It can often feel like you need to make a trade-off in horror movies. If you want the fright factor, the gore, violence, hiding-behind-your-hands type of terror, it can come at the cost of a deeper narrative focus. But then the horror movies — often redundantly referred to as “elevated horror” — that pack a meaningful punch when it comes to their stories, with underlying themes of mental illness, womanhood, or race and class, are so zoned in on the script that they forget they’re meant to terrorize their audience. Masterworks like the films of Ari Asterbalance both, but more often than not, it can be difficult to find a movie that can go both ways. Take Sinners, a colossal hit at the box office that was incredibly well-made by Ryan Coogler, a powerful horror twist on racism in the American South. Still, it didn’t fully deliver on the vampiric carnage it promised to frighten us with.