,

makes decisions that will help itself as a business and a brand. Its decisions as to what

films are marketable to a wide audience impact those films’ potential. Films like The

Witch and Hereditary were groomed for positive word of mouth at film festivals before

being afforded the possibility for blockbuster success with large theatrical releases. The

Lighthouse, meanwhile, was given a “specialty box office” release, and, despite earning a
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massive $52,471 per-screen average on eight screens during its first weekend (Ramos,

2019), it never expanded beyond 1,000 theaters.

At the end of the decade, A24 remained the dominant distributor for elevated

horror and one of the only companies bringing those films to the multiplex. Its corporate

decision-making held a high degree of influence on how elevated horror was perceived

by mainstream moviegoers and the press.36 Thus, an A24 horror film’s ability to

experiment with genre while also impacting the broader cultural conversation around

elevated horror is shaped in part by the company’s confidence in that film’s financial

prospects. While both Midsommar and The Lighthouse were sold by A24 as ambitious,

auteur-driven genre films, the company showed more confidence that Midsommar could

be packaged as something which could have mainstream success. The genre

experimentation within Midsommar, then, had a greater opportunity to impact the

elevated horror cycle than that of The Lighthouse.

Midsommar, more so than The Lighthouse, was treated in the press as the next big

elevated horror film. What is most interesting about the rhetoric within the press, though,

is that the distinctive genre hybridity that tempered the serious tone of elevated horror

and was highlighted in many critics’ reviews was not mentioned in pieces which assessed

the film’s relationship to the elevated horror cycle. Scout Tafoya’s takedown of elevated

horror is a good example of this. His piece centered Midsommar as a “focal point” in a

“semiotic war” within the horror genre and described the film as Aster’s attempt to

36Outside of niche film blogs covering horror, most publications centered their discussions of elevated
horror on theatrically-released films.
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convince the viewer to “forget the tradition of horror [to which the film] belongs” (2019).

In contrast to the critics who saw Midsommar as cleverly playing with the conventions

which underlie the horror genre, Tafoya reads Aster’s genre play as an attempted

“escape” from the history of horror as a means of presenting the film as “something

better than horror” (2019). Thus, Tafoya saw Midsommar as Aster taking genre very

seriously and used it as a further example of how elevated horror is pretentious and “self-

important” (2019).

In David Church’s account of the cycle, which he refers to as “post-horror” (an

alternative moniker of “elevated horror”), he makes the case that these films’ approach to

themes of grief, trauma, and gaslighting evoke “discomfort in viewers for whom these

films may feel less like entertaining diversions than painfully recognizable emotional

scenarios” (2021, p. 102). Church references the distinct lack of “fun” that these films

produce when compared to other horror films which prioritize shock and disgust (2021,

p. 69). Through this framing, Church also situates Midsommar as a discomforting film

with weighty emotional and psychological themes while only mentioning in passing the

aspects of the film which play as more humorous and self-aware.

CONCLUSION
Despite its approach to genre hybridity differing from previous films in the

elevated horror cycle, and those elements of hybridity being referenced in numerous

reviews for the film, Midsommar was grouped into the criticism that claimed the cycle

was overly self-serious in an attempt to be gauged as more artistically accomplished than

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other horror cinema. While I would argue that both Midsommar and The Lighthouse were

presenting something slightly different generically than the elevated horror films made

prior to 2019, the discourse surrounding the cycle has stopped shy of acknowledging the

two films as departures.

All the same, A24 afforded directors like Aster and Eggers the space to produce

projects which critics called “audacious” and which experiment with the genre hybridity

of elevated horror, opening up the possibility for change within the cycle. A24 is not

attached to Eggers’ forthcoming film The Northman—a co-production between New

Regency Productions and Focus Features that will be distributed domestically by Focus

Features (Sharf, 2020). But it will be distributing Aster’s third feature, Disappointment

Blvd., which Aster has described as a four-hour-long “nightmare comedy” (Lattanzio,

2020). Aster’s penchant for mixing dark comedy with psychological horror does not

appear to be something that he is giving up as he grows in popularity as a horror director,

and his approach to genre will certainly continue to inform the elevated horror cycle

moving forward.

With Midsommar, Aster presented an evolution of elevated horror by eliminating

some of the art-house preoccupations that came to typify the cycle’s corpus and which

have been a major talking point for the cycle’s most vocal critics. Given that a cycle only

maintains a foothold within the industry so long as there is a vested interest in its films by

audiences (Klein, 2011, pp. 8-9), the shift in the generic presentation of elevated horror in

Midsommar presents the possibility for the cycle to transform into something that could

assuage these critics’ concerns and provide the cycle with more mainstream appeal.
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Conversely, Midsommar may prove to be an outlier. With the novel Coronavirus

pandemic disrupting film distribution and exhibition in 2020-21, few elevated horror

films have been released (as of this writing). However, two that have, Relic (d. James,

2020) and Saint Maud (d. Glass, 2021), offer restrained narratives about trauma and

psychological grief within an elevated horror aesthetic, with neither straying too far from

the weighty themes and art-house preoccupations of the cycle.

With theaters in a precarious state during the pandemic, A24 leaned into

streaming for some of its releases, while delaying some high-profile releases like The

Green Knight (d. Lowery) and Zola (d. Bravo) to summer 2021. It handled Minari (d.

Chung, 2021) with a premium VOD release during the 2021 awards season, and it made

an eight-figure deal with Epix for exclusive rights to stream Saint Maud (D’Alessandro,

2021). The company is also in pre-production on a slasher film called Bodies, Bodies,

Bodies. The film is being helmed by a director with a prestige pedigree in Halina Reijn,

whose debut feature Instinct (2019) was selected as Denmark’s entry into the Best

International Feature Film category at the 2020 Academy Awards (Kroll, 2021). As such,

there is a strong possibility that it will fit into the elevated horror corpus.

Another upcoming film from A24 is False Positive, the feature debut from John

Lee which is scheduled to release on Hulu in June 2021 (Leishman, 2021). Co-written by

and starring Ilana Glazer, the film is about a woman named Lucy who becomes pregnant

after seeing a fertility doctor. Lucy “begins to notice something sinister” about the doctor

and the nature of her pregnancy (D’Alessandro, 2020). This premise contains shades of

Rosemary’s Baby, to which films of the elevated horror cycle are often compared. False
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Positive also reportedly sports heavy themes regarding mental health and is a genre-

hybrid horror film (Cadenas, 2021), making it another potential elevated horror release

from A24. It is clear that, as A24 weathers the effects of the pandemic, it continues to

rely on the distribution of elevated horror films from burgeoning auteurs. And as long as

this remains the case, the cycle will likely remain a central part of the horror discourse.

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 Conclusion

I have traced two parallel histories with this study: the development of A24 as a

company and a brand from 2012 to 2020, and the related development of the elevated

horror cycle. By following the distribution of A24 horror films from the beginning with

Under the Skin, we see the growing pains the company experienced in executing its

business model. That film’s marketing failed to entice the mainstream audience as A24

had hoped, and it even struggled to appeal to the indie niche market, resulting in a

substantial financial failure. This marketing strategy, however, which reconfigured the

film’s generic elements to sell the film as a more traditional horror piece, worked more

effectively with subsequent films The Witch, Hereditary, and Midsommar. As the

elevated horror trend grew in popularity—in no small part due to the success of The

Witch—A24 became central to the discourse around the cycle. The growing prestige

associated with A24’s brand, alongside the company’s ambitious theatrical release

strategy, provided elevated horror a crucial level of cultural exposure.

The company has released content in other genres beyond horror, and these

releases also function as part of A24’s house style. Films like Spring Breakers (d. Korine,

2012), The Bling Ring (d. Coppola, 2013), Free Fire (d. Wheatley, 2016), Good Time (d.

Safdie and Safdie, 2017), and Uncut Gems (d. Safdie and Safdie, 2019) were indie takes

on the crime genre. The company has also distributed science fiction dramas which could

be considered “elevated—” Enemy (d. Villeneuve, 2013), Ex Machina (d. Garland,

2014), and High Life (d. Denis, 2018). It has even ventured into punk exploitation cinema

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with Green Room (d. Saulnier, 2015). Clearly, A24 has made genre an integral facet of its

brand.

As a brand-focused independent emerging in the 2010s, A24 has played a pivotal

role in the evolution of American independent cinema. The late-2000s was a period when

independence was pushed once again to the margins, having moved “away from the

conglomerated majors’ specialty film divisions and standalone superpowers such as

Lionsgate to artisanal companies … many of whom tried to exploit new and emerging

approaches to distribution” (Tzioumakis, 2017, p. 259). Companies like A24 and Neon

moved to fill the gap in American independent cinema left by the decline of Indiewood,

and they both have done so with an emphasis on corporate authorship and branding.

Corporate authorship has been theorized by scholars such as Jerome Christensen,

who argues that “making a consumer into a customer involves the establishment of a

connection to the corporation” (2011, p. 10), and J.D. Connor in The Studios after the

Studios investigates the extent to which films are allegories for the business which

created them (2015, p. 5). More specifically, a volume like MTM: ‘Quality Television’

(eds. Feuer, Kerr, and Vahimagi) examines the links between corporate identity, house

styles, and the perception of “quality” content. A24, quite clearly, fits into this discourse.

For its niche audience, the A24 logo has become a marker for quality independent film—

a connection has been made between company and consumer that attributes the corporate

author as a trustworthy name in cinema. With its flowery logo preceding the marketing

for Midsommar, the company even engaged in what Connor refers to as logorrhea—

which is to say, the “bleeding” of studio logo and film narrative emblematic of corporate
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authorship (2015, pp. 19-21). By examining A24’s branding practices, I have attempted

to place the company directly into this conversation.

By focusing on A24, this project provides one perspective from which to analyze

the elevated horror cycle. Of course, there are other angles which future research can

take. Primarily, and as noted in the Introduction, the global perspective of the elevated

horror cycle is worthy of further study. In organizing this study around a U.S. distributor,

my discussion of non-U.S. productions has necessarily been kept to a minimum. Under

the Skin, a product of the United Kingdom, is the exception, and its acquisition for U.S.

distribution by A24 allowed for an analysis of the marketing employed by a non-U.S.

company in StudioCanal. However, this analysis dealt primarily with A24’s marketing

and branding practices. More could be said about the film’s complicated

transnationality—it is a film set and shot in Scotland from a British writer-director,

adapted from a novel by a Dutch-born author who lives in Scotland, and starring a

Hollywood A-lister. The ways in which these varied national identities and market

interests manifest within the film text are broached in Connor’s brief analysis in Jump

Cut (2016), and this could be explored further.

Several films in the elevated horror cycle which have been produced outside the

U.S. are worth examining in detail, notably Goodnight Mommy (d. Fiala & Franz,

Austria, 2015), The Wailing (d. Na, South Korea, 2016), Raw (d. Ducournau, France,

2017), and Tigers are Not Afraid (d. Lopez, Mexico, 2019). These films warrant further

analysis within their relevant national contexts. This work has already been initiated in

the case of The Wailing, a film which received worldwide critical acclaim and was the
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seventh highest-grossing film of 2016 in South Korea at $45 million USD (Box Office

Mojo).37 It was nominated for Best Film at the two most prestigious South Korean film

awards, the Grand Bell Awards and the Blue Dragon Awards, and Na Hong-jin won the

Blue Dragon for Best Director. Luisa Hyojin Koo has written about the film’s

relationship to South Korean national identity, particularly as it relates to a history of

Japanese colonialism in the country which bred a culture of hypermasculinity (2019).

The Wailing was one in a line of genre films coming out of South Korea’s rapidly

developing film industry. As Darcy Paquet puts it, the New Korean Cinema that emerged

out of the political upheaval of the late-1980s grew “strong enough [by the mid-2000s] to

compete with, and even out-perform, Hollywood films in its home market” (2009, p. 4).

The genre cinema of filmmakers like Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon, and Bong Joon-ho

were particularly influential in this market shift given their blend of commercial and film

festival appeal (Paquet, 2009, pp. 93-94). The 2010s evidenced a continued emphasis on

genre cinema in the success of South Korea’s film industry. The Wailing was a

contribution to both this national industry and the elevated horror cycle, making it a

dynamic case study.

Ducournau’s Raw is a similar case, in that its subject matter echoes that of the

New French Extremity, which spanned roughly from the 1990s to the end of the 2000s.38

Specifically, it shares commonalities with the cannibal narrative of Claire Denis’ Trouble

Every Day (2001). Raw has been critically examined through psychoanalytic (Watson,

37South Korea’s number-one grossing film of that year was another horror film, Train to Busan (d. Lee).
38Alexandra West argues that the New French Extremity, like the New Korean Cinema, was a politically
motivated cinema pushing back against a conservative political regime (2016).
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2020) and gender studies (Dooley, 2019) lenses, but not much has been said of its

inclusion in the elevated horror corpus. The differing ways in which the films of the

elevated horror cycle engage with their respective national cinemas is, I believe, a fruitful

avenue for future research. Similarly, it is worth looking at the transnational dimension of

these films and how they exist as part of a global film industry.

It is also worth noting here the other studios which distributed elevated horror. I

have briefly discussed Blumhouse and its contribution to the cycle, Get Out. While the

company has not released other elevated horror since that film, it is perhaps worth

examining the way in which elevated horror functions differently in Blumhouse’s

business model when compared to A24. Blumhouse’s brand clearly diverges from A24’s,

in that it is notably less prestige oriented and focuses mainly on low-budget commercial

horror. The situation of Get Out within this brand, as well as Jordan Peele’s relationship

to the company, would make for an intriguing case. Moreover, there has not been a

significant study to date of Blumhouse’s market strategy. Being that Blumhouse is an

independent company which has produced a number of successful horror blockbusters—

e.g., the Paranormal Activity and The Purge franchises, Split (d. Shyamalan, 2016),

Halloween (d. Green, 2018)—its impact on contemporary horror cinema has been

considerable.

IFC Midnight, the genre division of IFC Films, is similarly notable in terms of its

branding. It has released a small selection of horror films with an art-house aesthetic, the

most recent being Relic in 2021. But the company takes a broad approach to horror,

releasing content in a variety of subgenres such as teen screams (#Horror [d. Subkoff,
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2015]) and hard-R body horror films (Cabin Fever [d. Zariwny, 2016], Contracted [d.

England, 2013]). IFC attached itself early to the VOD trend (Hildebrand, 2010, pp. 24-

28), with most of its horror films not seeing theatrical release—another distribution

strategy which diverges from that of A24.

There are elements of A24’s model which also could be explored in future

research. The independent company was a crucial facet of American independent cinema

in the 2010s. A24’s marketing and distribution strategies attempt to appeal to both its

“indie taste culture” niche and to the mainstream moviegoer. In looking at how the

company expanded the audience for the elevated horror cycle, this project has focused

mainly on its appeals to the mainstream. Further research could explore the processes

through which A24 has cultivated its niche audience. These processes include targeted

social media marketing and the sale of collectible products associated with its films.

A24’s online shop sells limited edition memorabilia clearly geared to the more intense

fans of the company’s films. Products include a tabletop roleplaying game associated

with the fantasy film The Green Knight ($35), a facial hair grooming kit modeled on

iconography from The Lighthouse ($42), and a gold-plated replica of the “blinged-out”

Furby toy from Uncut Gems ($250) (A24). These are a brand of unique, artisanal

products which go beyond the usual film merchandising (i.e., posters) to appeal to a

narrower fanbase. It would be worthwhile to examine A24’s niche branding practices in

more depth, particularly in relation to the practices of other contemporary independents.

One could also look at the ways in which A24 has diversified its business and

how that affects its brand. I touched briefly on the streaming and VOD deals A24 has
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made, including those with DirecTV, HBO, and Apple. While this project has focused

mainly on theatrical exhibition, A24 is moving increasingly into the streaming space. The

company has also produced a number of television projects like Ramy (2019-) and

Moonbase 8 (2020). This non-theatrical content lies largely outside the scope of my

study; nevertheless, it is an integral and developing component of A24’s business which

should be explored further.

Over time, the elevated horror cycle will necessarily fade away and new cycles of

horror will emerge. In terms of genre cycle analysis, this study is restricted by the fact

that the elevated horror trend is still in progress. The historical perspective on horror

cinema will benefit, I believe, from research in the future which will place the elevated

horror cycle in conversation with subsequent cycles (in a similar way to what I attempt to

do in the Introduction by placing the neo-grindhouse cycle of the 2000s in conversation

with both elevated horror and blockbuster horror of the 2010s). The impact of A24 on

American independent cinema, too, will only be properly assessed in retrospect. The

company has only been in operation for nine years, and it shows no signs of slowing

down, with six films slated for release in 2021—including two elevated horror films,

Saint Maud (d. Rose) and False Positive (d. Lee). If past is prelude, both American

independent cinema and horror cinema are likely to be impacted by A24 as we head into

the 2020s.

145
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