#elevated horror

[thedeathofthelamb]

I'm so glad Bryan Fuller watched all of the movies based in the Thomas Harris' books and went: yeah but what if we made it gay and unbearably erotic?

[d1sc01nf3rn0]

Horror movies are political.

Horror stories are political.

Human created works are political, cause we don't exist nor create in a void.

Don't argue "separate politics from horror movies", because it is dumb, and you're denying your history.

[sam-keeper]

One Sad Grey Note: Hellraiser 2022

The opening of Hellraiser 2022 is dark. Visually, I mean. It's even drab. It's pretty well trodden ground at this point to criticize the poor lighting of contemporary cinematogry. Even within its class, though, Hellraiser dedicates itself to keeping information out of the frame, and excitement out of the plot. The mansion orgy that starts the film's action barely makes it onto the screen, for example. We follow a youth through this sequence--will he be seduced by this predatory-seeming cougar? No, she diverts him down the hall like any secretary. Finally, this random victim's encounter with orgy impresario Roland Voight--and the monster-summoning puzzle box that Hellraiser centers on--is as chaste as can be. Maybe the film just wants to set our expectations properly for its first kill... ah, no, it bafflingly happens out of focus in the background, while Voight recites spooky ritual nonsense. It's... pretty deflating!

Much of this could be run of the mill mediocrity and a contemporary set of stylistic choices that I just find kind of bland and unsatisfying. Rewatching the film a year later felt like a dull slog, the tendency to underlight scenes making for a toxic combo with its editors' refusal to cut the fat (the movie is an indefensible two hours long). I think there's more than technical problems dampening the enthusiasm in the film, though. It struggles on a deeper level with its choice to replace the central metaphor in Hellraiser--the allure of transgressive, kinky, queer sex--with a new one: drug addiction. 

It's not alone in that fixation, or its muddy results. Contemporary "elevated horror" increasingly feels to me like a tune played with one sad grey note. The sex the protagonist of Hellraiser 2022 has is sad. She can't have a meal with friends, because her asshole brother is there to make it sad. Drinking or doing "pills"? Sad. Sad and nondescript. All she does is "pills", and what are their effects? "Sad" and "drug". What happens in an orgy? Sex, in another room from the one the characters are in. Eroticized bondage murder? A backdrop to a liturgy.

Well, until a trans woman shows up covered in spikes and then for a brief moment I am transported to untold realms of experience. That's no thanks to the film makers, though. That is just how I respond to trans women. Especially scary ones.

I like having all my neurons lit up by seeing Jamie Clayton decked out as this film's cenobite leader Pinhead, and hearing Clayton's gorgeous voice saying spooky shit, because broadly that's something I come to horror for: fear and revulsion and sadness, yes, but also the pleasure of fear mixed with attraction. I sort of thought that was the whole, like, point of Hellraiser, actually. In Clive Barker's original film, the Cenobites are "demons to some, angels to others, explorers in the far realms of experience." The horror, paired with fascination, comes from entities that have transcended the boundaries of pain and pleasure colliding with more conventional human beings. Humans creep and scheme, but Cenobites are a force.

I may as well lay my cards on the table here: I find this very hot, conceptually.

Now, I had to reflect on this a little bit, as I worked on this article. The original Hellraiser is a movie about Frank, a guy who, bored with conventional perversion, seeks out a cursed puzzle box and gets ripped to actual shreds for his trouble. He then comes back as a melty skeleton to seduce his ex (his brother's wife) and menace his niece. She in turn solves the puzzle box, summons the Cenobites, and in desperation offers them the escaped Frank in exchange for her own life.

Eroticism, sexual menace, and masochism all play a part in this film, but I'm not sure that the protagonist Kirsty experiences, on screen, the commingled desire and terror the Cenobites represent. The Cenobites are not even necessarily directly erotic monsters (though apparently the film was developed under the title Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave, which rules). Some of the eroticism was apparently in part taken out due to MPAA censorship. Go figure. And yet, what remains is a kind of eroticism of texture. It's looking at these practical effects, these monster designs, and being repulsed but also wishing to see more of them. What makes it read that way for me is not necessarily in the story itself, but in the sensory imaginary of Chatterer putting its fingers in Kirsty's mouth and going [clickclickclickclick] next to her ear. The first time I saw that I recoiled from the screen!

...But I kept looking, and have returned again and again.

Maybe it's this dynamic that inspires the drug (or more broadly "mental health" or "cycles of trauma") metaphor increasingly popular in contemporary Elevated Horror. The possibility of relapse certainly hangs over everything in Hellraiser 2022. Protagonist Riley is treated with constant suspicion from everyone from her brother to his friends to paramedics over the possibility she's relapsing, something I could get if the film seemed to understand "substances" as offering something appealing to the user. Something seems to have gotten lost in stylistic translation, though. The metaphor is suggested by the stylistic allure of the genre, then the metaphor becomes sort of heightened by the modern vogue for horror films to not just mean something but Mean Something (Elevated), and in the gloomy ponderousness of the style the original aesthetic that carried the meaning gets lost.

Every cursed relic is a drug. Every drug is fentanyl.

Here's a question though: if the puzzle box the Lament Configuration represents drug addiction, why would anyone ever fucking start? The whole thing seems viscerally unappealing. You move a couple parts around (this is actually pretty cool and appealing in an autistic kinda way) then a blade snaps out and jabs you. The original puzzle box was content to summon a bunch of demonic angels to pierce your flesh with meathooks, but this has an added Drug Metaphor Effect. Which... mostly constitutes making you kinda droopy, before sending you screaming to hell.

I may not act like it but I've smoked a drug or two in my day and idk man I'm sorry but if this is what they did, no one would fucking do them.

To read the rest of my review of the movie, as well as Talk To Me (2022) and, of all things, a short film made between the first and second American Ring films that I think actually does a lot of this stuff much better than contemporary horror, check out the full article on my website:

One Sad Grey Note: Hellraiser 2022

A blog of esoteric media criticism, laying siege to the Ivory Tower of academia from the gutters of pop culture

I'll be doing more reviews of horror movies, a lot of which you probably won't see talked about anywhere else, all this month, so follow along in my horror tag here. If this piece helped you appreciate art more deeply, consider following me on patreon, adding me to your rss reader, and tipping me.

[possumwithlotsofswag]

I love trash!!!

[bitter69uk]

Kudos to Amy Madigan! The fierce veteran actress deservedly won the Best Supporting Actress award at the 31st Critic’s Choice Awards on 4 January for her performance in Zach Cregger’s barnstorming 2025 horror movie Weapons. Madigan absolutely mesmerized as Aunt Gladys, a freaky, vivid vision straight out of a child’s nightmare. Think of Gladys as a distaff equivalent of Nicholas Cage in Longlegs (2024) or a throwback to Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Madigan’s portrayal also links Weapons to the golden age of 60s and 70s hagsploitation horror movies (if Weapons was made in the 70s, Gladys would be played by someone like Shelley Winters, Geraldine Page or Jo Van Fleet, and the title would have been Whatever Happened to Aunt Gladys? or What’s the Matter with Aunt Gladys?). Anyway, how gratifying to see a 75-year-old actress (who’d been contemplating retirement because the good roles had dried up) come roaring back so triumphantly. And Aunt Gladys was THE red-hot Halloween costume of 2025! (I might be biased, but I’d argue no one did it better than my boyfriend Pal!).

[klainebayeuxtapestry]

i’m doing like queer threesome challengers inspired very original book faithful frankenstein in nyc right now and if you’re around you should come check it out it’s about what happens when you’re so afraid of sex and intimacy that you give birth to an insatiable sex monster who hates you?

firebird.nyc/tix

[pluggedintosaverockandroll]

favorite video essays part 6

Nosferatu & The Gothic Appetite

The Ghost Hunting Industrial Complex

The Internet Used to Be a Place

STOP devaluing the arts and humanities

Medieval Knights Were a LOT Gayer Than You Think

you can't separate literature from politics

I Want to Talk About "Elevated Horror"

the ethics of reality TV | a video essay

Wilde & Stoker: girl, so confusing

Why We Can’t Stop Collecting.

[thekimspoblog]

I can't say this is a project I would ever feel passionately about enough to write an actual screenplay, but let's say for the sake of indulging a fantasy, someone from Blumhouse or A24 approached ME to write a "Jeff the Killer" movie...

My treatment would be a PG-13 dark romance, psychological thriller, and horror-comedy, with a decided leaning towards character development and comedy rather than horror. Mostly, I just have this image in my head of a very snappily-edited trailer utilizing a mashup of "What's the Matter with Kids These Days" and "Teenagers Scare the Living Shit Out of Me". The premise can be summarized as "When a charismatic older boy moves in, an affluent American suburb breaks out in a rash of teenagers attacking adults and each other." The film would heavily feature direct homages to "Blue Velvet" and especially "Edward Scissorhands", but the narrative would actually have the closest resemblance to something like "Village of the Damned" or "Children of the Corn". The point would be to really tap into the emotions of a parent with a troubled child they have no idea how to reach or even discipline, and what it feels like for that frustration to be compounded when the child seems to readily embrace the authority of an even worse influence. The alieness, inscrutability, and untamability of youth culture. The fear of getting old, losing your edge, forgetting what you once knew in your gut. That you barely got a taste of the world belonging to you before the next shiny new thing has already muscled you out, and being powerless to warn the next generation it's a repeating cycle. It's a nightmarish heightened reality where every moral panic the news has ever peddled feels vindicated.

Jeff would not be the main character. Instead we follow an unnamed fourteen year old girl, who at the start of the movie is still reeling from being diagnosed with signs of severe personality disorders (which only makes her feel more socially isolated), and is clearly holding onto a lot of resentment that her parents impeded her dreams of being a child star out of fear the industry was too seedy and would distract her from school. After being suspended for an altercation with a classmate, the girl begins to seek out movies which reinforce her perception of herself as a psychopathic killer. Her parents are clearly repressive, narcissistic, hypocritical, have their middle-class priorities backwards, and are arguably verbally and psychologically abusive, but there's still no question that the intrusive thoughts she begins indulging about killing them are NOT a solution. It's also clear that she wants to lash out at the drab conformity of adulthood that awaits her, that deep down she isn't special, but has no idea how. Jeff moving into the big creepy old house on the hill is framed like the start of a more conventional haunted house movie, but it becomes quickly apparent that the house ISN'T haunted; it's a regular dilapidated death trap and the threat is that nobody who's attracted to it or feels at home living there could be well. But after a brief period of the heroine being dismissive of Jeffery as a poser, the gothic romance of the creepy mansion enchants her and Jeff's general foul-mouthed speaking-truth-to-power vibes suck her into the little cult of personality forming at the house. From there, she is fully under Jeff's spell, and yet he still can't manipulate her into doing anything part of her wasn't already contemplating. As their edgy romance progresses, this is when parents start turning up dead. We know Jeff is behind it, even if the girl is too brainwashed to see it, but a mystery is still built up around the hierarchy of Jeff's followers and which disciple killed which adult.

The main mechanic of this story is the way the movie would repeatedly build up the audience's empathy for characters, then rip the rug out from under them. Everyone's a victim and no one is innocent. And Jeff himself defies explanation: When he first recounts his tragic backstory to Girl, we get a full unbroken nine minute retelling of the traditional Jeff the Killer lore: Relentless bullying, abusive perfectionist parents, brother falsely accused of murder, maiming and reconstructive surgery. But as the movie goes on, we get more flashbacks of Jeff's origins, and the details begin to contradict each other. At one point, Jeff tells a story about how he used to be a timid boy, but after a cult murdered his entire family, upon returning to school he embraced a kind of dead-inside "fake it til you make it" mindset that allowed him to succeed in all his endeavors and ultimately infiltrate the cult and turn it against itself. In another story near the end of the movie, Jeff's career as a serial killer began when he had an encounter with a cryptid akin to the Angel of Death itself, which personally cursed him with a mission he has no free will to resist carrying out, to be an emissary of its message. In another story he was chewed up and spit out by Hollywood and method acting broke his brain. The bulk of the runtime would be the slow burn of the girl peeling away the lies of Jeff's character and growing from enraptured to disillusioned with him. The man and woman Jeff moved in with aren't his parents; they're his hostages, which recontextualizes some of their "abuse". And this isn't even the first couple he's done this to since killing his actual parents over ten years ago. Oh that's right! By the way, Jeff isn't seventeen like he said; he's twenty-eight. And our protagonist isn't the only teenage girl he's promised to run away with once she "cut out the rot from her life". I'd like to think of something a little fresher, but the most obvious trajectory a story like this could go culminates in a Veronica Sawyer-esque showdown between the final girl and the ex-boyfriend who speaks for her dark passenger. I think by this point Jeff should basically split into two different figures: the frail and pedestrian appetites and vanities of a man who kills to feel special, and the eternal self-perpetuating disease Jeff tried to sew himself into the mythology of. His human body lays dead at the girl's feet, defeated, but vapors of television static form a ghost that flashes her one last knowing smile before walking off confidently into the fog. His laugh following her all the way home.

As far as the Blue Velvet homages, I would borrow dialogue said by both Jeffery Beaumont and Frank Booth, and let them both bleed together coming out of Jeff's mouth in a way that only gets more uncomfortable if you understand the reference. The version of himself Jeff wants his victims to see - sensitive, artsy, protective, angry at the cruelty of the world - masks a fragile brute hungry for control who has no problem punching down when it serves his ego. His demeanor in a scene can shift very suddenly, and it needs to be jarring every time. The original CreepyPasta was never high art, but the one thing it did well was serve as a time capsule of the Dark Suburbia setting. The symmetrical shot composition and pastel/candy color palette would clearly be going for a 1950's retro aesthetic, but great pains would have to be taken so that the actual interior set and costume design feels specific to the era the original story was written in. It would be a difficult balance to strike, but if the film's look succeeded in making 2006 feel like a fairytale - distant enough to be nostalgic and at the same time recent enough that we never escaped its shadow - I think we could have something really different and special here. For years, critics have mocked how every character in Jeff the Killer's universe is armed to the teeth and yet the adults are useless in the face of a couple cartoon bullies, and that's actually what started to inspire me. Because while it's very obviously just a plot hole in the original story, there's a real irony there which - if done correctly - could at minimum be mined for comedy. It's an absurdity but in a strange way it feels realistic.

In general, I would take a very "OOPS! ALL SOCIAL COMMENTARY!" approach to the screenplay. The movie throws out so many theories about where Jeff came from and why he's doing this; the police, teachers, and town hall talk in circles speculating on why the kids listen to Jeff and how to diffuse the situation, that it becomes white noise after a while. It lampshades the idea something as simple as an allegory in a horror movie can help us to better understand real world tragedies at all. The closest the story gives to a serious answer is what my criminology textbook calls "Social Control Theory" - basically that it's more constructive asking why people are ever good than why they are sometimes evil. A very specific set of conditions had to be true for the American Dream to ever give the illusion of viability, and by 2006 that dream was already succumbing to entropy at a rate nobody was ready to admit. Symbolized by the opening shot of the movie where the neighborhood is all watching a solar eclipse, and Jeff enters the mansion for the first time just as the eclipse is ending. The tone is very nihilistic, but the goal is to criticize all reductive narratives, including nihilism, and so at least with our main character's arc, the implied resolution is that mental illness and free will are not mutually exclusive, that oftentimes being an asshole is a path of least resistance we have to actively struggle against, even if that struggle looks different to each person. Sprinkle in some moments where the Girl stops herself and exercises some basic common decency, and have those moments not necessarily save the day but at least prevent things from getting worse. A lot of what supporting characters say about/to Jeff can easily be read as being about Trump if the audience wishes, but I'd be more overtly interested in characterizing Jeff this way as a means of calling Brian Warner a transparent loser and satirizing the way countercultures reflect the exploitation of the dominant culture. Our heroine's odyssey of looking for authenticity, in its place finding more bullshit, and having to form her own conclusions about what needs to change.

So yeah. That's my elevator pitch. As always, all creations by Annie Trinty are in the public domain. If you liked this post, don't forget to reblog.