Despite receiving rave reviews from critics, A24's 2017 film It Comes at Night proved much less popular with horror fans and audiences overall. In recent years, A24 has become well known for its critically acclaimed output, and its horror films have been no different. 2019's Midsommar, 2018's Hereditary, and 2016's The Witch all earned widespread applause from critics. Whether these films hit with audiences has been much more mixed, especially among the horror faithful. The segment of horror fandom that prefers gore, nudity, and fast-paced scares tends to leave A24's fright flicks unsatisfied, focusing as they do on slow burn terror and character-based stories.
Another among this ilk was It Comes at Night, written and directed by Trey Edward Schults, who most recently helmed the positively reviewed coming-of-age drama Waves. It Comes at Night holds an 87 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is exceptionally high for a horror film. Noticeably though, It Comes at Night's audience score is a much lower 44 percent, making the divide between critics and moviegoers quite apparent.
Sporting a game cast, good production values despite a low budget, and a story not content to simply imitate other horror successes, It Comes at Night really should be more widely beloved. So why isn't it? One reason sticks out above the rest.
It Comes at Night's trailers instantly drew interest from both horror fans and audiences at large, and by all appearances seemed to promise some kind of creature feature, or demonic possession tale. What was the "it" that comes at night? What was up with the screaming old man with the black eyes? These questions were teased, amid lots of quick cuts and jump scares. This was especially true of the more vague teaser, but even the later full trailer didn't clarify much, other than that some sickness was taking hold in people, and still made things look fast-paced and thrilling.
The problem was that the film A24's marketing sold was not the film audiences got. It Comes at Night was by no means a fast-paced suspense tale, and was instead a brooding, meditative look at how the spread of an incurable virus causes humans to fall apart, and turn on each other. Most of the scary images in the trailer were from dream sequences, and there were no creatures or anything clearly supernatural to be found, just man's endless capacity for selfish, inhuman behavior. One can't blame audiences for being bothered by this kind of bait and switch, even if It Comes at Night is a pretty good film on its own terms.
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