At Glass Eye Pix, we always said Rick Alverson’s THE COMEDY was a horror film, both as a tongue-in-cheek answer to the question “why would an indie horror production company make a comedy?” (silly, because we make lots of movies outside of the genre), but more importantly because Alverson’s film was an uncompromising portrait of the detachment and socio-pathology of the modern, privileged, white male hipster, a less overtly violent version of the American Psycho, but just as debasing to society.

Now, after this year’s Sundance, Buzzfeed starts to catch on to Alverson’s themes, while simultaneously (and finally) acknowledging the scope of a genre too often pigeonholed. 

Check out the excerpts below and read the full article by Alison Willmore at BUZZFEED.

3 New Movies That Are Redefining The Horror Genre

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The Witch, The Nightmare, and Entertainment challenge old ideas of how horror films can look and feel.

PARK CITY, Utah — There are horror movies, there are art movies, and then there are those that fall in the sweet spot between where fans of the scary and fans of the exquisitely shot come together. And that usually happens at a film festival.

Like many fests, the annual Sundance Film Festival has a midnight section where most of its genre selections — including Eli Roth’s latest, Knock Knock, and David Robert Mitchell’s beautiful, terrifying sexually transmitted haunting movie It Follows — are grouped. But this year, the most talked-about horror film in Park City, The Witch, premiered in the bright light of afternoon in Sundance’s largest theater, courtesy of its place in the main dramatic competition. And, in addition to The Witch, two other movies also pushed the boundaries of what horror could be with innovative filmmaking and a willingness to show the many different types of fears people grapple with.

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Rick Alverson’s dread-filled latest, Entertainment, isn’t a horror movie at all, not in the traditional sense. But by the end, it feels like it fits in that genre as much as it does comedy: Essentially, it’s like watching someone die repeatedly, albeit on stage.

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the movie gets more Lynchian as it goes along, with strange, surreal cul-de-sacs in which the comedian encounters a nervous fellow traveler (Michael Cera), a chromotherapist, and a woman in labor.

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This is a movie that is about as enjoyable as embracing a cactus. But once it starts to feel like Entertainment’s protagonist is actually stuck in some ironic, awful purgatory, waiting and waiting for someone to tell him it’s time to go home, it’s difficult to shake the movie off, even long after it’s over.