2017 Jordan Peele film. Get out changed a lot. Chief among these was the invention—unwittingly, of course, and perhaps unfairly—of a new and extremely dangerous type of horror. Peele's perfect bittersweet thriller about racism, appropriation and white hypocrisy was a big hit and was beloved by critics. It proved that small, smart, thematically serious films could be commercial if they were scary, and that horror could be an effective Trojan horse for aspiring cinephiles to smuggle themselves and their big ideas into filmmaking. Almost overnight, the “elevated horror” industry was born, and it has held a strong hold on the prestige of genre filmmaking ever since.
But this yearI finally felt this grip loosen. A trio of excellent, high-profile horror films – Sinners, 28 years laterAnd Weapon – achieved both artistic respectability and box office success without relying on metaphor. These are big films that have something to say. But it's also just a vampire movie, a zombie movie, and a possession movie. And they are scary. In 2025, being scary mattered.
The glut of films that followed Get outHeels were sometimes grouped under the term “heightened horror,” but most were united by an insistent, systematic use of metaphor to identify themes of inequality or trauma. Monster in films like Midsummer, His house, The Invisible Man, Ownerand much more – grief, or motherhood, or the refugee experience, or abusive relationships, or systemic racism, or depression, or broken family relationships. But it was also like, monsteroften literally: the creepy supernatural embodiment of bad. My colleague Sam Nelson calls these films “Dracula Is Your Mom Dead.”
Some of these films were really good, including the ones I just listed. This trend has brought several prominent cinematic talents to the forefront, including Peele and his colleague Ari Aster. But the genre quickly became a cliché and its use expanded. Earlier this year I have reviewed Opusa decent enough thriller in which the monster, I guess, was modern celebrity culture and its role in the death of print journalism? It saddens me too, but I'm not sure how highly it ranks as a traumatic, horrendous injustice. Moreover, the film seemed to be written to a strict formula, demonstrating how shallow the horror assembly line had become. The same can be said about other 2025 films, e.g. Together (the monster is codependency) or To him (sports monster).
If they imitated Get outWhat many of these directors seem to have missed is that Peele honestly stems from his love of horror (obviously he wants to make horror films, not cosplay to dress up his scripts), and also that Get out is not metaphorical at all. While the film is somewhat fantastical in its plot mechanics, racism is not the monster; racism is just racism. It doesn't need to be referenced or abstracted, and it really can't be made any scarier. Peele proves to be a confident enough master of tone to build a terribly interesting film around his dark spot without covering it with a creepy cloak.
You will find this refreshing directness in Sinners, 28 years laterAnd Weapontoo much. All three films are built around the story they want to tell rather than the message they want to convey, and their resonance arises naturally from the plot, characters and setting.
SinnersTrue, it has a metaphorical layer. The film, which follows twin brothers in Prohibition-era Mississippi as they defend their music club from Irish vampires, is writer-director Ryan Coogler's way of delving into the erasure and assimilation of black cultural spaces. (There's something to be said for that matter about the rootlessness and ostracism of Irish immigrant culture.) But it doesn't seem like Coogler built the film around a thesis. Instead, he decided to set a vampire story in the Jim Crow Deep South, and themes emerged naturally from the material.
It's also striking that Coogler's mysticism goes both ways. The Whiteness of the vampires is equated with an insatiable hunger, but the Blackness of the revelers is also a powerful, non-life-threatening force, expressed in the time-traveling musical fantasies of the griots. This is not a one-way metaphorical scheme. This is a whole, detailed fantasy world, full of events and meanings.
IN 28 years laterWriter Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle set out to make something like Ken Loach's kitchen sink drama in a fast-paced zombie thriller. Following 12-year-old Jamie as he hunts with his father and then embarks on a desperate mission to save his mom, it's a family story of loss and coming of age, as well as a microcosmic portrait of a fallen nation coming to terms with its own demise.
But the infected do not play a strictly symbolic role in this. Instead, they dramatically emphasize characters and themes, raising the stakes and giving the film increased tension and emotion. The infected do not need to embody anything to 28 years later work. By their mere presence, they strip the film's tiny, fragile society and its yearning people to bare wood, leaving them raw and exposed.
From three films Weapon most clashed with the ingrained expectations of an audience trained in a decade of heightened horror. There's been a strange backlash against writer-director Zack Cregger's film for not being “about anything,” as if a horror film of this scale and prestige couldn't function without a clearly defined thematic structure ripe for deconstruction.
It would be enough if Weapon It was just an entertaining and scary movie with a good story, which is what it is. But Cregger may have provoked a backlash by framing his film about the sudden disappearance of an entire elementary school class with so many powerful and suggestive images: children running into the night, an angry school assembly, a horrific depiction of aging, the troll-like ghost of an assault rifle spinning in the night sky like a video game pickup truck.
Cregger almost refuses to connect the dots, which may have upset some viewers. But it is their mystery, their disunity, that gives them and the film their unsettling power. Perhaps this is how great horror works: a smoothly constructed thrill ride that gives your subconscious lots of little kicks. Weapon builds a picture of a crumbling, grieving society slowly falling apart without providing an accurate diagnosis of its ills.
Horror films – and not just horror films, but any films – can be about something, but they don't have to be that way. about something. The greatest masters of horror know this, and in 2025 they showed it. Sinners, WeaponAnd 28 years later snapped the genre out of a decade-long inferiority complex during which filmmakers pursued a search for meaning that was ambitious but mechanical and subject to the law of diminishing returns. Of course, grief can be a monster. But what if the monster was a monster and grief was grief? Wouldn't this be even worse?
