Promising Young Woman & Defining Genre
It happened without me noticing, and I don’t know how I missed it.
Did you know Promising Young Woman is no longer a horror film? Forget it being a revenge film with meta-commentary on the form of slashers, revenge/exploitation, and the use of both male gaze and female empowerment through the survivor girl to leave you feeling satisfied at the end of a horror film. Nope. Now it’s just a black comedy. Or a character study. Or a thriller. Or a rare revenge film with no horror elements at all. Nothing to see here, folks. Keep it moving.
Academy Awards buzz is where horror films go to die. Films as diverse as Silence of the Lambs, Get Out, Black Swan, The Exorcist, and The Sixth Sense magically become “thrillers” or “psychological dramas” or “character studies” or “satire” when the scent of awards attention is in the air. Films that don’t make that marketing shift, like Hereditary, May, and Us, will miss out on the Academy Awards nominations even with key precursor awards and wonderful campaigns.
I predicted that Promising Young Woman would receive a similar rebranding in anticipation of the Academy Awards. I did not think that it would so quickly reach the point of receiving “well actually, it’s not a horror film” comments for speaking about its genre.
Promising Young Woman isn’t just a horror film. It’s a meta-horror film. It’s a revenge film. It’s a film with the beats of a slasher that doesn’t show violence until the third act. It’s a satire of the revenge form, which is both an exploitation form and a horror sub-genre at the same time.
There are scenes in Promising Young Woman that scared me in ways I’ve never experienced before. The psychological horror is on the level of Funny Games. And until the climax, it is just psychological horror. You can create a horror film without relying on violence, and a film heavy with dialogue can be as terrifying as a more traditional horror film with physical confrontations.
The first thing to realize about this discussion of genre is a classification system. Horror, as a genre, is meant to scare. What scares me probably doesn’t scare you. I will argue with a straight face that Blackfish, the documentary about the abuse of whales in captivity at Sea World, is as much a horror film as it is a documentary film; it’s edited with the same beats as a slasher film, with the whale’s attacks replacing more traditional kill scenes. Horror films are so easily redefined for various marketing purposes because fear is so subjective. Convince enough people that a scary film is “blank” instead and they’ll believe you.
The second element is tropes. There are certain recurring images, characters, ideas, scenes, and shorthand used within similar films that become ingrained in certain genre classifications. The main character arc of Promising Young Woman is the same tragic character turned villain in their own story seen in films like Carrie, May, and The Fly. The difference here is subversion. We’re not meant to fear or hate Cassandra; we’re meant to empathize with her, even feel sorry for her.
It also comments on elements from the hidden psychopath story like American Psycho, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and the Scream series (among other young people slasher properties like I Know What You Did Last Summer or Urban Legends). Again, the change is subversion. Cassandra’s actions feel justified from the start. When she overreaches as her plans become more elaborate, we can understand her motivations and still hope that someday she heals from whatever is causing her to act this way.
There is a crossover between horror and other genres, specifically thriller and suspense films. This is where horror films transform into other genres. Horror, thriller, and suspense are subjective classifications. They have so many of the same beats, tropes, and themes that they often swing back and forth even within a single film. It’s a marketing distinction as they present thrillers as more mature texts than horror and suspense as more psychological than horror.
If you are not scared by Promising Young Woman, I believe you are a lucky person. There are elements of Emerald Fennell’s brilliant film that had me pulling away from the screen. The sense of danger, the miscarriage of justice, and the struggles of surviving trauma are the things that fill my nightmares.
I could see calling it a dark comedy or, more accurately, labeling it a revenge film (which does typically fall under horror, though some lean more toward thriller or even drama). There are bitter laughs to be had created by the psychological revenge scenes of the film, but they are intended to creep into your bones and have you question how you respond to the material being discussed the whole way through.
Genre is subjective. It’s okay to classify Promising Young Woman or any of the films I mentioned as a different genre. That’s your call to make based on your understanding of media and genre. You should feel comfortable defending your categorization on its own merits.
What’s not okay is dismissing someone else’s experience by stating “no, it’s not” when presented with a different opinion. I might not agree with some of the other classifications of these films, but I’m willing to have that discussion if I’m not immediately dismissed as wrong for defining something as horror. Erasing the artistic achievements of genre films by refusing to acknowledge that, yes, they could be read as horror or other often disregarded genres is not a great look.
