Something interesting has been happening in horror since the turn of the century. Maybe it started with The Blair Witch Project, that famously lo-fi hit that spawned a franchise and a million sub-par imitators. Then again, maybe it has more to do with the Internet, and how it’s changed what we define as horror when we remove any sense of a specific location from the equation. Recent hits like Skinimarink, Barbarian, and Baghead focus on the traditional eeriness of empty or forgotten spaces: this is elemental. We’ll always fear the locked door, the dark basement, the painstakingly preserved child’s bedroom. But what happens when the horror of a location stays offscreen? How does an audience respond to the type of horror that’s just based on vibes?
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