November 1, 2024: The Politics of Horror: Recent Films

[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]

Quick political takeaways for five horror films from the last decade.

1)      It Follows (2014): As at least a couple of the earliest posts in this series have illustrated, sex and horror have always been intertwined in this genre. But I’m not sure any horror film has been quite so explicit, and yet quite so ambiguous, about the links between those two elements. I’m not here to tell you how to interpret this film’s themes in social or political ways—but you can’t watch it and not try to do so, and that’s a great case for horror’s political echoes regardless of your perspective.

2)      Get Out (2017): In that hyperlinked post I framed a trio of other films that provide contexts and perhaps inspirations for Jordan Peele’s modern horror classic. Here I’ll simply add that Peele’s choice in a 2017 film to make white supremacy the truest source of horror has to be among the single most prescient cultural decisions in our history.

3)      Midsommar (2019): That smart hyperlinked analysis says a great deal of what I’d want to say about Ari Aster’s cult classic and themes of toxic masculinity. A lot of horror film killers and villains seem to hate women with a particular vengeance, so I’d say it was long past time we had a horror film in which men are the specific target instead. Maybe that’s a reductive reading of Midsommar, though, which is plenty divisive in its interpretations as well as its reviews. As with every film here, check it out for yourself and share your thoughts!  

4)      Prey (2022): This latest installments in the long-running Predators franchise is a lot less ambiguous than the others in this list, and a lot more badass, with young Comanche warrior Naru (Amber Midthunder) more than up to the challenge of taking on the alien predator (at least as much as was Ahnold back in the day, I’d argue). Here the politics aren’t in the film’s content so much as in its existence as cultural representation, and (as the above hyperlinked piece also argues) it’s really excellent for that.

5)      MaXXXine (2024): I don’t know either this particular film or the trilogy it concludes very well, so I’ll mostly hand things over to my favorite contemporary reviewer Vern in that hyperlinked review (which engages with all three films, and certainly includes their social and political themes as Vern always does). I’ll just add that, as with Prey, these films seem to continue a trend of foregrounding badass young women in contemporary horror, and that in and of itself is a powerful social and political stance.

October Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?