Horror Directors Perform Rigor, Not Produce It

Jane Schoenbrun spent hours preparing for a single slasher sequence in their new film—mapping shots, rehearsing blocking, playing Counting Crows on repeat.

This level of detail gets published as craft, as proof that horror can be serious art made by serious people. What's unstated is the assumption doing all the work. It is that visible preparation correlates with the legitimacy of the work itself.

Before 2017, directors talked about horror as intuitive. Dario Argento didn't narrate his process as a credential—he made the thing. But after Ari Aster's Hereditary and Midsommar arrived, something shifted. These films were unambiguously excellent and unambiguously horror. They couldn't be gatekept as prestige by being classified as something else.

So the industry did the next best thing and made process itself the marker of seriousness. Directors began performing their meticulous preparation in interviews the way actors perform humility at awards shows—the hours spent, the research, the literary touchstones, the essay-length director's statement. The problem is that this assumption depends on a hidden belief. Showing your work proves you earned the right to make it. But showing your work doesn't prove that—it proves you documented your work.

There are films made recklessly that are brilliant, and films made with monastic discipline that are dead. Nathan Fielding didn't overthink his scripts—he over-rehearsed the actors' reactions to scripts he'd deliberately kept loose. His precision was in the space between preparation and surrender, not in preparation itself. The moment a director has to publicly establish legitimacy through process narratives, they've already ceded the ground—they're arguing for acceptance from people who don't want to be convinced, they want to be reassured that horror is respectable now. And that means every director in the genre is now doing invisible labor. They are not just making the film, but manufacturing evidence that they made it seriously. Schoenbrun's Counting Crows on loop becomes currency in a conversation the director never asked to have.