How mod­ern hor­ror cin­e­ma is gal­vanis­ing Gen­er­a­tion Z

Con­tem­po­rary teen hor­ror is creepy because it isn’t try­ing to be. It bypass­es the dat­ed tech­niques and affec­ta­tions of cheap jump scares, un-iron­ic camp and the ances­tral fear of ​‘the oth­er’ while chal­leng­ing per­ceived wis­dom con­cern­ing the ado­les­cent expe­ri­ence. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly crav­ing the atten­tion, dra­ma, stim­u­lants and sar­casm it wants so des­per­ate­ly to dis­miss, this new wave of hor­ror is far more dis­turb­ing for how eas­i­ly it mir­rors our own lives, and for how blurred the bor­der between real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy becomes.

The fear and the vio­lence seeps in slow­ly, sub­ver­sive­ly and at times satir­i­cal­ly. But just to be clear – it’s not all slow-burn mind games. Gen­er­a­tion Z hor­ror is still of the flesh. It won’t hes­i­tate to sum­mon buck­ets of fake blood and Hol­ly­wood-grade spe­cial effects to exe­cute its plot (how­ev­er iron­ic the deliv­ery may be). Yet the ter­ror isn’t hap­pen­ing in remote cab­ins in the woods, evil vil­lains’ hill­top bach­e­lor pads or Tudor-era haunt­ed mansions.

Rather, it unfolds in every­day loca­tions: qui­et­ly pos­sess­ing our unas­sum­ing sub­ur­ban streets, stalk­ing the nooks and cran­nies of our inner-city project hous­ing, groov­ing in the shad­ows of DTLA’s thump­ing, neon-soaked night­clubs. It’s snuck into drinks at frat par­ties on col­lege cam­pus­es and casu­al­ly deposit­ed between seedy bath­room hook-ups. From retro­ma­nia to miss­ing par­ents, con­sumer cul­ture to sub­ver­sive self-aware­ness, here are the trends cur­rent­ly defin­ing con­tem­po­rary teen horror.

The first and per­haps clear­est hall­mark of Gen Z hor­ror is the absence of parental or guardian fig­ures: a sort of metaphor­i­cal incan­ta­tion of the glow­ing screen alight with mes­sages under­neath the din­ner table. Of course, the obvi­ous set­ting for new-age hor­ror is a col­lege cam­pus – as a car­ni­val of nov­el encoun­ters, a jum­bled, half-remem­bered assem­blage of non-aca­d­e­m­ic illuminations.

Julia Ducournau’s Raw plays into the absolute extreme of this effect as a series of firsts: the unas­sum­ing, straight-laced Jus­tine (Garance Mar­iller), born and raised by a qui­et fam­i­ly of strict veg­e­tar­i­ans, enters into a vet­eri­nar­i­an school to fol­low in her family’s foot­steps. From sib­ling rival­ry to Brazil­ian wax­es to haz­ing rit­u­als involv­ing raw flesh, Justine’s first term unleash­es a flood gate of car­nal expo­sure that gets its kicks from a lack of super­vi­sion, with par­ents long gone and pro­fes­sors notably absent (in fact, in-class scenes are almost as rare as the meat).

Else­where David Robert Mitchell’s It Fol­lows and Michael O’Shea’s The Trans­fig­u­ra­tion offer a dif­fer­ent take via a Par­ent Trap approach, with the bulk of hys­te­ria occur­ring in the realm of the domes­tic, its her­alds hav­ing dis­ap­peared. Their absence gets a poet­ic nod in It Fol­lows, with Mitchell’s cam­era dot­ing upon the immac­u­late­ly-staged child­ish bed­room sets of Jay (Mai­ka Mon­roe), and com­plete with plen­ty of fam­i­ly por­traits lin­ing the stairs.

The Trans­fig­u­ra­tion makes the absence of par­ents a cen­tral, lit­er­al (i.e. they are dead) and polit­i­cal­ly-charged plot point. With its out­sider pro­tag­o­nist and wannabe vam­pire Milo (Eric Ruf­fin) liv­ing in a derelict pub­lic hous­ing com­plex in New York with his old­er broth­er Lewis, an ex-army vet­er­an and sur­ro­gate guardian. Though Milo’s stand­ing as a ​“true” vam­pire is nev­er real­ly answered, one does won­der whether the chain of human deaths unleashed by his blood hunger could have been avoid­ed were the pover­ty and tragedy out­lin­ing his youth some­how vindicated.

For the gen­er­a­tion that weighs social cap­i­tal in ratios of fol­low­ers-to-fol­low­ing and blue-coloured text bub­bles yet will prob­a­bly wear vin­tage mom jeans to their graves, the fetish for a retro-future receives an empa­thet­ic lean-in from a like­mind­ed audi­ence. Gen Z hor­ror has nes­tled into the ambi­ent dream­scape fram­ing our own pat­terns of con­sump­tion: that sweet spot in between Insta­gram-wor­thy Cal­i­for­nia sun­sets, heart-to-hearts on the rooftops of col­lege build­ings and the ten­der, tee­ter­ing pubes­cent rush of car dates on the beach.

It is catal­ysed through an instant­ly empa­thet­ic love of anachro­nism, expos­ing the hypocrisy of our own fetish for often-inex­plic­a­ble bouts of retro­ma­nia, where the rise of Insta­gram cul­ture is built on the scaf­fold­ing of the polaroid revival; where astrol­o­gy only trends fur­ther the more Smart tech­nol­o­gy can tell us through inces­sant mon­i­tor­ing of our bod­ies. This fetish for the old-fash­ioned is tak­en to extremes in It Fol­lows, where Mitchell lit­er­al­ly invents his own tech­nol­o­gy to elude dat­ing (a clam-shell shaped e‑reader on which nerdy Yara reli­gious­ly reads Dos­toyevsky). This plays out more lib­er­al­ly across the sub-genre, with a strong-armed ​’80s neon aes­thet­ic to com­ple­ment (or con­spire against?) the bru­tal­ism of con­sump­tion, as in Nico­las Wind­ing Refn’s The Neon Demon.

Gen Z hor­ror is not so much con­cerned with ter­ror, vio­lence and trau­ma point blank as it is with the forces of con­sump­tion cul­ture that sur­round it. More than any­thing, films like Raw, It Fol­lows and The Neon Demon reveal that our rela­tion­ship with nar­cis­sism and con­sump­tion is com­plex. Lam­bast­ed for its lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of con­sumerism and body cap­i­tal, these films are ultra-effec­tive in that the very crit­i­cism they solic­it reveals a cru­cial truth about our own culture.

Gen Z rocked up pim­ply-faced and hor­mon­al in the dog days of neolib­er­al­ism, and is com­ing of age now in an era of post-cap­i­tal­ism, where we’ve swal­lowed the glit­ter pill of mate­r­i­al excess and anx­i­ety and are just now wak­ing up to recent history’s worst hang­over. It’s a tale of two worlds: we want to look good all of the time, but we also hate that cul­ture; what Gen Z sees as a force of empow­er­ment is seen by the baby boomers as a self-indul­gent and despi­ca­ble van­i­ty fair.

Both on-screen and IRL, there exists a con­stant com­pe­ti­tion between self-aware­ness and self-indul­gence. Teen hor­ror today reveals a shift of the super­fi­cial into the realm of com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion; self-image has become some­thing sub­stan­tial, as vio­lent as it is pow­er­ful. Con­tem­po­rary teen hor­ror moves freely across typolo­gies – from vam­pires to can­ni­bal­ism to stalk­ers, hor­ror has per­haps nev­er been as diverse as it is now. It proves that our own con­sump­tion cul­ture can be as venge­ful and as dead­ly as any super­nat­ur­al force or spite­ful demon, and per­haps even more dis­turb­ing, because it lives inside of each of us, a cycli­cal sub­ject and effect of our own insa­tiable hunger.