Jump scares and monsters: Those are the hallmarks of seminal horror, and the label should be a badge of honor, not something to shun at awards time.
That blurb misses the point a bit, try this one:
The ‘bad guy’ in both is the status quo.
‘Get Out’‘s villain is a white woman, and her white family is involved. Their whiteness and racism are their thematic cores. The family is, to the average white viewer, totally reasonable and nice! They’re cool, they’re rich, they’re educated and clearly they Aren’t Racist because they’d vote for Obama a third time! And all of those things are shown to be LIES specifically fabricated to hide the monstrocity of their racist actions.
‘The Shape of Water’‘s villain is a stereotypical clean cut white male. He’s military. He’s a flag-flying, country-serving, head-of-the-household jingoistic posterboy for the patriarchal identity. He’s sexist. He’s racist. All of those -isms are the monster: bigotry.
Both of these movies are told from the POV of a victim of bigotry.
The person the audience is least likely to feel they can’t empathize with (the white family in ‘Get Out’, the strong-jawed white officer in ‘The Shape of Water’) turns out to be the person they SHOULDN’T have empathized with all along, and both movies imply that if they did they should feel bad.
Both movies made white people into the monsters for ONCE and that’s too scary to them to admit. If they validate these movies as horror, they’d have to validate the horrors of their actions and they don’t want to.
Both movies are well written enough that a lazy and likely bigoted viewer wouldn’t notice at first just how horrible they look from the victim’s point of view, but by the end the narrative is obvious and they are embarrassed, guilty, ashamed and too emotionally brittle to process that properly.
