When it comes to foundational movie genres, we are told that the Western is dead and the romantic comedy is on life support, but the horror movie is alive, well, and, er, presumably bleeding. The modern entrants in this genre may not be good or even well-made, but enough of them still become hits to sustain the form. This year, the studios have already subjected moviegoers to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Send Help, The Strangers — Chapter 3, and, heaven help us, Scream 7. 

Yet, these gruesome, gory movies do not only do violence to the moral and intellectual sensibilities of those who watch them but to the genre itself, which, once upon a time, was a perfectly respectable form of mass entertainment. In the old days, the best horror movies tapped atmosphere and inference, and encouraged audience deduction. Is that a shadow on the wall or something more sinister? Classic movies ranging from Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People to Robert Wise’s The Haunting to M. Night Shyamalan’s comparatively recent The Sixth Sense each induced fright by means subtler than blood and guts.