theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinema

You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil above jump-scares and gore.

It was first used to describe a crop of horror films that came out in 2014 such as Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walk Home Alone at Night, but has been used to describe some of the most recognisable horror films of the decade from directors like Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. 

To some this is an innocent enough descriptor. To others, the pairing of words causes a visceral reaction, deemed a backhanded compliment that reeks of the same snobbery that has banished horror from the house of respectable film discourse. In Feeding the Monster, critic and author Anna Bogutskaya reveals she belongs to the latter group, “It is a phrase that generates an unusual amount of bile in me”, she writes. In her taut overview of the past 10 years of horror cinema, Bogutskaya argues that as with any genre, there are good and bad horror films and that a genre deeply embedded in the history of cinema doesn’t need a fancy laurel next to its name to make it respectable. 

But something did happen in 2014, around the same time this phrase was bandied about. The aforementioned films did reinvigorate the genre with their nuanced portrayals of grief, depression, and yes, trauma. The Babadook was a grey-hued portrait of a grief-stricken mother and Robert Egger’s The Witch was more about a family’s descent into paranoia than a cauldron stirring sorcerer. Whatever you want to call it, Bogutskaya pinpoints 2014 as the beginning of a wave of introspective horror which would attract renewed critical acclaim, foster new talent and define the zeitgeist for the coming decade. 

Although Bogutskaya argues that this wave has simply been doing what horror films have always done: portraying the free-floating anxieties of our age in extremis. Through five chapters titled “Fear”, “Hunger”, “Anxiety”, “Pain” and “Power”, Bogutskaya traces how cannibalism and the loneliness epidemic go hand in hand, why analogue horror is the soured milk of our nostalgia-prone culture, and how body-horror has been reimagined through a trans lens and become a prestige genre in the process. 

Her thesis is that we are at the tail end of this wave – which is certainly a hot take. Especially as this summer was stacked with anticipated releases from buzzy indies like Longlegs to new-ish horror franchises in their third iteration like The Quiet Place: Day One and Maxxxine. The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror romp won best screenplay at Cannes and has now become distributor Mubi’s biggest theatrical release. And just last week the latest in killer-clown series Terrifier outperformed Joker: Folie à Deux at the box-office, despite only costing $3 million compared to Joker’s eye-watering $200 million. So why would this mark the end of an era? 

In time for Halloween, theartsdesk caught up with Bogutskaya to discuss her insightful new book, what direction the genre is currently heading in and what the “Woman’s films” of the 1940s can tell us about the past 10 years of horror cinema.

Why did you want to write a book about horror cinema, and why was now the right time?

A lot of my work has been centred on horror for a number of years now, since The Final Girls began in 2016 as a screening series and then evolved into a podcast. I always knew I wanted to do something that was a love letter to horror, because it’s a genre I love deeply and a community that I feel very connected to. When I wrote my first book, Unlikeable Female Characters, I purposefully excised all horror and exploitation cinema from it, knowing that I had something else to say about horror, but I didn't quite know what it was. I learned a lot during the process of writing my first book, so I eventually felt able to tackle a book that was specific about one genre, about a very contemporary moment of horror cinema. I felt firm in my ideas about what I wanted to say and I felt it needed to come out quite soon, because I talk about the waves that have existed throughout horror film history and I felt like we were at the end of a particular moment.

It felt like a good time to write a book that was talking about how that moment has felt, what it was doing, how it connected to larger ideas about horror, how those ideas have evolved, and how audiences have reacted to horror films, TV, books. Although I don't really cover books deliberately because there's a much longer and richer tradition there – there's a whole other book in that!

What are some films that you feel have marked the end of this wave of horror that you argue started in 2014? 

I pitched this book at the end of 2022. And I wrote it in 2023 and it came out in 2024. So the things that I was feeling that were in the air then are kind of crystallising now. It’s a very “critic” thing to do, to find a neat period like 2014 to 2024, so I'm aware that there's a bit of me projecting my ideas onto the horror scene right now. But a lot of the horror that I write about in the book of the last 10 years that really exploded after The Babadook, The Witch, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, It Follows – were very internal, very psychological. They’re really operating in the grey areas of: are these characters the monsters or are they victims? They’re questioning the idea of what makes a perfect victim on screen and questioning norms around who gets to be the protagonist. These films notably removed monsters as well.

But now I feel we're entering a new horror era that's more interested in bombastic scenes and spectacle and using monsters again as a selling point like they did in the 1930s. Abigail was the first thing that came to mind when you asked that question, the film about the little vampire girl which had these massive action scenes, it was like a John Wick movie! Or the Vampire film Renfield with Nick Cage where the horror itself is not horror, it's action. It's a spectacle. This was happening in the 80s, so it’s not a bad or new thing. It’s just the temperature of horror is changing and going in a new direction. In the last year or two, I’d say we've gone back to blood lust, heightened gore and less into characters, and to be slightly facetious, less into sad monsters who are questioning their own monstrosity.

I agree. Smile from 2022 felt like the end of an era. In 2014 The Babadook portrayed mental health in a complex, nuanced way whereas Smile makes trauma into an actual big scary monster.

Yeah exactly. The monster in Smile is literally trauma made physical. It just feels like a full stop.

Was it difficult trying to hit a tone with this book that was both specialist and accessible? 

I didn't want it to just be for my pals who are professional film critics who might know all of this already. I don't want this just to be read by people who feel like they need to have watched X amount of films in order to be able to understand and gain something from this book. I'm not interested in appearing to be the smartest or most well-watched person in the room, the book is supposed to be both a companion and sort of self investigation. I'm working out my own thoughts and feelings about horror, films and bigger ideas tied to what I’ve been noticing in the industry and in culture. I'm asking the reader to join me in that thinking, even though they can completely disagree with me! I've made this my job and part of that job is to digest and communicate those ideas and that knowledge in a way that is interesting or helpful in some way. So yeah, I think it's something that I constantly keep in mind. I could not tell you honestly how to do it except constantly keeping readers in mind who are not direct replicas of you.

When re-watching films from the past decade for this book, were there things you missed the first time around or found new appreciation for?

All of the stuff that I cover in the book, I watched when it was out. The research of this book was essentially the last 10 years of my career, as opposed to “I'm gonna specifically watch all of these films”, but revisiting them I definitely discovered new feelings and angles, simply because time had passed and I was a different person than when I first watched them. For example, I rewatched The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan's Netflix series, and I was struck by how much of an open wound each character was. Flanagan has become well-known for these sort of remix-novel-series but I was really struck with the physicality of the horror and what an incredible accomplishment tackling a book in such a new and bold way is. It could have easily not worked – but absolutely did. That was one that I just gained completely new levels of appreciation for outside of just being scared, which I was.

There’s a film I mention in the book that always surprises me called Starry Eyes from 2014. I think it’s an impeccable body horror. Really low budget, really indie, but one that I felt was talking to some of the ideas that I was exploring in the body horror chapter. I write a bit about The Handmaid’s Tales TV series too, which I've sort of gone to and abandoned a few times. The body horror really surprised me. I was watching it to relax while writing but then it ended up in the book because it is 100% horror. You cannot convince me otherwise. The amount of death and gore in that show is rarely visible in any other TV series.

You draw a connection to the horror films of the past decade such as Midsommar, The Witch, with the “Woman’s films” of the 1940s, like Rebecca (1940), The Phantom Lady (1944), Cat People (1942) and more. Can you elaborate on that?  

I was watching a lot of these films from the 1940s and I started seeing parallels. It was called “Woman’s cinema”, somewhat disrespectfully, because the films were designed for women in a purely commercial way. During World War II and in the post war period women were the primary audience for cinema. So women have always been a huge audience for horror but it’s in the last 15 years or so it’s been actively and in a mainstream way recognised as such again by actresses, filmmakers and writers.

So stylistically and on a character basis, these films have many similarities with a number of contemporary horror films in how they prioritise, legitimise and try to present the full scope of female interiority, but within a genre that is excessive and not beholden to the standard rules of a world or narrative. It presents a playground of possibilities for female characters. In the past decade, big names actresses who you don't solely work in horror were suddenly seeking out these stories, as executive producers as well, because these stories allow for the interiority of female characters to be centre stage without falling into the narrative trappings of more mainstream genres like drama or rom-coms.

The Substance has been a huge hit and confirms what you talk about in the book about body horror becoming a prestige genre. What did you make of The Substance? 

Yeah the most interesting element of The Substance is how it represents how exploitation cinema and body horror, like proper Brian Yuzna gore, has entered the prestige space. Julia Ducournau’s Titane winning the Palme d’Or in 2021 was momentous and opened the door for more extreme, really out-there films being presented in hallowed spaces like festivals, different types of cinemas, winning awards, and even having a presence at the Oscars and the BAFTAS, a very small presence, but there is one.

The Substance also taps into one of my favourite and one of the most interesting subgenres which is Hagsploitation, which looks into how we think about ageing and bodies, but more so how we feel about them. And of course there’s a conflict in culture between those who feel entitled to police and have opinions about other people's bodies, especially with female presenting bodies, and those fighting back saying it's none of your business. The Substance is wrestling with that conflict and people have really tapped into it. Also, sometimes you just wanna become a giant pageantry monster and explode all over everyone. And that is something that horror can do – and actually visualise.

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