Scream (2022), a self-described “requel” to the meta-slasher franchise, opens like every other film in the series. Alone in a house, a young woman (Jenna Ortega) takes a call from Ghostface, the killer who hides behind a white mask. He wants to know the answer to one question: “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Playing along, she cites The Babadook (2014), “an amazing meditation on motherhood and grief.” Her reply signals enthusiasm for “elevated horror”—movies that are, she says, “scary but with complex emotional and thematic underpinnings… not just some schlocky cheeseball nonsense with wall-to-wall jump scares.” “Hmm,” Ghostface replies, “that sounds kind of boring to me”—then stabs her to a pulp.

Horror films have long been fodder for allegorical readings and sociopolitical correlations. Nothing’s more inviting than interpreting the fears of an age, and horror trends can often be pegged to their respective American presidencies. The Scream phenomenon—with its signature Gen-X ingredients of irony, remix culture, and jaded whateverism—follows a template established by the 1996 original, and is emblematic of the Clinton era. The series’ playful, apolitical formalism characterized horror films from the mid-'90s through the early 2000s: found footage movies, J-horror titles like The Ring (2002) and The Grudge (2004), as well as the Rube Goldberg hijinks of the Final Destination cycle (2000-2011). After 9/11, this started to change. The grimmer political climate was reflected in a more gruesome and unapologetically violent cycle of movies dubbed “torture porn,” which numerous commentators read as cultural blowback against the Bush administration’s torture of supposed terrorists: the Hostel (2005-2011) and Saw (2004-) films, the New French Extremity shockers—High Tension (2003), Inside (2007), Martyrs (2008)—and brutal imports like Wolf Creek (2005) and Eden Lake (2008).

Dubious as this type of presidency periodization may be, it’s hard not to speculate in similar terms about the contemporary rise of “social horror,” and the emergence of a new sensibility I’m calling the “anti-social” horror film. The former arose during the second Obama administration and the Trump era, and was decisively marked by tropes stemming directly from cultural anxieties around race, class, and gender. Aligned with the “elevated horror” trolled by Scream, the social horror film brings to the surface political subtexts that have long accompanied the horror genre. The prime mover of social horror is Jordan Peele, whose debut, Get Out (2014), caused a sensation for its fusion of genre elements with a biting satire of racism. Peele has announced his intention to make a series of films addressed to various “social demons,” an endeavor in which he’s hardly alone. Movies like Antebellum (2020), His House (2020), and the underrated race-on-campus thriller Master (2022) likewise reckon with systemic racism, while a bourgeoning subgenre of films about gentrification and the monstrosities of Airbnb include The Rental (2020), Candyman (2021), and Barbarian (2022). Evolving social views on gender and sexuality, a perennial theme of horror movies, are reflected in a flourishing of queer films such as Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), They/Them (2022), and Swallowed (2023), among countless others.

While films about social demons persist as a thriving premise, it was the epidemiological terrors of COVID-19 that established the conditions for the anti-social horror film. Unlike recent movies that directly engaged the pandemic—among them the Zoom séance freakout film Host (2020) and the lockdown haunted house chiller The Harbinger (2022)—anti-social horror films seem to have emerged from a cluster of interlocking factors: the acute alienation of pandemic life; the derangements of post-Trump politics; a retreat from overt political commentary in favor of oblique allegorical effects; and a microbudget DIY esprit more indebted to avant-garde cinema than even the most adventurous genre pictures. The anti-social horror film is what happens when canny young savants absorb the lessons of social horror, hunker down in a global pandemic, and then emerge with their heads full of inscrutable, fucked-up feelings and a repertoire of radical cinematic techniques. A trio of recent releases are emblematic: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), The Outwaters (2022), and Skinamarink (2022). In a manner distinct from the social horror film, these fresh provocations internalize the shitstorm of our doom-scrolling zeitgeist so acutely as to fracture the psyches of their desperately isolated protagonists and, in the process, the norms of the horror genre.

Of the three films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair has the most conventional—if highly ambiguous—narrative. It’s the tale of a lonely, extremely online girl named Casey (Anna Cobb) who undertakes a viral “World’s Fair Challenge” that begins to disturb her reality both online and off. She negotiates dark crevices of the internet and confronts the consequent effects on her identity. Director Jane Schoenbrun has described Casey’s ordeal as an allegory for queer coming of age; more generally, the scenario can be read as a potent dramatization of how Gen-Z personhood is bound to the fraught vicissitudes of the internet as the world falls apart. Casey’s oscillation between self-discovery and self-destruction suggests an update to Todd Haynes’ eco-horror melodrama, Safe (1995). Where Haynes’ film examined the free-floating psychosomatic meltdown of a Los Angeles housewife (Julianne Moore), Schoenbrun’s work evokes the precarious mental health of a younger generation. Casey and her contemporaries came of age in an era in which climate catastrophe and mass shootings are existential givens, the tackiest person alive became president, and their formative high school years were spent staring into Zoom grids.

The Outwaters, on the other hand, channels the stupefying experience of watching the endless fuckery of the Trump administration unfold. The film begins as a conventional found footage movie about a group of obnoxious Millennial influencer-types who head into the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. Midway through, the familiar beats of the horror genre—intimations of weird company in the night, the discovery of peculiarities in the landscape, and mounting paranoia—give way to a wildly inscrutable and deliberately incoherent camcorder POV from a lone character played by Robbie Banfitch (who also wrote, directed, edited, and served as the film’s cinematographer), which suggests, among other things, the murderous presence of a tentacled creature, as well as intermittent astral projection through the cosmos. If the movie fails to overcome two flaws endemic to the found footage genre—the fact that everyone is so annoying and why, when things go sideways, someone keeps filming—the nature of the documentation is flamboyantly weird enough for the movie to transcend these limitations. Limitation is, indeed, the movie’s guiding formal principle. The result is nearly indescribable: a tumult of images that suggest tripping balls in a dumpster at Coachella with nothing but the world’s shittiest flashlight while bumping into an unspeakable Lovecraftian nightmare. The Outwaters is at once mesmerizing and frustrating in its refusal to establish a premise for its kaleidoscopic oddities, yet this very confusion makes it all the more characteristic of anti-social horror’s penchant for open-ended narratives.

Michelle May in "The Outwaters."Courtesy of Cinedigm.

The most powerful and formally audacious entrant to this nascent genre is Skinamarink, already a cult favorite. It’s about a four-year-old boy and his six-year-old sister who wake up in the middle of the night to find their father missing and proceed to wander around the house. Abstract in the extreme, Skinamarink is less a movie than a wildly dissociative audio-visual fugue state. The film’s Seriously Bad Vibes are the true protagonists (and antagonists) of the picture. Directed by Kyle Edward Ball, Skinamarink might have taken one of David Lynch’s most iconic motifs from Twin Peaks as its starting point: a slow motion shot of a ceiling fan unassignable to any point of view. It’s the most mundane of fixtures rendered unnerving merely through its curious spatial and kinetic disposition. Barring a few jump scares and one or two mind-melting distortions of the space-time continuum, Skinamarink extends this Lynchian aesthetic of dread-inducing ordinariness across every square inch of a suburban house: stairwells, doorways, ceilings, carpets strewn with Legos, a TV broadcasting old black-and-white cartoons. Ball, who made this film in his childhood home in Edmonton, Canada, shot with a digital camera but processed his footage to resemble filmstock so degraded you can barely recognize more than the general shape and content of the image. The effect is unlike any haunted house movie I know of, mirroring more closely the unnerving banality of early video art à la Bruce Nauman.

Skinamarink’s admixture of emphatically experimental tactics with invocations of childhood abandonment has deeply unsettled many of its viewers. I found the film less terrifying than nervous-system hijacking, a riveting perceptual adventure into the possibilities of cinematic space itself. The movie entirely abandons the system of continuity-editing that generates an illusion of events unfolding in front of you. Each cut is dissociated from the one before: it’s movie as mosaic. What it adds up to is hard to say and beside the point. Skinamarink abandons viewers to their own devices, a refusal that is a feature and not a bug of the genre, which rejects any definite causal agent or explanatory principle for its scenarios. Where social horror recognizes a ruling thematic principle and, more often than not, the audience’s structural position within it, anti-social horror leaves viewers adrift and uncertain, demanding they accept or reject the films on their own uncompromising terms.

Modestly produced, each of these films has generated outsized impacts on spectators and fomented considerable online discussion and fandom. Debuting at Sundance, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a critical darling, appearing on several best-of lists and opening the door for its director Schoenbrun to produce a follow-up with prestige production house A24. Shot on a crowd-sourced budget of $15,000, Skinamarink became a word-of-mouth sensation with a theatrical release that grossed $2 million, an astonishing feat for what amounts to an avant-garde film using genre conventions. Likewise produced for $15,000 and critically well-received, The Outwaters is something of an outlier among the three; as opposed to the largely house-bound scenarios of its cohort, the movie is an unhinged treatise on why you should absolutely not go out and touch the grass. Nevertheless, in its delirious final hour, the movie commits to going off the rails even more extravagantly than World’s Fair or Skinamarink. It is no less devoted to their shared themes of radical isolation, psychic fracture, and allegorical indeterminacy.

These are scarcely the first movies to exhibit such properties, and three films do not make a movement. Yet their temporal proximity and thematic affinities suggest the rise of a new generation of DIY horror auteurs who have synthesized and internalized the force of social horror but rejected its normative forms and overt politics. In their place, they have invented novel cinematic languages that speak to contemporary fears in a distinctive manner. While social horror is collective, didactic, and optimistic to the extent that a problem is being identified and thus potentially addressed, anti-social horror is private, inscrutable, and pessimistic. In these films, social dynamics are not ignored, but rather absorbed by the individual and expressed as psychological and aesthetic ordeals. Abandoning their viewer to their own devices, these titles do share one socially binding achievement: they get people talking—and thinking—about the spiraling effects of alienation. ♦