The horror genre has always been a particularly vulnerable target for formal censorship, as well as for social disciplining in a broader discursive context; a flashpoint for cultural control of the cinema. This was particularly the case in the latter part of the twentieth century when the genre's associated conventions and expectations were increasingly bound up and wrapped in the presentation of “high impact” violence. Perceived by cultural critics as lacking the artistic merit apparently self-evident in the more mainstream genres of drama and comedy, the intentions of horror filmmakers have often been perceived as exceptionally cynical; a business model for generating box office revenue by exploiting abhorrent tastes and proclivities. Even in the “post-classification” twenty-first-century media environment, horror films (particularly those containing “sexual violence”) remain the exception to the rule that viewing rights of adult audiences should supersede the perceived threat of indecent or potentially corrupting cinematic material. This thinking is evidenced in the BBFC's censorship of notorious early millennial horror films including A Serbian Film (2010) and Human Centipede II: Full Sequence (2011). Both films were granted classification in Britain only if distributors agreed to remove certain sequences depicting “abhorrent” sexual violence. A comparable Australian example can be found in the OFLC Review Board's censorship of Canadian filmmaking collective Astron 6's horror-comedy film Father's Day (2011), similarly censored for abhorrent sexual violence.

Conventions of the horror genre were also instrumental in the abrasive strategies of the New French Extremity. Trouble Every Day draws on the literary gothic vampire in its themes and motifs, while Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone famously draws its pre-climax “gimmick”—warning the audience of impending violence with flashing onscreen text—from 1950s shock merchant William Castle. The NFE movement also produced the peculiar case of Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms, the rare example of, as Dumont himself called it, an “experimental horror film” (see Chapter 2). For the sake of precision, one could consider the NFE's initial wave as concluding with Twentynine Palms in 2003, although the reality is slightly more complex. The filmmakers responsible for its formidable status (Denis, Noe, Dumont), pivoted their attention in more “mature” directions.