A quiet shift has taken hold in Anglo-American filmmaking. A growing group of directors is bringing the supernatural back into realism. Not as metaphor, not as trauma symbolism, not as dream logic, but as simple, literal fact.
Films like Under the Skin (2013), The VVitch (2015), Longlegs, Weapons and Bugonia all follow the same unexpected pattern: they build a world with documentary-level seriousness, then let something impossible walk straight through it without blinking.
The VVitch sits in the middle of this timeline—closer to Under the Skin’s early experiment than to the recent cluster—yet it anticipates the new mode far more directly than most films of its era.
It’s not fantasy and it’s not allegory. It’s a change in the terms of realism itself.
And what’s remarkable is not just that filmmakers are doing this. It’s that audiences, who once rejected this kind of move outright, now accept it.
Something in the culture has shifted.
How These Films Actually Work
Longlegs The opening is pure procedural: case files, FBI rhythms, forensic logic. It earns your trust by showing you a world that obeys rules. Then, without fanfare, the film reveals a reality the investigation can’t account for. The shock is conceptual rather than visual: the world is larger than the tools used to interpret it.
Bugonia An alien arrives. No backstory, no cosmology, no symbolic wink. The film treats the creature with the same plainspoken camera language it uses for everything else. A ruined world hangs behind it, but that world stays opaque. The mystery isn’t a puzzle; it’s a condition.
Weapons The film begins in grounded ensemble realism: teenagers, suburban routines, handheld immediacy. When the supernatural element appears, it does so without stylistic exaggeration or symbolic framing. The witch figure is presented with the same visual sobriety as the everyday world around her. The violence that follows is neither allegorised nor psychologised; it simply happens. Weapons uses realism as a trapdoor, and when it opens, the film refuses to translate the impossible into metaphor.
The VVitch The witch is not a projection of Puritan anxiety or an allegory about repression. She’s real. The horror comes from the collapse of the explanatory worldview the characters rely on. The film doesn’t ask whether the supernatural exists; it asks what happens when it does and no one knows how to interpret it.
Under the Skin A decade earlier, Glazer was already testing the boundaries of this style. The film shoots Glasgow crowds, housing estates, and nighttime roads like vérité documentary, then quietly introduces the alien sequences without changing tone or visual language. The impossible arrives inside realism and the film simply accepts it. But in 2013, audiences weren’t yet primed to recognise this as a coherent narrative technique. In hindsight, Under the Skin reads as an early prototype for the pararealist shift that would only fully emerge years later.
Across all these films, the structure is the same: realism → rupture → continuation. The story keeps going even when the world has outgrown its explanations.
Why “Pararealism” Is the Right Name
Existing labels don’t quite fit.
Folk horror implies rural tradition and ancestral dread. Magical realism normalizes the supernatural instead of treating it as a shock. The New Weird deals in ecological grotesquery and destabilized worlds.
But what these new films share is a technique, not a genre:
Begin in strict realism. Introduce the impossible with no tonal shift. Refuse interpretive escape hatches (no dream sequence, no metaphor reveal). Keep the realist style intact after the world breaks.
That method deserves its own term: pararealism—the uncanny running parallel to the real, treated with the same gravity.
Why Audiences Accept It Now
Not long ago, test audiences might have laughed these films off the screen. Now they draw applause. Why?
1. Irony fatigue After years of meta-jokes and narrative reassurance, outright sincerity, especially in horror, feels radical.
2. Higher media literacy Viewers understand genre grammar well enough to tell when a film is deliberately withholding explanation.
3. The collapse of explanatory confidence Political chaos, algorithmic feeds, epidemiological disorder :life itself has stopped cohering into tidy cause-and-effect. Films that don’t add up feel proportionate, not broken.
4. Horror’s mainstreaming Horror’s audience is now broad, literate, and willing to meet films on their own terms.
5. Social realism’s limits Traditional realist drama can struggle to express contemporary dread. Reintroducing literal mystery gives filmmakers a different register to work in.
Audiences didn’t suddenly start believing in witches or aliens. They just stopped insisting that stories must explain themselves.
The Global Precedent
None of this is new outside the Anglo-American industry.
Latin American magical realism has long folded the inexplicable into everyday life. Japanese cinema, from Kwaidan to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, treats the supernatural as a structural fact. Eastern European directors like Švankmajer and Żuławski built entire careers on ontological instability.
What’s new is that U.S. and U.K. filmmakers, historically loyal to tidy causal logic, are finally adopting a global technique. Pararealism is less an invention than a belated adoption of an existing cinematic language.
Fantasy’s Diverging Road
Interestingly, fantasy literature has gone the opposite direction. Much of the market now rewards systematized magic, rulebooks disguised as novels, cosmologies built with spreadsheets. That’s not universal, Miéville, VanderMeer, Valente, and Jemisin keep the unexplained alive, but it is the dominant trend.
Piranesi shows a different approach. Its psychological explanation resolves the plot, but the House, the great, echoing architecture of tides and statues, remains metaphysically ungraspable. The mystery coexists with the rational layer.
Pararealist cinema goes further. Films like Longlegs, Weapons, and The VVitch don’t preserve two layers; they simply decline to provide the psychological one at all. The inexplicable isn’t matched with an explanation :it stands alone.
Why This Matters
Pararealism marks a shift in our narrative expectations. It says the unexplained is not a failure of storytelling but a valid part of how the world feels right now.
These films aren’t asking to be solved. They’re asking to be lived with.
The impossible appears; the camera holds; the story continues. Meaning comes not from decoding symbolism, but from accepting that some phenomena resist interpretation.
We used to watch movies to resolve the world. Now, increasingly, we watch them to reflect a world that refuses resolution.
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