“Hereditary” and modern Horror
For me, 2018's Hereditary marks a stark turnaround in the horror genre that really began a few years earlier with things like 2014’s stalker-horror, It Follows, and Robert Eggers’ The VVitch.
Horror as a genre is plagued with low effort, low quality, and high gore movies meant to shock and stir, rather than move or provoke real thought. Of course this isn’t a hard and fast rule, only a generality, and in recent years we've really begun to get some real gems from the category. I’ve been really pleased with a lot of what I’ve seen from that side of the page lately, and we've begun to receive many high class films in place of cheap slashers, corny jump scares, and buckets of blood. Horror is beginning to come away from the "movie" category and fall more into the "film" one; A trend that I hope to see continue.
Whether you personally find things like Hereditary, It Follow, It Comes at Night, The VVitch, or Midsommar to be your particular style, it’s difficult to argue that there isn't a level of quality here that is almost entirely absent from the last couple decades of horror releases, and one that hopefully will get some recognition come awards ceremonies soon.
