Lavish Made

I watched a video by Morbid Zoo called "I want to talk about Elevated Horror" recently and I want to talk about it here. It digs into what a B-movie actually is, how we’ve misused the term, and what’s been lost now that horror mostly lives on streaming instead of in theaters.

I’ve always loved horror. I grew up obsessing over Halloween and Romero’s zombie films. The slow dread, the social bite, the grainy weirdness of it all. I wasn’t drawn to it because it was clean.

Romero didn’t need prestige to matter. Night of the Living Dead said more about America than most "important" films ever did. Dawn of the Dead took that same instinct and pointed it straight at consumer culture. His movies weren’t just scary. They were warning signs.

And yeah... they were trash. Not because they were bad, but because nobody expected them to be anything else. Horror didn’t wait to be taken seriously. It just was.

Morbid Zoo talks about how the term B-movie was never about quality. It was about placement. The second film. The filler. The thing studios didn’t bet the house on. But sometimes, that space gave creators the freedom to go strange. To go too far. And I believe that’s where the good stuff lives.

I think we've all probably thought about this to some degree when we think about Ari Aster's first two features. He's one of my favorite directors. His films are deliberate. They certainly wouldn't be called B Movies. They are Artful. Unflinching. I love the way he frames pain. The way the camera lingers. The stillness. The unease. I love his work. It's Cinema at its finest. But it’s funny to me that some folks treat what he does as the moment horror became legitimate.

Horror has always been legitimate. It just wasn’t always approved.

Morbid Zoo calls out how this label, elevated horror, tends to erase everything that came before. It rewrites history like the genre only got smart recently. But anyone who’s been around knows better.

Stephen King, in the foreword to Salem’s Lot, talked about how his mom would bring home stacks of library books. As she handed them to him, she’d label each one.
“Trash.”
“Bad trash.”
Bad trash he couldn’t read. Trash? She gave it to him without hesitation.

For King, trash wasn’t a warning. It was an invitation. A green light.

We feel like this kind of trash is harder to find now. Like it’s disappeared.
We lament about how hard it is to find good horror, or original horror.

But its easy to forgot how hard it’s always been to find.

Trash never showed up right when you needed it.
It made you work for it.

Now? It’s on some obscure streaming service. It’s buried three menus deep, listed under a title that makes no sense, with a thumbnail from a completely different scene.

It's out there. There is always a downside though. Now you're watching it alone in your room on your laptop. No one screams together. Maybe someone discovers it by accident, but to get your friends to watch it they'll have to subscribe to the streaming service.. and really we all know that rarely happens.

It can feel like all of that is lost. The theaters. The discovery. The weird midnight buzz.

And Morbid Zoo lays that out well. But there’s one thing she doesn’t really touch on.

The people.

The kids who grew up on trash.
The ones who snuck VHS tapes past their parents.
The ones who watched late-night cable with the volume low so they wouldn’t get caught.
The ones who knew, even then, that this stuff mattered.

Those kids are still here. They grew up, but they never stopped watching. Never stopped chasing that feeling. There’s an insatiable appetite for weird, trashy horror... and it hasn’t gone away.

You see it at the little festivals. The indie ones, tucked behind comic shops and coffee bars, in small hotel convention rooms. Where the folding chairs are uncomfortable, but everyone is grinning. Where some garage-made gorefest gets the biggest cheer of the night.

Where you meet the actors after. Shake the director’s hand. Trade bootlegs and Instagram handles.

That’s where the magic lives now.
That’s where trash still means something.

We still need horror that doesn’t wait for permission.
We still need horror that just is.
And most of all... we still need each other to see it.

P.S. It's a good video. You should watch it.