Death is Alive

Evil, as the opposite of good, affirms the necessity and existence of good itself. But in the new wave of horror films, traditional faiths are not the answer.

2025 was a particularly strong year for horror cinema, with films of exceptional quality that made the most of the genre’s potential. Last year, more than 200 horror films were produced worldwide, considering only those with adequate distribution.

Films that push the boundaries of the genre to speak in different ways about motherhood (Bring Her Back), couple relationships (Together), or even reinterpret old fairy tales such as The Ugly Stepsister — a Cinderella story from a stepsister’s point of view — all wrapped in a body-horror sauce.

Also present is the return of the great classic monsters — Dracula, Frankenstein, the werewolf, the mummy — alongside quality horror from Italian productions as well, films that are competitive even on a technical level but still little appreciated by the public, such as La valle dei sorrisi (2025) by director Paolo Strippoli.

In the past fifteen years, making a horror film has become one of the safest commercial bets, and this has led to growth in the quality and variety of genre films. The public’s interest in this kind of film has also changed — an effect directly proportional to the genre’s capacity to tackle subjects that mainstream production has stopped addressing, in favor of spectacular but unoriginal blockbusters.

Confirmation of this trend came at the 2026 Oscars, when horror films such as Sinners, Frankenstein, and Weapons won a combined eight awards — a record for the genre in a single edition. Never before had so many horror films competed: in the past, these films participated in the Oscars but mostly won in technical categories, whereas Sinners, Weapons, and Frankenstein triumphed in the most important ones: best cinematography, best actor, best score, and so on.

It is worth noting that these films often try to imagine what happens to humanity when a religious worldview fades or collapses — that way of living and relating to reality in which every aspect of existence, inner and natural, answers to a transcendent principle. In this vision, even evil finds its place: as the opposite of good, it affirms the necessity and existence of good itself. So, what happens to the world when the transcendent order ceases to exist?

Nostalgia for Religions?

Several horror films attempt to address this dimension. It is not nostalgia for the religious — quite the contrary: most often it is an objective acknowledgment of the failure of the great historical religions, and of Christianity in particular, to explain or contain the supernatural world and the forces of evil. In this scenario, what never disappears is precisely evil and its workings, especially when religion becomes the need to glimpse the beyond at any cost or responds to the desperate desire for a miracle to resolve the pain of existence, tipping into fanaticism — which always has destructive effects on the community of believers.

In this sense, one of the horror subgenres that has seen the greatest development is so-called folk horror, a genre that combines fear with popular traditions — folklore, superstitions, and rural settings isolated from the rest of the world. It is not a new genre: one need only think of landmark films such as The Wicker Man (1973) by British director Robin Hardy. Rather than relying on monsters or jump scares, this genre creates unease by evoking ancestral rites, archaic beliefs, and closed communities dominated by a distorted vision of the sacred, where individuals’ actions are driven by blind fanaticism.

In this regard, the contribution of A24 — an independent American film and television production and distribution company founded in New York in 2012 — must be highlighted, as it has played an important role in relaunching and popularizing this subgenre from its founding to the present.

It has done so through auteur films with a strong visual and thematic identity, such as the seminal The Witch (2015) by Robert Eggers — in which the critique of the dogmatism of the Christian tradition was particularly strong — or Midsommar (2019) by Ari Aster, which amplified the fanatical-religious component of the already-mentioned The Wicker Man to the highest degree. In general, A24 has, over the years, demonstrated ease with religious imagery reread through a horror lens, or with taking up popular beliefs and reworking them in new narrative contexts.

No Death

One of the films that stood out for its intensity in the galaxy of 2025 horror films is also from A24: the Australian Bring Her Back, directed by brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who had already made the interesting Talk to Me (2022) for the same production house.

The story of Bring Her Back follows a woman who cannot accept her daughter’s death. Consumed by grief, she follows the instructions of a dark ritual to bring her daughter back to life, at the expense of the young people in her care.

Something does seem to respond to her call — the rituals truly work — but what has been summoned is not exactly the lost daughter. The film, however, does not fully commit to the theme of demonic possession: the angel — the entity at the center of the rite to bring back the dead daughter — seems to be more of an atavistic force, with little to do with an intelligent or personal entity. It is simply a force that only the perfect execution of the ritual can control.

Bring Her Back, while drawing on concepts reminiscent of the lesser-known The Dark Song (2016), transcends the horror genre and establishes itself as a profound reflection on the gravity of grief, the horror of loss, and the inadequacy of the consolation the idea of an afterlife is supposed to offer us.

Gledis

Directed by Zach Cregger, Weapons received major recognition at the 2026 Oscars and was hailed as the film of the year in its genre.

A small community is shattered when several children mysteriously disappear on the same night, at the same hour, without leaving a trace. The investigation reveals that these disturbing events are the direct consequence of the arrival in town of Gledis, a grotesque and unsettling elderly woman, hosted by the family of the only child who has not disappeared.

Gledis is a witch who brings witchcraft to the small town. The magical and ancestral element throws the rules of a community where every role is codified and normalized into crisis — yet where everything is also terribly flattened and superficial.

It is yet another film that seeks to expose the fragility of a system built on rules and relationships that appear efficient but are, in reality, not vital or monotonous, and that collapse in the face of the irruption of the supernatural, which ends up taking control of everything — because the one figure missing from the community is precisely the one capable of managing the magical element, the figure who should be able to render the inexplicable acceptable, along with the painful consequences it brings.

Smiles

2025 also brought us an entirely Italian horror film: La valle dei sorrisi, directed by Paolo Strippoli and set in an isolated, seemingly perfect mountain community, Remis, located in a remote valley.

The plot follows Sergio, who has moved to Remis to teach physical education at the local secondary school. Sergio carries unresolved grief over his son’s death, which he blames himself for and cannot forgive. He arrives in the village and is struck by the serene atmosphere and the inhabitants, all extraordinarily friendly. As time passes, however, disturbing details emerge: the residents’ constant smiles and repetitive behavior devoid of spontaneity.

Sergio gradually discovers that beneath the idyllic façade lies a dark secret: Matteo, one of his young students, has the ability — when he embraces someone — to eliminate any inner suffering. However, Matteo is also capable of taking complete control of those he embraces.

The film is a spiral of delirium that draws visual references from works such as the TV series Midnight Mass and Nameless. The cult of the embrace finds one of its most ardent supporters in the community’s priest, who sees in Matteo the tangible proof of a miraculous element whose origin cannot be explained.

One of the protagonists — excluded from the community because he refused to let go of his wife’s loss and the grief that comes with it — will try to open Sergio’s eyes: “Matteo’s power takes away pain but annihilates God, because God is found above all in pain,” he will say.

Death is alive

If God is dead, evil is not — above all, the pain that comes from death — and if throughout human history it is precisely death that has triggered the search for religious thought, for today’s man such a search seems to have concluded — or so these films suggest — without yielding any authentic discovery or certainty.

But if evil and its effects have not ended, evil remains a mystery nonetheless, and what these films declare is precisely the ineffectiveness of official religions — which, however, produces a return to magical knowledge or to destructive and unresolved forms of witchcraft. In this perspective, evil and suffering can only be denied or anesthetized: in this way, though, it is not only God who is annihilated — because, as Strippoli’s film suggests, but the removal of pain is also  the path to losing one’s humanity entirely as well.

(published with permission from https://www.settimananews.it/religioni/se-la-religione-fallisce-un-anno-di-cinema-horror/ )