Here is my thesis about the horror genre and the 1970s: what made that decade's horror films work was a collapse of institutional trust that created a specific kind of dread.

The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween — these films are all, in different ways, about the failure of protective institutions. The church fails. The police fail. Medicine fails. The family fails. What makes them scary isn't the monster. It's the discovery that there is no authority that can help you.

Post-9/11 horror has tried to access this dread but the institutional context is different. The Conjuring universe is fundamentally about the restoration of religious order. The Blumhouse films are largely about middle-class safety being disrupted and then restored. They're not nihilistic in the way the 70s films were, and that's why they're ultimately less frightening.

Hereditary gets close. Midsommar gets close. But neither quite reaches the cold emptiness of the originals because audiences have been trained to expect resolution.