Why can't we decide whether Doctor Strange is horror?

Outside of the cyclops tentacle monster, zombies, witches, gore, bloodshed and death, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness flaunts one of the most transparent horror references out there, right there in its title.

The film borrows from H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, a novella which itself had enough interstellar weirdness to fit a Marvel movie — and quickly became one of the writer's most enduring stories.

Written in 1931, it follows an Antarctic research team who discovered typically horrifying secrets of the ancient "Elder Things" — also known as "Old Ones" — buried in an as-yet-undiscovered range of black mountains.

It helped to launch an entire new genre: Cosmic horror.  

Even with the racist themes that so often cropped up in his writing, At the Mountains of Madness and Lovecraftian literature is one of the most pervasive examples of inspiration source material out there. 

Everything from Stranger Things, to Locke & Key, to Rick and Morty, to the Mass Effect video games have drawn from it.

And even Doctor Strange's one-eyed monster — officially named Gargantos — is just the film's version of the Shuma-Gorath. Comics writer Robert E. Howard first created the creature in 1967 as a way to bring Lovecraft's "Great Old Ones" mythos into Marvel, eventually dovetailing into Doctor Strange itself. (The movie's altered name was simply a way to avoid a copyright dispute.)

So if Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has such clear roots in the genre, along with the jump-scares, violence and body horror so often associated with it, why can't anyone agree if it really is horror?

It's because we're really bad at identifying horror, and as it ekes its way further into the mainstream, we're only getting worse. 

"Don't worry, Sam Raimi fans. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness fully goes horror," wrote New York Times editor and movie reviewer Karl Delossantos soon after the film's premiere. 

"This is a horror movie," reviewer Tessa Smith similarly tweeted, also making sure to note director Sam Raimi's stamp is firmly there — a source of worry after Doctor Strange's originally intended director Scott Derrickson left over "creative differences."

(Marvel Studios's CEO Kevin Feige later denied the move was because Derrikson wanted to take the movie further into the horror world than they were prepared to go.)

But elsewhere, the most many reviewers could bring themselves to call it was "horror-adjacent," "horror-inspired" or as containing "horror elements." Even the CBC's own Eli Glasner suggests it's "merely the veneer of horror … a fun ride without any real moments of terror."

"I wouldn't say this is a strict horror movie," Chase Hutchinson, a film critic for Collider, said in an interview. Instead, Doctor Strange uses horror tropes and imagery to evoke the genre, without being firmly in it.