Auteur-driven horror films have been wreaking havoc on mainstream audiences since Nosferatu first sunk his fangs into moviegoers all the way back in 1922. But today, as low-budget indie hits like Hereditary and The Witch gain attention with their extremely intimate, ethereal, non-conventional approach to scares, word on the street is that “arthouse horror” films are back with a vengeance—especially as the genre garners Oscar attention for box office-crushing and critically acclaimed hits like Get Out.

These trendy new terrors from specialty studios like A24 or Blumhouse have become so popular that The Guardian’s Steve Rose proclaimed the birth of “post-horror” late last year, a critically-beloved “new breed” of horror films that, according to Rose, “replac[es] jump-scares with existential dread.” The writer cites recent hits like It Comes at Night, A Ghost Story, and It Follows for broadening the range of horror, “breaking all the rules,” and descending into some of the more nuanced, “unknown” aspects of a genre that has perhaps been burdened by formulaic, predictable tropes.

With Halloween approaching, many of us will be honoring a yearly tradition of revisiting our favorite horror films throughout the month of October. For you, this may mean pulpy, ’80s slasher films like Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. Or perhaps you’re more nostalgic for the gory grindhouse classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Some of you may even be looking to the Universal Monster era, with studio lynchpins like Bride of Frankenstein or Creature from the Black Lagoon. Or maybe you’re even reaching back to some of cinema’s earliest films, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, to satisfy your most depraved desires for spooky fun.



To me, all of these subsets of horror bring different things to the table. We can argue all day about the merits of each realm of the genre, but from Alfred Hitchcock to Troma Entertainment, horror has been anything but narrow-minded. Sure, we have the shock-value jump-scare movies like Paranormal Activity or the goofy, splattering chaos of slapstick horror films like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series. But to say that genre-bending films like The Babadook and It Follows are making horror more mature or smarter is simply not true. There have always been rule breakers. To refer to today’s director-driven indie films as “post-horror” and giving an esteemed, cinematic afterlife to the genre—as if it’s never ascended to such bold, artful heights—is to ignore decades of cinematic history and the many films that influenced the new work hitting multiplexes today.



Throughout October, I’ll be revisiting some of the greatest auteur-driven classics of American horror history, to show the precedent for craftsmanship, style, and distinctive storytelling that these prestige horror films heralded. By the time Halloween creeps around, we’ll have re-contextualized all the darlings of today’s “post-horror” epoch through the tormented lens of the original master directors such as Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick.



I invite you to follow along on with me on this haunted hayride, share your thoughts, dust off those Blu-rays, and settle in for a devilish descent as we unhinge the tombs and raise some of horror’s boldest and most terrifying auteur classics from their hallowed graves.

Dom Nero Video Editor Dom Nero is a staff video editor at Esquire, where he also writes about film, comedy, and video games.

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