In Feeding the Monster, the critic, podcaster and author Anna Bogutskaya grapples with the last ten years of horror cinema. In the book’s introduction, titled “What’s Wrong with You?”, she outlines a sentiment that many horror fans will be more than familiar with – the suggestion that loving vengeful poltergeists and cannibals and vampire zombies and knife-wielding maniacs is somehow a reflection on a person’s being. Throughout the five following chapters, all themed around emotions, Bogutskaya offers an insightful and vast overview of what it means to be a horror fan during one of horror’s most fruitful, and yet still constantly maligned, periods.

Barry Pierce: Like many good conversations, I want to start with something Paul Schrader said. He went to see Longlegs recently and he wrote on his Facebook, “Osgood [Perkins] is clearly a talented director but, like Ti West, is confined by the horror genre ghetto. What is it about independent film that talented young filmmakers can only find financing and distribution in the horror genre?”
Anna Bogutskaya: Well, I think Ti West and Oz Perkins are terrible examples of directors in the “horror ghetto”. They have always wanted to work in a horror space. Yes, Ti West has done a couple of films outside the genre, strictly speaking, but all of Oz Perkins’ films have been in horror. Whatever you think of Longlegs, he is interested in using the language of horror to filter his own ideas about other stuff. There’s a great interview he did where he talked about one of his films being about his relationship with his dad, who was closeted for all of his life, and Longlegs being about his relationship with his mom and the histories and lies that parents tell their children. I do actually wonder, in the year 2024, when horror is one of the most commercially viable and reliable genres, how we can continue saying that it’s a ghetto?

BP: Well, you’ve written a whole book about this.
AB: [laughs] It’s mostly to do with the death of the mainstream mid-budget film. We’re very happy when we get crumbs. When we get Twisters, when we get Anyone but You, when we get… I’m just naming Glen Powell movies. In between the bloated, huge budget productions that are upwards of $250 million and could never break even, and micro-budget indie films, the only thing that exists in that space right now is horror films. How could that be a ghetto? It is currently the epicentre of creativity.

“[Horror] is currently the epicentre of creativity.”

BP: I do feel that every time I see a bus now, the ad on the side is for a horror film. It’s a really fruitful time for horror. Of course, there are still a lot of really bad horror films being made…
AB: Of course there are, there are also a lot of really bad comedies.

BP: That’s true.
AB: And nobody is talking about the “comedy ghetto”. Nobody was saying, “Oh isn’t it terrible that Julia Roberts keeps making romantic comedies?”

BP: When did the book first begin for you?
AB: It’s always difficult to pinpoint the idea for a big project, but I think it was when I was writing my first book, Unlikable Female Characters (2023). I knew that many of the female characters I wanted to write about were very well represented by horror, but I specifically excised horror from that book. I didn’t cover much horror in it because I knew there was another book there that specifically had to [focus on] horror. I tried different formats for this book, I experimented with different structures. Once I locked into the structure around specific feelings [the book is divided into sections based around fear, hunger, anxiety, etc] and those particular chapter headings, that’s when I knew exactly what I needed to say.

BP: What was the research process like for the book? At the back you have an exhaustive watchlist of, what looks like, every major horror film that has been released since the early 2010s. Did you just watch all of those films and then try to connect the dots between them all?
AB: There wasn’t a particular research period where I was like, “Oh, I need to watch all these horror films.” I’d already seen them. I’d been noting down and thinking about things about this era in horror as it has been happening and I gave myself the framework of 2014 to 2023 because that roughly coincides with the years that I’ve been working in horror. One of the things I’ve always bristled against when it comes to horror criticism now is that nobody talks about how these films are experienced. Nobody is asking why they love these films. Horror is a genre that requires a lot of earnestness and honesty from its audience and I felt that kind of writing was missing. I wanted to look at and think deeply about how we watch horror and how we are watching contemporary horror through a contemporary lens, how audiences are interacting with a genre that has very often, traditionally, been decried as being very exclusionary and very much for a very particular type of audience and not for anybody else.

BP: I really liked your point near the end of the book where you talk about how little contemporary horror criticism actually describes how the film makes you feel. So rarely do critics talk about the emotions that a horror film brought about.
AB: I feel it’s the opposite of music criticism, where a lot of music criticism talks about how certain music makes you feel, what it’s meant for, what is the emotional intention of it? I feel horror, in particular, is lumped into this one big mess of, “Oh this doesn’t scare me, so it’s shit and therefore, all horror is shit.”

BP: Yeah, like you said, if someone watches one bad comedy film, nobody is then going to suggest that all comedy films are bad. Horror has proven itself over and over again to be an incredibly successful genre, horror films nearly always make money, and yet it is so rarely taken seriously. What does horror have to do?
AB: Win an Oscar?

BP: And even that isn’t enough. We are in the era of “elevated horror”, which is a term that you reserve a lot of contempt for in the book and which I wholly agree with you on. It’s such a ridiculous phrase.
AB: It’s the implied snobbery. It’s an insult to both the filmmakers and the audience. It’s basically saying: “I like The Babadook but it’s not horror because I’m above horror, I’ll call it elevated because I’m smarter than horror fans and I appreciate art.”

BP: It’s a marketing term though, surely.
AB: I think it’s more an awards strategy. Jordan Peele was marketing Get Out as a “social thriller.” Jordan Peele loves horror and he’s incredibly knowledgeable about it. He’s not unapologetic about his love of the genre and he has contributed to it massively. But you cannot convince me that Get Out and Us are not horror films. In the same way that The Silence of the Lambs, which won all the five top Oscars, was marketed as a ‘thriller.’ It’s a horror film.

BP: I feel a large swathe of audiences have forgotten what horror can look like. Like, you watch The Exorcist now and it’s surprising how much of it is just a straight drama, and yet it’s one of the scariest films ever made. The same with Rosemary’s Baby. There is a thing where if people hear a film is a horror film, they think it’s going to be a gruesome slasher from the 70s, when that’s just one genre within horror. And when a horror film isn’t like that, it’s “elevated horror”. 
AB: Let’s talk about Hollywood. It’s been the same pattern since the start. It’s always high-minded dramas with a horror edge, then it gets franchised and becomes over-commercialised. And then boom, there’s another resurrection. People take it seriously again. It’s new adaptations of literary classics. Then it over-franchises itself again. It’s this constant thing. So, it was Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist in the late 60s and 70s, the classic horrors that were done by, often, very young filmmakers. Tobe Hooper was 24 when he made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then the 80s came and franchised everything. So many Halloweens, so many Friday the 13ths. Horror loses its track up until you get Scream and that brings about the 90s renaissance. At the same time, the big studios are making lush Gothic adaptations of your literary classics, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein, Interview with the Vampire. Then in the 00s we get into over-franchising again. Things like torture porn comes along. The Saw films. Then in the 2010s, it’s the rise-up of original voices in horror. Right now, we’re at the adapting the literary classics stage. There are two Frankenstein movies coming out next year, we had The Invisible Man a couple years ago, there’s several new Draculas, there’s the new Interview with the Vampire series. I think horror is slipping into another downturn right now. It’s been ten years of good stuff.

“The Silence of the Lambs, which won all the five top Oscars, was marketed as a ‘thriller.’ It’s a horror film.

BP: Throughout the book there’s one director who you keep coming back to and that’s Mike Flanagan. I feel if his career happened in the 80s, we’d talk about him like he’s John Carpenter. But he’s really been tarred by the Netflix brush. What is it about his work that you love so much?
AB: I think you’re absolutely right. If he had broken through in filmmaking, as opposed to TV-making, we would be talking about him in the same terms as we do with Carpenter or Wes Craven. I think there is that bit of that inbuilt snobbery of “Oh, well he just makes TV.” For the purposes of the book, first of all, he’s an extraordinarily productive storyteller and was particularly active during this precise decade that I was covering. But, also, he will go from making you cry to terrifying the shit out of you in two scenes. He understands horror. He writes character first but that doesn’t mean that he disregards the genre in which he operates. He’s both horror first and emotion first. So he’s the perfect person to anchor this book because we’re talking about the emotional experience of watching and making horror. He’s the guy for that.

Feeding the Monster by Anna Bogutskaya is available now, published by Faber.