MaXXXine

Yesterday I was watching the trailer for MaXXXine which will close the Ti West/Mia Goth trilogy after X and Pearl and I was thinking that, apart from being very enjoyable films in the microgenre of femcel/delulu scream queens and important additions to the good-for-her cinematic universe, have contributed to escaping the recent monopoly of so-called "elevated horror" and returning to a more modern balanced horror filmography.

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In general, the last decades has been marked by the rise of so-called "arthouse" horror films, starting roughly with The Babadook, It Follows and The Witch, and taking off in popularity with the success of Get Out and Hereditary. Gradually, horror films began to be more represented at festivals and awards, the genre regained a wider "artistic" acceptance and the term "elevated" horror emerged, which also denoted well-researched horror, that which is not like the others, which is "SERIOUS ART" etc.

A pioneer in this flowering and marketing was obviously A24, and it certainly gave us some great films in this new golden era of the genre, but the price was that it standardized a refined horror aesthetic intended for festivals and awards, which turned out to be quickly just as conformist as the banality of mainstream horror films with jumpscares and genre conventions etc. Also, this was often combined with a snobbery of "low art" horror films due to the smaller symbolic capital compared to "elevated horror" films. In other words, the genre was partially hipsterized.

In recent years, of course, there has been some buzz (in terms of reviews and/or tickets) that has put a bit of a damper on this season of "elevated" horror. Let's say films like Men, Nope and Beau Is Afraid turned out to be quite underwhelming and confused in their artistic ambition (as if they were seriously deceiving themselves), while others like Lamb for example started to look more and more out of A.I. Generator by A24 to get good reviews at festivals and frame well as screenshots in kino Instagram profiles. HELL, LUCKILY THAT ERA SEEMS TO BE ENDING.

At the same time, we've seen recent horror films that, unlike several of the ones we've described, equally respect the mainstream and underground history of the genre along with its conventions, and try to do something meaningful or clever with them. Such examples, as far as I can now roughly recall, are Something in the Dirt, Barbarian, Deadstream, Talk to Me, When Evil Lurks, Ready or Not and the new Halloween trilogy among others (if they come to you and more from this new "normcore" horror revival in the comments).

In this wave I personally include Ti West's X trilogy, who of course collaborates with A24, and also has a long history from the 00s with the genre, unlike in others who simply saw the hype and joined in recent years ( check out 2009's House of the Devil starring Greta Gerwig, fuck). So he's done very well with X and Pearl, setting the stage for a very strong modern horror trilogy almost out of nowhere.

So that's why I'm looking forward to MaXXXine. And because Mia Goth is made for dark side of fancy 80s Los Angeles, ok.W

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