There is a particular kind of horror film that does everything correctly.
The cinematography is accomplished. The score is unsettling. The pacing is controlled. The performances are committed. You watch it, you feel vaguely uneasy, and then it ends and you go to bed and sleep perfectly well.
This is competent horror. It executes the genre’s requirements without failing them. And the distance between it and genuinely great horror is enormous, not because great horror films do more things, but because they are doing something fundamentally different underneath the craft.
The question worth asking is what, exactly, that something is.
Not atmosphere. Not subverted expectations. Not social commentary, a compelling score, or the absence of jump scares, all of which appear on every listicle about elevated horror and none of which adequately explain why certain films lodge in the nervous system permanently while others, equally well-made, vanish on the drive home.
The real distinction, I think, is this: great horror films are not about the horror. The horror is the vehicle. What the film is actually about, grief, complicity, religious terror, the accumulated weight of what men do to women, that is what refuses to leave.
Three films make this argument more clearly than any theoretical framework could.
Hereditary (2018): The Horror That Was Already There
Ari Aster has said in interviews that he deliberately pitched Hereditary to financiers as a family drama, careful not to frame it as a horror film in case that cost him the funding. The instinct reveals something essential about what he was actually making.
Stripped of the supernatural and occult elements that dominate the third act, the film could almost function as a bleak portrait of a family collapsing under the weight of its grief and legacy. Aster has been explicit about this: “I wanted the film to function first as a vivid family drama before I even bothered attending to the horror elements. This family is ultimately eating itself out of grief, and I wanted to make a film that took suffering seriously.
The result is a film in which the horror, when it arrives, feels less like an intrusion than a revelation. The Paimon mythology, the cult and the grandmother’s long conspiracy, these are not the film’s subject. They are the formal structure the film uses to say something true about how grief does not distribute evenly through a family, how trauma passes between generations without anyone choosing it, how a household can contain people who love each other and still be a place of quiet devastation.
The first notable live-action shot is that of models in the house, a slow pan around the room showing various miniatures before dollying into a model of the house in which the film is set. Aster described this as intentional: “It just struck me as a solid metaphor for the family’s situation, which is that they’re ultimately people without any agency. They are like dolls in a dollhouse, being manipulated by these outside forces.” The camera frames characters throughout as though observing them from outside their own lives — trapped, positioned, watched.
Long takes corner you in the frame. Sound design hums with unease. Edits withhold just enough to make every cut feel like a trapdoor. These are not decorative choices. They serve a specific argument: that the family’s horror was always present, structural, inherited. The supernatural plot does not create their doom. It merely makes visible what was already there
Toni Collette’s performance as Annie is where this becomes almost unbearable. Collette was initially reluctant to work on a horror film, but the script’s grounded approach convinced her to commit. She described Aster as someone who “really understood the dynamics in the family, has such an understanding of what it is to be human, what it is to experience loss.” The result is a performance that exists simultaneously in two registers, a mother in grief and a woman being slowly consumed by forces she cannot see and the genius is that both are equally real, equally credible, and equally devastating.
Competent horror films are frightening. Hereditary is the rarer thing: a film that makes you grieve.
The Witch (2015): When the Monster Is the World You Were Born Into
Robert Eggers spent four years researching seventeenth-century Puritan life before writing The VVitch. The dialogue was drawn directly from period diaries, court records, and confessional documents. The film states this explicitly in its end credits: “The film was inspired by many folktales, fairytales and written accounts of historical witchcraft, including journals, diaries and court records. Much of the dialogue comes directly from these period sources.”
This is not historical pedantry. It is the film’s central argument.
The film’s greatest achievement is its ability to create a picture of this world as fundamentally different from our own. The world of the film is permeated with magic; the people of the film believe in it with all their hearts and without a flicker of doubt. God and Satan and variously associated magical entities are not, for the people of the film, abstract concepts. They are very real entities.
By inhabiting the Puritan worldview entirely rather than observing it from a safe critical distance, Eggers produces something that most period horror refuses: genuine empathy for people whose beliefs would strike most contemporary viewers as incomprehensible. William is not a fool for fearing the forest. Katherine is not weak for suspecting Thomasin. These are people operating according to the internal logic of their world, which is coherent, rigorous, and completely without mercy.
The film’s real terror is not the witch. The witch is almost peripheral, glimpsed, implied, certainly real within the film’s terms, but not the point. The point is the world William’s family inhabits before she arrives. A world in which religious fanaticism, isolation, and fear of the unknown combine with a slow-burn tension to make the family’s destruction feel inevitable regardless of any supernatural intervention. They are a family living on the edge of a dark forest, expelled from their community, existing on subsistence farming and prayer, with no margin for failure and no one to turn to. The witch does not create their doom. She simply accelerates it.
Thomasin’s arc is where the film’s feminist reading lives, though Eggers resists making it schematic. She is suspected, accused, and ultimately blamed for everything that goes wrong, not because she is guilty but because she is a young woman in a world that needs someone to blame, and she is available. The exploration of gender is not something many mainstream films, let alone horror films, are always discussing. Hereditary deals with the representation of gender as an excellent piece of political commentary. The same is true here
The ending, Thomasin signing the Devil’s book and rising among the witches is not a tragedy and is not straightforwardly a victory. It is a choice made by a young woman who has been given no other options. Every other path has been closed. The woods, at least, offer something her family never did: agency.
Competent horror films build dread. The Witch builds dread from within a system of belief it takes seriously enough to make terrifying on its own terms. That is a different and considerably harder thing to do.
Men (2022): The Limits of Imagery Without Argument
Men is the most instructive film to include here precisely because it almost achieves greatness and does not quite get there and examining why is more useful than a third unqualified success story.
Alex Garland first wrote a script on this subject matter around fifteen years before making the film. It all started with the imagery of the Green Man, found in churches, pub names, and hidden in bits of architecture. That origin matters. The film begins from a visual obsession and works outward toward meaning, which is the reverse of how Hereditary and The Witch were built
Harper, played by Jessie Buckley with considerable commitment, retreats to the English countryside after her husband’s death. As she starts to settle in, what begins as simmering dread becomes a fully-formed nightmare. The methodical pacing, eerie cinematography, startling sound design, and vivid visual effects all work in synergy to create an almost merciless tension
Rory Kinnear plays every male character Harper encounters, the landlord, the vicar, the policeman, the naked man in the woods, the child who taunts her, a casting decision that is the film’s most intelligent structural choice. Kinnear’s frequently appearing face enhances the myth that men are all the same, a constant threat lurking for women. The Green Man imagery, the Sheela-na-gig carved into the church, the biblical echo of Harper plucking an apple from a tree on arrival, individually, each of these works. The atmosphere Garland creates in the first two acts is genuinely extraordinary: a countryside that looks beautiful and feels profoundly wrong, a pastoral England rotten at the root.
The problem is the finale, and it is an instructive problem.
The themes Garland is exploring are a bit hazier than the film’s technical excellence would suggest. What is he trying to say about the trials women must withstand within the patriarchy? Bringing these ideas into sharper focus would have given them far more power. Instead, they meander and sprawl, remaining intriguing but tantalizingly out of reach.
The body horror climax, an extended sequence of grotesque physical transformation that many critics found either brilliant or borderline comical is where imagery without argument breaks down. The film has assembled extraordinary symbolic material: ancient fertility iconography, folk horror tradition, the accumulated weight of everyday male entitlement rendered literally monstrous. But it never quite resolves what it is arguing. It gestures at a thesis and then retreats into spectacle.
This is what separates the very good from the genuinely great. Men is a film that knows what it wants to feel like. Hereditary and The Witch know what they want to mean. The craft in all three is formidable. But craft in service of feeling eventually runs out of runway, while craft in service of argument keeps paying out long after the film ends.
Men is worth watching, worth arguing about, worth returning to. But it is a film that demonstrates, almost by negative example, the principle the other two embody: horror becomes great when the monster is a precise metaphor rather than an evocative one. Evocative is not enough. The film has to know what it is saying with enough clarity to earn its images.
The Principle Underneath It All
The films that last, the ones you find yourself thinking about weeks later, mid-conversation, mid-shower are the ones that used the genre’s machinery to deliver something that was true before it was frightening.
The Paimon mythology in Hereditary is true about inherited trauma. The Puritan world of The Witch is true about what systems of belief do to the people who cannot fit inside them. Men‘s green man and its single face worn by every male character is true about the texture of ordinary female experience, it just cannot fully articulate its own truth, which is why it haunts without quite satisfying.
Competent horror makes you afraid of something outside yourself. Great horror makes you afraid of something that was already there, that you already knew, that the film has simply had the nerve to name.
That is a much harder thing to survive.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a horror film genuinely great rather than just effective?
The short answer is that great horror films are not primarily about the horror. The dread, the imagery and the craft, these are vehicles for something else: a precise argument about grief, complicity, power, or belief that the film is using the genre to deliver. Competent horror makes you afraid of something external. Great horror makes you afraid of something you recognise, something that was already present. The monster, in genuinely great horror, is always a metaphor precise enough to mean something specific not just evocative enough to feel unsettling.
Is Hereditary really about grief, or is it a supernatural horror film?
Both, and the point is that these are inseparable. Aster built the film as a family drama first, a portrait of a household eating itself through unprocessed grief and inherited dysfunction and then let the supernatural elements emerge from that emotional reality. The Paimon mythology does not contradict the psychological reading; it crystallises it. The family was always heading toward destruction. The cult simply made that structural doom visible and literal. Both readings are true simultaneously, which is exactly what makes the film so difficult to shake.
Why is The Witch considered folk horror?
Folk horror, as a genre, draws on rural folklore, isolated communities, and pre-Christian or pagan traditions to generate dread, often locating the horror in landscape, belief systems, and social structures rather than in a single monster. The Witch qualifies because Eggers constructed it entirely from period-accurate historical sources, inhabiting the Puritan belief system from the inside rather than observing it critically from outside. The horror is not the witch alone but the world the family lives in, which would be suffocating regardless of any supernatural presence.
Is Men (2022) worth watching?
Yes, with managed expectations. The first two acts are exceptional, among the most atmospherically accomplished folk horror in recent British cinema. Rory Kinnear’s casting as every male character is a brilliant structural decision, and the imagery Garland assembles is genuinely striking. The film loses its grip in the finale, where spectacle begins to substitute for argument, and some viewers find the body horror climax more unintentionally comic than horrifying. It is a flawed film worth watching for what it almost achieves, and worth arguing about for what it reveals about the difference between evocative imagery and a fully realised idea.
What is the Green Man in Men (2022)?
The Green Man is an ancient folkloric figure found throughout British and European architecture most commonly in church carvings depicting a face surrounded by or emerging from foliage. Interpretations vary, but the figure is generally associated with nature, cyclical growth, fertility, and the uncanny persistence of pre-Christian belief within ostensibly Christian spaces. In Garland’s film, the Green Man becomes a physical embodiment of something very old and unreformable, the face of male entitlement wearing different masks but remaining, underneath, identical. Garland has said the Green Man imagery was his starting point for the film, an image he had been trying to write about for fifteen years.
