This article contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale Seasons 4 & 5 and Us (2019)Elevated Horror films, or ‘Social Thrillers’ (which it has unfortunately been dubbed), gets a bad rap. Deemed pretentious by some of the ’80s gorehounds, it has been accused of dancing around proper flesh and blood nastiness and jump scares in its pursuits of being creepy — while being too broad and vague to properly put in to any box.

Pretentious or not, right now, it’s at the height of its power. And as the movement becomes bigger and more mainstream one actress can’t help but be seen at the center of it all: Elisabeth Moss.

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Former child star Moss came into her own via her workmanlike performance in The West Wing (1999-2006), and quickly followed it up with Mad Men (2007-2015). Her appreciation for what television can do (and what kind of growth it can provide her characters over multiple seasons) has only remained as she has become one of the most recognizable actresses on the planet.

Elisabeth Moss is The Handmaid

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The Handmaid’s Tale (now seeing Moss promoted to main character) adapts Margaret Atwood’s novel and turns it into a scarily realized drama. Technically a science-fiction piece (its original idea being simply an expanded What If? scenario), the Hulu series shares the same breathy heartbeat of the horror genre, as the monsters and ghosts are the men kidnapping and holding these women prisoner.

While basic human rights are denied across the world and the United States, the viewing experience of The Handmaid’s Tale at least drudges up the same ’70s bad taste posters that Elevated Horror has inevitably mutated from. Purposely grim and shocking, The Handmaid’s Tale is close to the bone throughout and provides exhausting event television. Watch as themes of each episode regularly cover: Rape, kidnap, torture, war, terrorism, murder, suicide… all of which become everyday scenarios for June and the Handmaids as they attempt to merely survive at first — and then escape from their modern day prison.

Even when June does finally manage to leave Gilliad (a sort of Nu-America in this world where women are second class citizens), she has so much PTSD that the show simply isn’t over yet. Now five seasons in, the focal point on June’s cocktail of anger and fear is now boiling over. From day one and as Moss’ June evolves throughout the series, she has gradually becomes more vicious and filled with exhausted rage, enacting revenge and righting wrongs where she can, often using the most violent of means to do so.

Assault and Shining Girls

     MRC Television

Be it physical or sexual, assault plays a deadly running theme throughout Moss’ works. As victims of rape, some of her characters are haunted in every sense of the word. They struggle and drive forward against their distinctly human — but distinctly male — villains. Be it Moss’ own characters, or the one’s around her (The Top of the Lake opens on a young girl now five months pregnant), men act as the forever bogey men.

Her Shining Girls, released in 2022, shows her attacker (Jamie Bell) as a constant within her life, quite literally, as some ageless time traveler capable of keeping tabs on her Kirby character and tormenting her throughout the decades as he sees fit.

Sounding so simple, its Moss’ performance in Handmaid’s Tale that summons the most horror as an assaulted woman who slowly turns the tables. In her tiny 5'2 frame is an actress harboring blind, white-hot carnage. Stout with a beaky nose and overbite, her human girl-next-door prettiness makes her characters all the more real and scary when finally able to confront one of her attackers, as rage-fueled saliva escapes from her mouth in extreme close up.

Her disposition complements The Handmaid’s Tale more extreme moments; the fourth season finale saw June lead a gang of fellow survivors through the woods after Fred Waterford. The women beat June’s former tormenter to death, sever his finger from his hand, and send it by mail to the woman carrying his child. On his character’s death, actor Joseph Fiennes said:

Elevated Horror on Film

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Jordan Peele was one of the creatives whose films were partly responsible for coining the term “Elevated Horror,” a phrase he particularly dislikes, telling The Verge that “people slap a prestige label onto simply because its subject matter is nuanced.” Peele’s Get Out transported modern day liberal racism and placed it in the secure footing of genre. The white sheets of ghosts had now become the white faces of the rich, and the scares came via an employee vs employer power dynamic and modern day slavery.

“We ended at 6:00 in the morning, I went straight to the makeup trailer and off came Fred’s beard, so I could begin the process of shedding the horror.”

As an actress at the forefront of Hollywood trends, Moss jumped aboard Peele’s highly anticipated follow-up sequel, Us (2019). Her character, while not a villain per se, built the scenery of that world so wonderfully. As the white skinned mirror version of Lupita Nyong’o’s character and her family, she is introduced as a blonde Rosé-glugger on a beach, having recently gotten plastic surgery and now exchanging blows with her husband (a hilarious Tim heidecker) while getting jabs in at Nyong’o’s Adelaide at any given opportunity.

By the time that Kitty and her spoiled family are offed by their own shadowy doppelgängers, there is a tongue-in-cheek satisfaction from the audience that we get to see them die so horribly in their two-story holiday home.

The Invisible Man and the Evolution of Elisabeth Moss

By 2020, Moss was three years into the role of June Osbourne, and following the upward climbing trend of Elevated Horror’s success, Moss could easily transition into the updated feminist horror take on The Invisible Man. As yet another woman being abused by a powerful male, it’s revealed that the new invisible man is an entirely controlling tech bro who has also raped this woman previously.

As one of the prime examples of Elevated Horror, The Invisible Man plays with themes of modern day gaslighting and rearranged the done to death horror trope of no one believing the protagonist and thinking they must just be crazy. Efficient and scary, the movie was a blast and audiences absolutely devoured it (despite the fact that the COVID pandemic would cut its theatrical run short).

Talking to Mind Food, on The Invisible Man, Moss said:

Her characters, be they on film or television, are fractured and fraught. They evolve, and like the genre itself, Moss has surpassed the dumb blonde final girl being chased in the darkness with smart, nuanced women either fighting for survival or recovering from it for the rest of their lives.

Well, I think first and foremost I really wanted to do another scary movie. I had done a small part in Us the year before and it was such a wonderful experience that I wanted to do more of it. I kind of got the bug.

I’ve loved horror films since I was a kid. I obviously have a very high tolerance for dark material and am not easily frightened. I love that genre and then I was sent this script and I read it and it was this incredible character piece and had this analogy of gaslighting and coming out of an abusive relationship. It was addressing things that we’re all talking about and are really important to us right now, bullying and domestic abuse, domestic violence, women losing their voices, women not being heard or believed. And I just thought all of that was really kind of brilliant of [director] Leigh Whannell to put into this construct of this monster movie.

Blood and guts horror is so 1985. Elevated Horror, whatever that may mean, is here to stay, and its figurehead is Elisabeth Moss. Hear her roar.