Why Dysfunctional Families Are The Hottest Trend In Modern Horror Movies
Over the past decade, the horror genre has repeatedly crossed over into family drama territory, with horror movies that focus on household tensions, inherited mental illness, and the experience of collective trauma. This trend remains as strong as ever, with the cultural impact of films like Hereditary, The Babadook, and A Quiet Place giving way to explorations of dark dynamics. In these movies, dysfunctional family relationships lead to palpable dread before the monsters, ghosts, and killers even appear.
Horror movies have always acted as mirrors that reflect the fears and anxieties of their contemporary audiences, and while family drama has always played a role in horror throughout history, the current focus on close relatives as the source of the horror themselves is a decidedly modern-day element. Classic horror films like Poltergeist, The Omen, or The Exorcist may touch on themes related to family, especially pertaining to children, but the new crop of horror deals much more explicitly with the toxic patterns and uncomfortable behaviors that are disturbingly present within the higher branches of the family tree.
Despite the horror genre's reputation for embracing violence in lieu of subtlety, these more recent films show how effective horror can be in raising greater awareness about taboo issues. Far from creating exploitative shock, up-and-coming horror filmmakers look to embrace recent realizations about mental health and abuse. Their horror cinema sympathizes with individuals dealing with the painful effects of abuse and the suffocating weight of family trauma. In a politically divided culture and a globalizing world, relatives live and grow further apart from each other, yet they are still unable to escape the stress and anxiety of family conflict and responsibilities.
Hereditary, directed by family drama/horror extraordinaire Ari Aster, is about a mother trying to make sense of senseless tragedy, slowly unraveling her sanity as she digs deeper into her cursed lineage. The film captures the terrifying and isolating realization that children can never truly escape the emotional flaws of their parents. Annie Graham, the survivor of her family line after her male relatives succumbed to their mental illnesses and died, is forced to watch her life crumble and her family torn apart as she unknowingly inherits the occultist dysfunction of her deceased mother.
Likewise, the recently released Relic utilizes the supernatural to explore the anxieties of mental illness, specifically dementia, being passed down through generations. Director Natalie Erika James, who, based on her short films, seems similarly fixated as Aster does on the horrors of parenthood, captures the existentialist dread that comes with the inability to recognize family members after their psychological decline. The characters of Relic and Hereditary have to face revelatory secrets regarding the destabilizing effects of mental illness in the form of malevolent ghostly forces. In effect, these films are also about confronting passed-down psychoses and struggling to control what feels like an inescapable fate.
Little is known about the sinister matriarch that masterminds the traumatic events in Hereditary other than the fact that her daughter had a contentious relationship with her. It's implied that she was psychologically abusive to her children and may have even influenced her son's suicide through her obsession with demonic possession, but it's clear that she causes discernible trauma even after her death. Familial grief is a reoccurring theme in current horror media and is directly connected to explorations of mental illness, most notably in The Babadook and the television show The Haunting of Hill House.
The Babadook not only demonstrates how horror can embody depression, but also interprets the oft-overused "creepy child" trope as a way to discuss the overbearing responsibilities of motherhood in the wake of emotional trauma. Director Jennifer Kent clearly uses the titular creature as a metaphor for the way unattended grief can transform into clinical depression, especially for a mother who is expected to control her family. Considering how she lost her husband and support system, the horror takes on a truly tragic tone.
The same can be said of director Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House, in which the members of the Crane family are forced to revisit the site of their collective trauma and face their figurative and literal phantoms. The hauntings of Gothic horror like Hill House have commonly served as ways to explore the dark secrets lying within family circles, often involving murder and madness, but Flanagan combines the rich emotion of Gothic tradition with modern themes regarding familial roles. As the plot of the show unravels and the audience discovers further information about the Crane family tragedy, it becomes clear that those running away from trauma can ironically become consumed by it.
The Haunting of Hill House ends on an optimistic note, reuniting the Cranes as a family for honestly and openly confronting their grief. Not all horror takes a completely cynical look at dysfunctional families, as occasionally hostilities give way to reconciliation against a collective threat. The family in A Quiet Place is, like the characters in the previously discussed films, dealing with a horrible tragedy that creates tension between the surviving members. Guilt and grief lead to compulsive acts that threaten the family's safety, but emotionally opening up to each other allows the characters to keep sane and survive in the post-apocalypse.
Dysfunctional families have grown so prevalent in modern horror that filmmakers have interpreted older material through this sort of lens. The 2018 reboot of Halloween, for instance, re-contextualizes the classic slasher film to fit the family drama-horror mold. The film directly confronts the lasting effects of Laurie Strode's traumatic experience with Michael Myers by exploring how her frayed mental state has damaged the relationship with her daughter and granddaughter. As the three women trap Michael in a basement and set his prison on fire, it's as if they have recognized each other's suffering and defeated their family curse.
The greater focus on traumatic family experiences within the horror genre has to do with a rapidly changing cultural landscape due to a generational shift, not only in filmmaking but in the greater world of artistic expression. For one, there is a greater awareness of mental illness as the result of traumatic events, as well as a higher level of sympathy for people that survived these types of experiences. "Trigger warnings" and "microaggressions" are often derided as examples of how the younger generation has lost its grit and grown too sensitive, but these concepts exist because more people are now considering the traumatic experiences of others instead of dismissing them.
As the world becomes more globalized, more younger people become further separated from those that raised them as they move from place to place seeking employment and affordable living. In addition, politics continue to grow more divisive, and a political opinion that what was once an uncomfortable conversation at dinner may now genuinely split families apart. The new wave of horror movies gives form to the crushing anxiety of trying to escape from a stressful or outright toxic family life that keeps pulling relatives into its orbit.
Finally, there has been a growing feminist outlook in cinema due to the increasing (albeit still small) number of female filmmakers. Horror has experienced a recent rise in woman-led stories created by women themselves, and even the films helmed by men have introduced more dynamic female protagonists. As a result, filmmakers like Jennifer Kent and Natalie Erika James look to explore anxieties related to the expectation of women to responsibly take care of the household. These horror movies are subversive takes on the traditional role of women as controllers of domestic life, and it's no coincidence that the conservative pressure placed on these characters often drives them literally mad.