By Jo Light, Dec 19, 2025
We’re so glad A24 exists. The production company has platformed some amazing directors over the years and released diabolical horror, creative drama and comedy, and some films that exist outside genre conventions.
There’s definitely a “feel” to many of the company’s works, to the point that editors can recut trailers as A24 horror films, usually under the umbrella term of “elevated horror.”
Lucas Alpay is a fiction writer and film fan, and he recently turned his expertise toward understanding why A24 films work so well with audiences, particularly when it comes to horror and thriller projects.
Alpay identified five storytelling techniques that A24 commonly uses in its films, some of which also occur in best-selling novels.
Slow-Burn Pacing and Anticipatory Anxiety
Good storytelling does not require constant action. If you’re writing horror, you don’t need jump scares every five minutes or plot twists at every act break.
“This is where most writers completely shoot themselves in the foot,” Alpay says.
Alpay argues A24 does the opposite, building dread gradually rather than delivering instant payoffs. The approach taps into what psychologists call “anticipatory anxiety.”
“Your brain is literally more terrified of what might happen than what actually does,” Alpay says.
If you use constant action and endless tension, the audience starts to feel desensitized to it all, and you lose any impact you might have had. As a storyteller, you need to create hills and valleys, buildups and releases.
And you don’t want to start at 11 in the beginning… unless you eventually plan on reaching 12. Alpay uses Hereditary as an example. Imagine if the big moments in that film were at the beginning—floating bodies, decapitation, etc. It would start so big, there would be nowhere for the story to go.
“Before anything supernatural even happens, we get strange symbols carved into trees, a creepy dollhouse, an old woman who smiles too long at a funeral,” Alpay points out.
Be patient. Start small and breadcrumb your way through the story so the tension has somewhere to build toward.
Trauma-Based Character Development
A24 gives its characters more than everyday problems. It gives them wounds.
Alpay distinguishes between characters who are merely sad and characters who carry generational trauma that actively shapes their behavior.
“Every single A24 protagonist starts fundamentally broken,” he says.
Sometimes the character doesn’t have the self-awareness to know they’re flawed or broken (see: Marty Supreme), or sometimes they’re painfully aware of it (Dani in Midsommar). We get two very different stories as a result.
Starting with a character who’s really going through it provides somewhere for the character arc to go—things can get better, which makes the audience feel accomplished alongside the character, or things can get even worse, making the character more sympathetic. Either way, watching a character experience that often allows an audience to connect with the character.
A 2022 study examining how viewers connect with fictional characters found that audiences form emotional attachments by projecting their own personality traits onto characters.
The study, which analyzed viewers’ perceptions of 56 Game of Thrones characters, found that people consistently rated characters whose traits aligned with their own more favorably.
“It would suggest that people do form parasocial relationships with these characters, and it’s probably because they see more of their personality traits reflected in those characters,” said Gregory Webster, associate professor of psychology at UF (via UF News). “Which means, if they like the character, it’s because of what they see of themselves.”
This phenomenon—”assumed similarity”—explains why damaged, complex characters resonate so deeply.
Tonal Shifts and Genre Blending
A24 films refuse genre boundaries. Alpay points to how the studio’s films weave comedy into horror, philosophy into action, and absurdism into family drama, often within the same scene.
The rapid tonal shifts can reflect how real life actually feels, where tragedy and humor collide without warning. The tactic is called “emotional contrast.” In psychology, this is what happens when experiencing one emotion intensifies the perception or impact of a subsequent, different emotion.
In A24 films, Alpay says, you can’t guess what “emotional punch is coming next.”
Sometimes life is absurd and sad at the same time. Your writing can be like that—take a character from tragedy to comedy. Use the tension of anxiety to give them the emotional release of laughter. It might feel like whiplash, but done right, it can really work.
Metaphorical Storytelling
Every supernatural element in an A24 film represents something human (that’s where that “elevated” term comes in for horror).
Alpay says the studio creates films in which the surface plot serves as straightforward genre entertainment, while the subtext explores deeper psychological and social themes.
“A24 films are never just about what’s happening on screen,” he says.
I think you should always strive to “say something” in your work, and that’s where theme comes in. Why are we telling stories, if not to connect with each other as humans and create emotionally resonant films?
However, this can be a bit of a double-edged sword. There have been A24 projects that slightly miss the mark on this point and try to force something profound into an underdeveloped story. (I’m thinking, unfortunately, of 2016’s The Monster, which received snarky reviews like, “the REAL monster is like alcohol or something, and I just want to go to sleep.”)
For your elevated concept to work, you have to give just as much attention to crafting full characters, strong dialogue, and a plot with enough punch and drive to keep the audience engaged. You can’t get by on theme alone.
Show Don’t Tell, and Trust the Audience
A24 films don’t explain themselves. Take Civil War. Audiences are dropped into the action, and we don’t get a full picture of how we got here. We’re just along for the action and figure out the details as we go. Same for Under the Skin.
Where conventional studios provide exposition and hand-holding, A24 expects you to keep up.
“Hollywood thinks audiences are stupid. A24 thinks audiences are detectives,” he says.
Creating Multilayered Stories
The five techniques can work together. Alpay says that slow-burn pacing creates anticipation, psychological depth creates investment, genre blending creates surprise, metaphorical layers create meaning, and trusting the audience creates engagement.
That’s how these films earn that “elevated” label and a fanbase excited to watch everything you put out. It also creates buzz. A24 gets “eight times more social media engagement, measured by Instagram likes per follower, compared to established media giants such as HBO, Disney, and Marvel,” per Archyde.
But the group also just has a solid slate, all the time. The execs know how to find stories and develop them.
If you’re trying to write the next A24 film, try some of these tactics and let us know how it goes.
Story from Nofilmschool.com
Jo Light
A recovering Hollywood script reader, Jo spent years analyzing stories for the likes of Relativity Media and ICM Partners while chasing her own creative dreams. These days, she juggles writing for industry leaders Final Draft, ScreenCraft, and No Film School, teaching budding writers at the college level, and crafting her own screenplays—all while trying not to critique every movie she watches.
