Payton McCarty-Simas
Payton McCarty-Simas is a freelance writer, artist, and editor based in New York City. Their most recent work focuses on horror film and literature, psychedelics, and queerness.
A24’s Folk Horror Boom and Bust
By Payton McCarty-SimasFor the last few years, A24 has critically dominated the horror genre with films such as Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) and Ari Aster's Hereditary (2018). Both directors’ follow-up films (Eggers’s The Lighthouse and Aster’s Midsommar, both from 2019) concretized the studio’s reputation for horror films with a penchant for hyper-formalist attention to detail, broader social commentary, and references to folklore, witchcraft, psychedelia, and the supernatural.
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