“Slow,” “Smart,” “Indie,” “Prestige,” “Elevated”: Discursive Struggle for Cultural Distinction

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This chapter examines the successive critical attempts to name the emergent post-horror cycle as something other than the literal conjunction of art cinema and horror, including modifiers like “slow,” “smart,” “indie,” “prestige,” “elevated,” and finally “post.” The shortcomings in each of these naming attempts were driven as much by critics’ difficulties to put the films’ affective impact into words as by the increased speed and fragmentated authority of film criticism during the social-media era. Nevertheless, by looking at the individual meanings of these critical labels, the chapter traces an intersecting series of historical lineages (e.g. slow cinema, smart films, indie cinema) that have productively led into the stylistic and discursive construction of the post-horror corpus.