Sunday Scaries: The Worst Year for “Elevated” Horror

Note: This article contains spoilers for Keeper, Together, Bring Her Back, Sinners, and Weapons.

At the start of this decade, I mused on a possible decline in the trend of horror movies with ambitious themes, heavier visual aesthetics, and a more “arthouse” appeal being the dominant form of the genre in favor of more tonally audacious and less thematically heady movies in the future. Looking back, with the decade halfway over, I have to come to the conclusion that in some ways I was right and in some ways I was wrong. In the wake of X and Malignant saw the releases of similarly wild, semi-comedic horror projects like Smile, M3gan, The Menu, Barbarian, El Conde, Thanksgiving, The Substance, Strange Darling, The Monkey, and two Terrifier sequels. Not a bad run so far for the latter type of horror movie! But it’s not like the “elevated” horror subgenre took a break. Far from it, those are still getting produced at a fairly rapid clip. However, based on their quality this year, I now have a strong desire to see this subgenre put on ice for a long time. Because I have never suffered through a year with so many abysmal entries in the “elevated” horror genre than 2025. Yes, this article is gonna be a bitch session. I’m sorry, but I have to get this off my chest.

I reached my breaking point last month having sat through Keeper, which was apparently shot on the fly by Osgood Perkins to pass the time while production on The Monkey was held up by the strikes in 2023. And boy, does it show. Frequently coming off like a parody of listless, pretentious horror movies that present random assortments of unpleasant imagery as the sum total of its grab-bag of scares [sic], Keeper is an unbearable slog. It spends nearly the entirety of its runtime spinning its wheels, revving up to trick you into thinking it’s finally about to go somewhere narratively consequential, before pulling back with a cheap “OoOoOh gotcha! It was just a dream! Or was it?!?!” fakeout to draw out its paper-thin plot for as long as possible before revealing a “twist” that is only shocking if you’ve never seen a horror movie, before. Perkins can’t even articulate an animating idea behind this woeful project beyond a fuzzy declaration that men are, like, bad and stuff. Not that this movie actually says anything interesting, or even comprehensible, about such a mundane idea at the end.

But hey, at least the ending has the benefit of some commendably imaginative monster designs, a strong central performance, and unflinching gore effects. Together can’t even boast any of those! Well, okay, Alison Brie actually does a decent job conveying a sort of scrappy resourcefulness and interiority in her character navigating such a repetitive, dull scenario. No such luck for her screen partner and real-life husband Dave Franco, who just blares the same one-note intensity in every scene to the point of secondhand embarrassment. But even if both of the leads were bringing their A-game here, they would still have been let down by the insultingly limited cinematic vocabulary of director Michael Shanks. The entire premise is literally about the synchronous mutation of two people’s bodies, and yet he and his d.p. Germain McMicking needlessly abstract the implication of this scenario by framing nearly every scene of body horror and corporeal fusion in clunky medium and close-up shots. Millie and Tim’s grimacing faces are the dominant shots of its most intense scenes, obscuring the stakes that are supposed to be the selling point of this movie. The camera can’t even bear to watch the final fusion scene, literally backing away and around a corner as if too bashful to embrace the movie’s own climax while acting like codependency is an inevitability in romantic relationships. Gee, I wonder why young people are losing interest in marriage?

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Bring Her Back, which seems to be far too eager to delight in its relentless, monotonous scenes of cruelty and physical abuse heaped on its child protagonists. This approach is nowhere near as directionless as Keeper nor is it as incompetent in staging its horror as Together, but that almost makes it worse here. From the moment we’re introduced to Laura, it becomes stupidly obvious that she’s Up To No Good and that she’s Hiding A Dark Secret, and then just wallows in scene after scene of three children being subjected to explicitly-rendered acts of gaslighting, humiliation, forced confinement, assault, and literal cannibalism. None of this would be a problem if the movie depicted such sadism with a sense of meaningful empathy, but in Bring Her Back, it is as badly misplaced as any horror movie I can readily recall. There are no thematic ideas beyond

G R I E F

and

T R A U M A

with an overarching message about both that is so dishonest that I feel like Danny and Michael Philippou should seriously consider therapy before taking another stab at horror. Because by the time we get to the climax, they strongly suggest that we’re supposed to feel pity for Laura, after everything we’ve seen her do in the preceding eighty minutes! Sorry, fellas, but I don’t actually think grief and trauma, even at their most overwhelming, motivates anyone to torture kids for several days on end. Nor do I think any well-adjusted person does, either. They tip their hand that they even know this, deep down, since their movie punts on the opportunity to contrast her grief with Andy’s, and I suspect that’s because doing so would make its suggestion that Laura is a pitiable character we should feel sorry for even more outrageous than it already is. Ruby Franke did not suffer any previous trauma in her life, and even if she did, that would not make her The Real Victim in the house of horrors she built with her accomplice. And I certainly would not ever want to watch a film suggesting she was one.

And then there’s Him, which is basically what happens when you mix the aesthetic heavy-handedness of Black Swan with the thematic observations of The Joe Rogan Experience. “What if America’s obsession with football was akin to religious fervor?” feels impossible to screw up, but by gawd, Justin Tipping found a way to do it! That almost impresses me.

To be clear, I am not complaining about bad horror movies. I see at least one of those every year, and I certainly don’t intend to let less overtly ambitious dreck like Shelby Oaks off the hook. In this instance, I’m calling out a specific kind of bad horror movie sweatily jogging behind a trend that their directors and writers don’t care to understand or genuinely build upon. If you want to make a movie about misogyny, make a movie about misogyny! If you want to make a movie about grief, just make a movie about grief! If you want to comment on the ugly underbelly of professional football, just do it! Stop feeling like you have to dress it up in poorly-realized horror trappings as a means to cover up your palpable insecurity over your handle on the ideas you want to convey.

I find it very telling that the only horror outings that have succeeded as entertainment this year are ones that prioritized actually being entertaining over any half-cocked pretensions of Deeper Messaging. Heck, if there’s one common flaw both Sinners and Weapons share, it’s that neither of their allegorical foundations map onto their scenarios very cleanly. In the real world, a town that experienced seventeen children mysteriously disappearing on the same night would have completely shut down and the story would have literally made international headlines. Linking vampire folklore and the history of American white supremacy is certainly possible, but for some reason Sinners felt strained every time it actually tried to do so. But these flaws pale in comparison to the simple reality that they worked. They were scary and exciting and I would be more than happy to see them again. I don’t care that Sally Hawkins poured herself into such a misbegotten character, when I have much fonder memories of being on the edge of my seat watching Amy Madigan’s more inspired take on the Wicked Witch/Evil Stepmother Aunt archetype.

Whatever cinematic value “elevated” horror brought us peaked at some point in the 2010s. I am sick to death of these pale imitators taking a cargo cult approach to what The Babadook and Under the Skin achieved so spectacularly over a decade ago. It’s a new era, give us something fresh. Like a scene with a gang of blood-stained vampires dancing and singing an Irish jig: