Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation

• Offers the first in-depth study of one of the twenty-first-century horror genre’s most important and divisive developments
• Explores the shared aesthetics, themes, and reception of the post-horror corpus
• Updates existing debates about horror cinema, artistic value, and cultural taste
• Listen to David Church discuss his book on the Full Contact Nerd podcast

Horror’s longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed 'elevated horror' and 'post-horror,' films such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema.

• It Follows
• The Witch
• The Babadook
• Get Out
• Hereditary
• Midsommar
• Goodnight Mommy
• It Comes at Night
• The Invitation
• I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House
• mother!
• A Dark Song
• A Ghost Story