A24's Horror Hot Streak Has Finally, Maybe, Broken

A24's run of horror movies, from roughly 2014 to about 2022, is, I will argue, one of the best sustained runs any studio has had in the genre since the 1970s Italian horror guys. That is a big claim, and I am making it deliberately, because the films themselves were deliberate. The Witch. Hereditary. Midsommar. It Comes At Night. Talk To Me. An entire stretch of horror that took the genre seriously as a vehicle for grief, ritual, and what it means to inherit a family. I am increasingly worried that run is over, and I am writing this not as an obituary but as a worried fan checking for a pulse.

What was working, structurally, was patience. That is the word I keep coming back to, and it is the word this essay centres for good reason. A24 horror in that window trusted the audience to sit with discomfort. Not jump scares. Not gore. Discomfort. The camera would linger. A character would say nothing for forty seconds. The score would be a single sustained note, or no score at all, for a stretch of minutes. The horror came from the patience itself, from the feeling that time was passing in a way you could not speed up or look away from. That is a radical thing for a commercial genre to ask, and it is why those films stayed with people long after the credits.

Horror, at its best, is a genre about time. Other genres can cut around a feeling. Horror, when it is confident, makes you feel the passage of a minute. It makes a hallway feel longer than it is. It makes a dinner table feel like a place you cannot leave. It makes silence feel loud. The directors A24 was hiring in that window — Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Ti West — understood that instinctively, and they were coming out of a shared film-school tradition that treated horror as a serious form rather than a delivery system for shocks. They were, frankly, good, and the studio was good at getting out of their way.

What patience actually looked like on screen

Think about what those films actually do with a scene. They do not rush to explain the monster. They let a family sit in a room after something terrible has happened and simply not know what to say. They let a ritual unfold at its own ceremonial pace, even when that pace is uncomfortable. They let a landscape — a forest, a field, a house that has seen too much — become a character rather than a backdrop. That slowness is not emptiness. It is information. It tells you that grief does not resolve in a montage, that dread does not arrive on a schedule, and that the scariest thing in a house is often not what jumps out of the dark but what has been sitting quietly in the next room all along.

I miss Hereditary. I miss the dinner scene. I miss being scared by silence. Those sentences sound sentimental, but they are really a critical argument in disguise. The dinner scene is terrifying not because anything supernatural happens in it, but because a family that loves each other cannot find a safe sentence to say to one another. That is horror as social realism, horror as grief work, horror as the recognition that the people closest to us can become strangers in a single evening. A jump scare can make you flinch. A scene like that can make you sit in your car afterwards, in silence, because it has touched something you actually live with.

What has changed, I would argue, is not talent but optimisation. Recent A24 horror releases have started optimising for something different. The trailers cut faster. The jump scares are more prominent. The runtime is shorter. The scores are louder. These are all commercial decisions that make sense on a spreadsheet. The original A24 horror formula was not making a huge amount of money at the box office, despite making enormous amounts of cultural noise, and a studio that wants to survive has to reckon with that gap. I understand the pressure. I also think the pressure is killing what made the thing work in the first place.

The most recent A24 horror release I saw — I will not name it, because it was fine, just fine — had a runtime under ninety minutes and felt like every scene had been edited to be shorter than it wanted to be. You could feel the film wanting to breathe. The edit would not let it. That sensation, of a film straining against its own cut, is more damning than any single bad scene. It suggests a system, not an accident: a belief that audiences will not tolerate patience anymore, that attention must be grabbed every few seconds, that a slow scene is a wasted scene. If that belief becomes the house style, A24 horror stops being A24 horror and becomes just another horror brand with good taste in posters.

The runtime rule, and why it is only a rule of thumb

Here is a rough rule of thumb that mostly works: if you want to check whether A24 horror is still A24 horror, watch for the runtime. Under ninety-five minutes, they have probably cut something essential. Over one hundred and thirty, they have probably given the director what they wanted. That is not infallible, and it should not be treated as a law. Some great horror films are short. Some bloated films are long. But as a diagnostic tool, runtime reveals intent. A studio that trusts a director trusts them with time. A studio that does not trust a director takes time away first, because time is the cheapest thing to cut and the hardest thing to fake.

That is why the hope at the end matters more than the worry at the beginning. I am not writing an obituary. Ari Aster has a new movie in production that, from what can be gathered, is going to be fully uncompromising. Eggers is doing another period piece. There are weird, interesting projects still in the A24 pipeline. The question is whether they will survive the edit — whether the patience that defined the run will be protected when the commercial pressure says to trim, to speed up, to add a scare where a silence would do. That question cannot be answered by a trailer. It can only be answered by the finished film, in a cinema, with an audience willing to sit still.

There is also a broader cultural stake here that goes beyond one studio. When A24 horror worked, it proved that mainstream audiences would pay attention to slow, serious, grief-driven horror. It expanded what the genre was allowed to be about. It gave other studios permission to take horror seriously as art, not just as a reliable opening weekend. If that proof gets quietly withdrawn — if the lesson the industry takes is that patience does not sell — then the loss is not just a few good films. It is a narrowing of the genre itself, back toward shocks and away from the uncomfortable, lingering dread that made those films feel like they were about real life.

So what do I want, as a fan? I want the long take back. I want the forty seconds of silence back. I want the score that knows when to disappear. I want a horror film that trusts me to be unsettled without being startled every three minutes, and that trusts grief to be scary enough on its own. I want A24 to remember that its horror run mattered not because it was fashionable, but because it was patient — and patience, in horror, is not a luxury. It is the genre itself, doing its oldest and most necessary work: making us feel time pass, and making us afraid of what time does to families, to faith, and to all the things we inherit without asking for them.