Horror movies need to be more than a big mood

The release of Get Out in 2017 disturbed Hollywood — not just the box office but, briefly, the entire horror genre, which had long been the most consistent moneymaker in the industry. The film made a multiple of 56 times on its $4.5 million budget and was less a breakthrough and more of a victory lap for Blumhouse, the studio that had for nearly two decades championed scary movies at a low cost with hopes of a high return.

Partly, Get Out was exceptional — not the first movie where the true horror is racism, but one that balanced the terror with humor and absurdity. Eager to repeat that success, Hollywood greenlit a swath of horror movies about racism. Many of them were underwhelming and, in some cases, appalling. Mostly, it was exhausting to see so much repetition in a genre that thrives on novelty. But at least these movies were about something. Now we’re onto the next wave of horror films, which have trended toward being about nothing.

This summer’s three biggest relatively high-brow, low-budget horror films — Maxxxine, Longlegs, and Cuckoo — represent a move toward big moods rather than big ideas. They also represent a wasted opportunity. All three traffic in atmosphere rather than actual scares. A horror movie doesn’t have to be smart to be enjoyable, but is it unfair to ask them to at least not be so dim?

(Some light spoilers to follow.)

Of the bunch, MaXXXine gets the closest to having an idea. Closing out director Ti West’s X trilogy, Mia Goth, who stars in all three, plays an adult film actress who lands a role in a Hollywood movie. The best scene comes early: after being threatened by a man in a dark alley, Maxine pulls out a gun and reverses the power dynamic. She forces the would-be assailant to strip, then crushes his balls with a stiletto heel — rendered briefly on screen, as grotesque and violent as anything you’ll see all summer. The theater gasped, groaned, and laughed. It was truly the stuff of great horror movies. But even more, it also suggested MaXXXine would go in a fascinating, transgressive direction: that perhaps this kind of absurd brutality could be justified in the moral universe of the film.

Disappointingly, it quickly runs in another direction. Whereas the first two films of the X series find their thrills and creativity in budget restraint, MaXXXine is a high-production affair, with much of that money seemingly used to remind you that it’s set in the ’80s. But gone are the charming homages of X or the strange turns of Pearl. MaXXXine shies away from the conceit it appears to be setting up in its first act — true ambition as savagery. Sadly, after the ball-crushing scene, the rest of the movie is figuratively bloodless.

(If you think I’m being too harsh, I offer you a review of MaXXXine by my colleague Charles as a counterpoint.)

Meanwhile Longlegs, a box office surprise (and studio Neon’s biggest opening ever), never even bothers to be about anything. Even with a straightforward setup about an FBI agent tracking down a serial killer, the movie’s best attempts at creating narrative tension amount to incoherence. Characters say stuff like, “You’re not afraid of a little bit of dark because you are the dark.” Come on.

To its credit, Longlegs is the prettiest movie of the bunch. Moody and occasionally spooky, director Osgood Perkins sure knows how to compose a shot that makes the air feel thick. But it uses its runtime to gesture toward themes (parenting, trauma, maybe 9/11?) rather than explore them, and several disparate plot elements (Satan, a bunch of handmade dolls, a main character with ESP) never really intersect in a way that bothers to make sense.

There are things to like about Cuckoo, out this weekend, which situates itself on a remote cabin resort in the German Alps. It rests on familiar tropes: a girl in a new town (Hunter Schafer), locals who act strange, a seemingly friendly scientist type (Dan Stevens). Schafer and Stevens appear to be having tremendous fun running around a saturation-blasted set, and there is at least one clever scare involving a bicycle chase. But even when the film reveals the mystery behind its namesake — a turn that, without giving anything away, is somehow both predictable and still vague — it’s clear that even two strong performances can’t compensate for characters that have little motivation and stand for nothing. Instead, Cuckoo, like MaXXXine and Longlegs, are best enjoyed as exercises in cinematography.

Recently, I encountered a miniseries from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for two horror masterpieces, Pulse and Cure. The show, Penance, was released in Japan in 2012 and is now streaming on Mubi. Knowing little about it other than the pedigree of its director, I was stunned by the way it looks. Pulse and Cure are meticulously filmed; an emphasis on dark and deep shadows, especially for interior scenes, creates a claustrophobic setting for its characters and viewers. Penance, by contrast, is shot like a cheap soap opera — brightly and dully lit, that off-putting veneer of a high frame rate. It’s quite ugly to look at, yet still so eerie. Through careful framing and tight editing, Kurosawa is able to oppress the viewer with so much dread even without the haunted lens of his films.

More than that though, Penance leans heavily on its conceit: a young girl is murdered in a small town, and the four friends who met the killer cannot recall his face. The mother tells the friends that she will never forgive them, and each episode leaps 15 years ahead to see what has become of each of their lives. Kurosawa’s miniseries always points back at a single idea: can a person ever escape their guilt?

Despite being uneven in places, Penance always feels like it’s structurally and thematically consistent, whereas this summer’s lineup of horror movies — MaXXXine, Longlegs, Cuckoo — don’t have anything to say because they never started with a real question. You might have a good time at the theater, but very little of those films will linger.