Take a moment to think about some of the things that give you the creeps. What comes to mind? Could it be a killer clown from outer space? A dream demon fascinated by nine-inch metallic nails, or could it be systemic racism and discrimination?

That last one was a bit of a curveball, I know. But that's the reality that horror is facing now.

A genre that has been around for over 100 years has seen quite a change since “The House of the Devil.” There's been a plethora of different subgenres such as the new French extremity, arthouse horror, and so many more.

Horror nowadays though has seen something of a renaissance where instead of scaring people based on a fantasy, directors and creators in the genre are scaring people based on reality.

Take 2017’s Get Out, directed by Jordan Peele. At a glance, the movie is just your average body swap thriller mixed with elements of Black comedy. But take a second to explore it even more. Interwoven with the unique premise of body-swapping science is an allegory for racial discrimination, appropriation and a sprinkle of slave imagery, a far cry from the horror stories that would depict demon possession, the monster under the bed, or a nun in the closet.

Since 2017, horror seemingly has been changing and making large strides. Marginalized groups have been using the genre to not only tell incredibly scary and fun stories but also to inform audiences and give them an inside look at the troubles that surround them in a way that seems too surreal to be true until you walk a mile in their shoes. 

For instance, Indigenous filmmaker Jeff Barnaby released a film titled Blood Quantum in 2019. On paper, the film is just an average zombie flick set on a Mi’kmaq reserve with the twist being that the Indigenous members of the reserve are immune to the virus plaguing the community. However, the film uses horror and its tropes to depict something even scarier. 

Michael Truscello, an associate professor at Mount Royal University, states that the uniqueness behind Barnaby’s film is how it manages to flip the script on itself to present a deeper story and reflection of the historical treatment of Indigenous people in Canada.  

“It's the settlers in the film who are the infected, and it is the Indigenous characters who have to fend them off,” Truscello states. “[Jeff Barnaby] goes beyond just the obvious inversion of the formula. He's also dealing with Indigenous social issues, at the same time as presenting this allegory for settler colonization.”

He explains, “Jeff Barnaby was saying that the experience of Indigenous people on this continent is basically a post-apocalyptic experience. In that sense, he has talked about the popularity of horror as a genre among Indigenous audiences. So there are historical and cultural reasons that horror was taken up by some Indigenous filmmakers.”

It's not uncommon for filmmakers to create pieces with a goal of bringing awareness to social, political, or even environmental issues. Some are more obvious than others but films are known to take an aspect of society and bend them to create their stories. But the question is why horror?

Why a genre that was once over-saturated with cliches, jumpscares, and low-budget acting? A genre that was once expected to fizzle out of existence? A genre meant to induce fear and panic? Why not use documentaries or dramas to portray these issues on a more realistic level? Why horror?

There has been some speculation, and the release of Peele’s premiere directorial piece has been at the forefront of these conversations as it seemingly popularized the genre being used to create “reflectionist” horror, a term coined by Johnny Walker at the University of Cambridge to understand films that are meant to reflect reality in some way. 

However, reality's influence on horror has always been a point of conversation for more than a century. Allison Landsberg, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia states that the goal of horror was always to showcase reality, as scholars from the Frankfurt School saw its potential to do so. 

Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Krakauer were theorists from the Frankfurt School of Thought, a group of German-Jewish intellectuals writing against fascism which was prevalent in the 1920s and 30s. These theorists were interested in the ideals of modernity and mass cultural technologies within modernity such as film and photography. 

“For Walter Benjamin, the camera presented the opportunity to enable people to see the world differently because you take a photograph, you can enlarge it, and you can see things that are not visible to the naked eye,” Landsberg says. “And for him, he thought that this might enable people to be able to see aspects of the world that had been naturalized, that we take a second nature. And if we have this opportunity to look, again, we might have the capacity to wake up and see the world as it really is.”

Kracauer, in the later 1920s, had specifically written on horror itself. Landsberg states that Kracauer had written about how cinema itself has an affinity to horror, and how it has capacity to visualize and bring us closer to it, and reveal things to us. 

“A lot of other theorists of horror have made the case that horror is connected to film’s mission as a means of making something visible” Landsberg states.

Some of these ideals can even be seen in Get Out. For instance, the main character, Chris, is a photographer himself and uses the camera to “wake up” another Black person who had gone under the effects of “the coagula,” a procedure in the movie meant to implant the consciousness of a white person into the body of a younger Black person. 

And these are just some of the reasons why people are using horror. It portrays it in a manner where you have to pay attention. In a manner where you are forced to see not how racism or discrimination is now, but what it could be, as absurd as it is true should it go unchecked. 

“As somebody who has been committed to film as a medium, I think part of the reason I'm committed to it is because it's an effective medium,” Landsberg states. “This is something else that Siegfried Krakauer wrote about in the 1930s that it seizes people with their skin and hair, you know, it grabs us, it affects us.” 

She continues, “When you endure an experience in the cinema, when you feel it, I think it has the capacity to stay with you and make an impression, and that's where I think it has the capacity to maybe make you think things that you wouldn't have thought otherwise.”

Get Out broke the mold and flipped the script on some of the tropes that we constantly see in horror films, and film in general. Trucello believes that this is part of the reason why its success is so widely studied. It looked at all aspects of racism instead of one, shaping it to encompass how other people might interact with it in places where you might feel safe.

“One of the smart things that Get Out did was to portray racism from affluent white liberals,” Truscello states. “It didn't use the typical horror genre trope of the racist hillbilly and it didn't locate racist horror in the South. It looked at another place from which racist horror emerges. And as far as films go, that's a kind of racism that's uncommon in Hollywood films in terms of how often it's depicted. It's uncommon to see white liberal racism accounted for in Hollywood films.” 

Horror as a genre allows us to share our real life horrors with those who might not understand.

Even throughout time, we can see horror being used for these purposes. The original Candyman films told the story of a slave who fell in love with a white woman and was consequently killed by a lynch mob once she was impregnated. And in the 2021 sequel, also directed by Peele, he was operationalized as a defender of Black people against police brutality.

The Saw franchise (before the story of the jigsaw killer/cult got way too convoluted) was initially meant to be a reaction to 9/11 which at the time often saw (see what I did there) movies that ended with no hope. And even the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was initially created to be a commentary on the rampant industrialization of the South which rendered them obsolete and useless for a time being. 

And in June 2023, Tim Story’s The Blackening was released in theatres. The horror-comedy starred seven friends who are trapped in a cabin during a small vacation by a killer out to get them all. The twist to this was that it flipped the role of the Black character, rendering the main cast down to their stereotypes to see what might actually happen if Black people were in a horror scenario to poke fun at Hollywood’s depiction of them over the years.

Horror now isn't scary because of the things we can’t fathom or see. Horror is scary because it forces us to see and interact with the issues we too often ignore.