For anyone who considers themselves to be both a cinephile and a genre fan, seeing other self-proclaimed fans behave this way is both disheartening and infuriating. I know because I consider myself both of these things, and I know a good number of other intelligent, thoughtful people who do as well. And like most of those people, I was excited by and greatly admired THE BABADOOK, IT FOLLOWS, and THE WITCH. All three films are considerably more artful and deal with much more complex concepts and issues than typical mainstream horror fare. Like anyone else, I have my own opinions about them. I don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t agree that these films are some of the best genre cinema in recent memory.

The problem lies with horror fans whose definition of the genre is so narrow that it somehow does not include stories in which an unstoppable supernatural monster terrorizes a grieving mother and her troubled child (THE BABADOOK), an inexplicable supernatural monster is passed along as a curse between people (IT FOLLOWS), or an isolated family is set upon by a supernatural evil that lives in a foreboding wilderness (THE WITCH). This is especially dumbfounding in the latter case, which is a sort of adaptation of the first horror stories that arose in the early settling of America by the British and eventually led to the Salem witch trials. It’s not just “a horror story,” it is almost literally a prototypical horror story. Like Lars von Trier’s ANTICHRIST, THE WITCH takes the genre back to primal, lizard-brain territory: fear of the dark, fear of nature, fear of the unknown, and most of all fear of other people — even the ones you think you know. How anyone could come away from THE WITCH and deny that it is a horror film defies reasonable explanation.

Interestingly, this is a point which cinephiles who do not necessarily consider themselves genre fans and those horror gatekeepers have in common. THE WITCH is an intricately detailed portrait of life on the American frontier in the early 17th century. Eggers spent years exhaustively researching the period, and his obsessive attention to detail pays off enormously. Like other recent acclaimed period pieces such as Aleksey German’s HARD TO BE A GOD and Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s THE ASSASSIN, THE WITCH feels less like a replica of a time period and more like someone managed to use a time machine to send a film crew back to that time. The family’s isolated farm and dense forest feel like a complete universe. The precise framing and cinematography by Jarin Blaschke calls to mind Stanley Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON, and not just because much of it was shot using natural light.

THE WITCH is unquestionably the work of serious artists, to the point that critics who usually are not interested in genre cinema may find themselves praising its technical excellence while asserting that any film made with such care and intelligence by definition cannot be a “horror film.” In other words both the horror gatekeepers and cinephiles who dismiss genre cinema have narrow definitions of what constitutes a “horror film,” and both seem to believe that any film made at a certain level of quality must be automatically disqualified from being defined as such. I will admit that I subscribe to a broad definition of the horror genre, but no part of it is determined by a film’s production value or budget. It makes sense for horror fans to be impressed by ingenious filmmakers who use minimal resources to maximum effect. It does not make sense for the same fans to shun expensive, handsomely-mounted genre films on principal.

CRIMSON PEAK. From Slate.

Guillermo del Toro’s insistence that CRIMSON PEAK is not a horror film was a moment in which this conflict between different factions of horror fans moved into a more public arena. With his background in genre cinema, del Toro is a major name in horror fandom. Purposely distancing CRIMSON PEAK from the genre was simultaneously understandable and frustrating. It may not be just a horror movie, but CRIMSON PEAK is unmistakably a hybrid of genres, teasing out and amping up the horror already present in the gothic romance to the point where ghosts drag themselves through the floorboards of its terrifying haunted house and the walls literally bleed. And that’s besides the gruesome murders, including a character who has his skull graphically caved in by blunt force trauma. CRIMSON PEAK may not strictly be a “horror movie,” but it’s certainly not not a “horror movie.”

That said, this deflection was understandable because the film’s marketing emphasized the film’s horror content to the exclusion of its romantic/dramatic aspects. Audience expectations can cause major backlash against films that viewers feel don’t live up to the hype. Horror fans may have expected a loud, garish shriek-show like Jan de Bont’s THE HAUNTING and ended up with something closer to Wuthering Heights with ghosts and some stabbings. Similarly, advance audiences who saw THE BABADOOK, IT FOLLOWS, and THE WITCH described them as extremely scary. THE WITCH even had an unofficial Twitter endorsement from Stephen King. But what the critics and cinephiles at film festivals find “scary” and what the wider public at large find “scary” are not necessarily the same thing. Some horror fans hear this advance praise and set expectations that these films will instantly reveal themselves to be timeless classics like THE EXORCIST or HALLOWEEN, and are inevitably disappointed when they feel like the new films fall short.

The biggest problem with expectations when evaluating any film is that the viewer’s expectations going into the film are not the film’s responsibility. The complaint that “the best parts of the movie are in the trailer” is not a complaint about the movie in question, it’s a complaint about the trailer spoiling the movie. Likewise the complaint that “the trailer made it look like a totally different movie” is a complaint about a film’s marketing, not the film itself. These can be (and frequently are) valid complaints, but they should have no bearing on the viewer’s impression of a film. When most of the films that are now considered sacred texts like THE EXORCIST and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD were originally released, they made such indelible pop cultural imprints because they were largely unprecedented in their form and content as well as their success. These films have been hugely influential, and expecting any new horror film to instantly have the same kind of impact on viewers and the culture at large is expecting the impossible. We’ve had decades to consider the power and influence of HALLOWEEN. As of this writing, most viewers have had hours to put THE WITCH into its context in genre film history.