Horror’s popular, but it’s too often treated as a cinematic curiosity, with analysis of its aesthetic qualities ignored in favor of exploiting its scare quotient. What’s ironic is that cinematography is integral to a good scare, and perhaps we’re too freaked to properly appreciate the technique that helped elevate the moment.
Aesthetic Horror, a new Twitter account, is working to change that by isolating frames from iconic horror movies as a means of capturing the indelible. The captured images are not just striking to see on their own—they also take on an added weight in the memory of whichever scare it helps forecast. And even if you don’t know the movie, the images conjure their own kind of contextless horror.