Caligari in 1919-ushering in the influence of German Expressionistic design, a foreboding stylistic intersection of diabolical sets and suffocating shadows-signaled a shift in how film could convey various states of the fragile human mind in decay or sliding toward madness. The penetrating arrival of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. And the socio-emotional-political climates of some of these films’ native countries in the years following World War I provided the psychological backdrop and drive for expression, interconnected ecosystems that birthed thrilling onscreen manifestations of anger, anxiety, and oppressive fear-not to mention a new visual language-in the form of imagined or real ghosts, monsters, and demons. Much of what audiences unconsciously attach to current horror cinema, though, can be directly traced back to the genre’s genesis in the emergent, terror-based films of both western Europe and America’s 1920s pre-sound era, the elements of which had an inarguable influence on the films of the next decade. Film still: Alex Wolff (b.1997) as Peter Graham in Hereditary (2018) Horror has always allowed for absurd expressiveness and sowed fertile grounds for a transgression that reflect how we’re living, feeling, and attempting to survive right now: on the edge of a razor, doused in uncomfortable truth, consequence, and a lot of bone-crunching. From the familial violence and trauma of Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Nia DaCosta’s new Candyman to the body horror of Jordan Peele’s acerbic Get Out and James Wan’s nutso Malignant, to the festering faith of Rose Glass’ Saint Maud and Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, it’s the modern psyche-in-disrepair that underpins it all. Neither does that word “elevated” do justice to what’s happening in horror cinema today, not from a thematic, nor aesthetic standpoint “expansive” is more like it.

To think: there exists international discourse, where-willfully or not, for clout or not-voices refute the presence of socio-political undercurrents in horror, a mystifying misdiagnosis that amounts to a withered ignorance of the genre’s history and very foundations. You can bet that whenever our little societal fiefdoms are flipped over like so many unlucky turtles, bellies baking in the apocalyptic sun, the horror genre will be there to trumpet the tragedy, the irony, the desperation of the moment in mostly monstrous terms.

The Van Helsing Legacy by M.R. Graham