The lingering profundities of horror are rarely to be found in a film’s straightforward symbolism but instead in the figurative intensity of striking, baroque, and even extreme compositions. The best horror films have always privileged mess over didacticism, where getting lost in labyrinthine narratives with gruesome wrong turns can propel the imagination in surprising directions or dissolve the paper thin membrane between seemingly rigid social categories. Historically, the sensual and intellectual payoff of this messiness – especially amongst low budget and B-movies – has rarely won the immediate favour of critics or awards institutions, meaning that the artistic merits of many horror films have been celebrated only retroactively.
From this perspective, it’s easy to understand frustrations with recent films that seek to smooth the genre’s jagged edges, efforts loosely circumscribed within the trend of so-called “elevated horror”. The term describes films characterised by a compositional sparseness, conceptual slickness, and polished violence: mechanisms that come off as designs to ward off associations with “low art”. Writing for LARB, Scout Tafouya – mostly referring to Ari Aster’s films but also to The Quiet Place franchise and Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Argento’s Suspiria – describes these films as “dully pretty parables with no discernible real-world connection and loudly broadcast emotions.” Elsewhere, Claire Ostroski suggests that elevated horror manufactures “artificial prestige”: an easily reproduced veneer that, when imposed by industry can soften the subversive properties of horror that its sidelined position has facilitated.
But horror has also reproduced tired tropes that deserve to be slashed, restitched, and imagined anew. Criticisms of elevated horror can generate their own reductive conclusions: namely that horror films of the past are generally ‘better’ than horror of the present, or that those who find their way into the genre, lured by the clever marketing of distributors such as A24 (whose titles are perhaps unfairly grouped together), are unenlightened poseurs. Such arguments close off artistic appraisals of horror filmmakers enacting such egregious ‘elevation’, or repurpose the ‘lowbrow’ as a gatekeeping tool. What these circuitous conversations about genre might in fact reveal is something more earnest than that which is ever overtly discussed: a sincere desire for art that echoes the messiness, transgression, and bewildering logics of living – and dying – on earth. These ideas have always been essential to horror but are often too tidily delivered in mainstream non-genre cinema.
By embracing a less prestigious era of horror, Prano Bailey-Bond’s first feature, Censor (2021) emphasises how these qualities have historically made horror a threat to law and order conservatism, drawing on an understudied piece of British film history, when a loophole allowed “video nasties” – low budget horror films distributed on VHS – to circulate without classification into the early 1980s. The film takes place following a period of moral panic, when those making and distributing these films are beginning to be prosecuted, and police are seizing videos deemed obscene from retailers. Bailey-Bond’s Enid (Niamh Algar) works as a content censor for a branch of the British Board of Film Classification, reviewing gruesome violence with studied stoicism and tenacious precision. “I just want to get it right,” she appeals to disgruntled producers and distributors before vetoing clips of eyeball gouging or tugs-of-war with human intestines. Enid’s tenacious commitment to her job operates from a strongly held, albeit naïve, belief that she’s contributing to a societal moral good (a concept her parents find unconvincing and her co-workers find pretentious): her character fluctuates between considered criticality towards the most egregious images in these horror films – especially sexual violence – and a more puritanical, repressed worldview being shaped by Thatcherism.
Enid’s instincts for “getting it right” come under scrutiny when a gruesome household murder mimics the violence of a film she previously censored. The murderer, who claims not to remember his actions, is dubbed the “amnesiac killer” by the press. Conservative pundits exploit this information as proof that horror films exacerbate violence. For Enid, who also experiences amnesia around the childhood abduction of her sister, Nina, this is the first of many parallels between intimate, traumatic details from her life and the films she oversees. When a leering producer puts her in charge of censoring the film Don’t Go In The Church by reclusive director Frederick North, the opening scene – the sinister separation of two young girls in a forest – starts to trigger memories. Enid starts to feel that North’s films are based on her life; an idea made more convincing by the resemblance she sees between their recurrent lead actress, Alice Lee, and her sister. In Enid’s search for more videos starring Lee, she becomes increasingly convinced that this actress is Nina, and that North’s films are insidiously linked to her disappearance – a belief that alienates their parents and unravels Enid’s own violent impulses.
Through its protagonist, Censor questions whether art needs to contain moralising directives, without ever reducing Enid to an archetype or symbol. Rather than instrumentalise “trauma” to signal the seriousness of a film within a genre often not taken seriously—Tafouya’s principal gripe with the success of “elevated horror”—Censor points to the flawed but complex treatments of trauma that already exist within the historically demoted cinema it references. While dominant culture in the 1980s positioned violent video nasties and B-horror as anti-art and dangerous to society, film scholarship from the 1990s onwards considered the more nuanced cultural refractions of these films through the lenses of gender, race, and sexuality. Censor is also tinctured with revisionist interests: the fleeting presence of a punk in a scene at a video store, where Enid has come to seek out North’s more inflammatory titles, nods to the evergreen connections between horror and counter-cultural movements; more specifically the political links between British punk music and video nasties (see, most famously, the 1984 track “Nasty” by The Damned). Unlike the superficial allegories of horror-adjacent films like It Follows, Mother! or Promising Young Woman (oddly also about avenging a sororal figure named Nina), Censor is more interested in exploring the history of the genre, rather than using it as a vehicle for direct topicality. This disinterest in engaging (or even acknowledging) the signifiers of genre ‘elevation,’ reflects a more genuine consideration of women horror protagonists and their acts of vengeance.
Importing material from Bailey-Bond’s preceding short, ‘Nasty’ (2015), Censor expands its filmmaker’s perennial curiosity towards the morbid and tender moments in which cinema viewing grazes personal or socio-cultural memory. More potent still, is the film’s treatment of cinephilia as a particularly intense relationship, through which the images, places, and stories of films spill over into our corporeal lives. Throughout the film we watch Enid watching films, the camera trained on her face. Despite the nature of her job, this spectatorship never seems purely evaluative: increasingly it betrays Enid’s desperation to pass through the mesh of the screen into the filmic universe itself.
Naturally, this collision between film and reality happens in Censor’s third act when Enid arrives in a forest for the night shoot of North’s latest project. Bypassing a scant crew who believes she’s part of the cast, Enid stumbles into the woods towards North, anticipating her reunion with Alice Lee/Nina. As she approaches North’s camera, she steps into the garish glow of key and fill lights and a fluctuation in aspect ratio momentarily dislocates the unification of our perspective with Enid’s: we are now stranded, too. “All of my ideas are drawn from real life,” North muses before prompting Enid to improvise a scene. Working from her traumatised memory, Enid re-enacts both the separation from her sister and her imagined rescue. North’s camera whirs to life, but as he points it towards Enid, his lens – given its own frontal close up – also meets the viewer’s eye as if we are being filmed too. It’s a confrontational, Brechtian moment where the onscreen presence of filmmaking machinery operates as a mode of direct address that collapses the chasm between diegesis and reality. The effect, albeit through a genre lens, is akin to the startling reveal of artificial home video footage in Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell; one that draws a sharp parallel between cinematic construction and the construction of our lives.
Unlike the latter, in which the melancholic strumming of Bon Iver sets the tone for such a collapse between fact and fiction, Censor descends into a bloody rampage as Enid confuses screen acting with reality – a parody of conservative anxieties about the social influence of violent video nasties. The ideology under particular criticism in this frightening denouement is that horror films threaten the integrity of the heterosexual family unit, particularly by corrupting children (a concept reiterated by conservative commentators of the period, most emphatically Christian conservative Mary Whitehouse whose vocal crusade against the obscenity of video nasties was instrumental in the implementation of the Video Recordings Act of 1984 and the founding of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, now Mediawatch-UK). Rather than end on the note of entertainment by framing Enid’s murderous catharsis as a timeworn showdown between defensive ego and wild id, Censor positions the violence of suppressive imaginaries as much graver than that of the cinematic spectacle. The more fitting comparison, then – amongst the numerous nasties and giallo films that Bailey-Bond lovingly pays homage to – is The Ring, in its treatment of television screens as spectatorial portals and video tapes as powerful containers: even more so when their circulation is threatened. Similarly, Censor suggests that we have much to learn from forms of media that have been cast aside. Better, then, to keep watching, searching, perceiving.