Horror has always been a reliable index of cultural anxiety — what a society fears at a given moment tends to find its way into horror films before it surfaces in more respectable genres. The current wave of European and European-inflected horror is unusually legible in this regard. The anxieties it is working through are specific, contemporary, and shared across national contexts in ways that suggest something more than individual auteur preoccupation.
The wave I am describing is not identical to the “elevated horror” discourse that emerged from Sundance around 2015 with films like The Witch and Hereditary — American films, addressing American anxieties, operating in the Puritan-guilt tradition. The European variant has different roots and different obsessions, and it is worth trying to map them.
The Body as Institution
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024, Cannes Best Screenplay) is the most explicit recent example. Demi Moore plays a fading television presenter who takes a black-market drug that generates a younger version of herself. The film is a body horror film in the most literal sense — its third act is a sustained act of physical destruction — but its real subject is the institutional logic of female beauty: the way it is extracted, commodified, exhausted, and discarded. The horror is not the monster. The horror is the mechanism that creates the monster.
Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021, Palme d’Or) works in related territory. Its protagonist’s relationship with machines — literal, erotic, violent — is a metaphor for the automotive-industrial complex of masculinity, and the film’s most disturbing sequences are not the kills but the medical ones: the body modified, suppressed, forced into a shape that is not its own.
Institutional Dread
A separate strand of the new European horror is concerned not with bodies but with institutions — with bureaucratic systems that produce horror through procedure rather than malevolence. Michael Haneke is the obvious progenitor here, though Haneke refuses the horror label. His influence is visible in films like Ruben Östlund’s work (not strictly horror, but operating in horror’s territory of social dread) and in a recent wave of Eastern European genre films about state institutions — healthcare systems, prisons, schools — that destroy individuals through indifference rather than intent.
“The institutional horror film is, at its core, a film about powerlessness — about the gap between the individual and the system, and what the system does to people who fall through that gap. It is a very European anxiety.”
Religious Uncanny
A third strand, harder to categorise, involves the return of religious experience as a source of horror — not the Satanic-panic horror of American tradition but something more ambiguous: the encounter with the numinous as threat rather than comfort. Agnieszka Smocińska’s work, certain Polish genre films, and the remarkable recent output of Romanian cinema (which has always had a complicated relationship with Orthodox spirituality) all participate in this.
What these three strands share is a horror that comes from inside structures rather than outside them — from the body itself, from the systems we live in, from the beliefs that organise experience. This is the specific anxiety of the European present: not invasion or external threat but internal collapse, the discovery that the structures we trusted are themselves the source of what we feared.
What Comes Next
The commercial success of The Substance (unusual for a film of its formal ambition) suggests that this wave has not exhausted its audience. Several films from Cannes and Berlin 2025 suggest continuation rather than resolution. The anxiety, evidently, has not been processed. Cinema tends to keep working on what culture has not yet resolved.