“Elevated horror,” a term coined by John Krasinski to promote (2018), has come to signify something like “fake news”: it’s a sticky, self-defeating phrase ripe for repurposing. But what Krasinski gestured toward with this term is really a tendency, in the last eight to ten years, of horror films to contain monster-sized metaphors. Few of these films, often structured around racial or gendered traumas, are even as dexterous as (2017): one of Krasinski’s citations was (2015), a movie of obvious intelligence and skill that is boxed into a corner by its analogy for bereavement, like the cage that traps its top-hatted monster at the end. To this list one might add (2017), , and (2019), films in which scares are subordinate to, and neutralized by, the script’s reliance on a
