You Got Your Politics in my Horror!
Story featured in Layered Butter's Modern Horror issue.
When George A. Romero decided to cast Duane Jones as Ben in his seminal classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), some began to question if it was a choice based on race. Romero famously stated that it wasn’t, and that Jones simply performed the best in his audition.
Whether purposeful or not, this choice would define Living Dead’s legacy, not just as a culturally formative piece of filmmaking, but a staple of political undercurrents seeping its way into the blood-stained celluloid rolls of horror films in the decades since its 1968 release. Horror films are notoriously ripe with political and social criticisms — so much so that entire academic courses specialize in the analysis of their cultural relevancy — and though media trends disappear just as easily as they emerge, one mainstay of the ever-evolving horror genre remains: politics is horror, and horror is politics.
It is no surprise that horror seems to have had a massive gluttony of topical fodder to pick and choose from in the age of Donald Trump’s America. The emergence of Trumpism into American politics has brought with it intense discourse on race, class, truth, and power, all of which many films have taken and ran with (you’re either given Get Out (2017), or The Hunt (2020), there seems there are no two ways about it). However, this isn’t something really new, right? Horror films have been an avenue for artists to weave their points of view into stories of terror for decades, generations even! The difference has steadily become that horror and politics are almost becoming one in the same and is no longer fictional -- some of it has become our reality. Look no further than the current pandemic for the most prime example of this conceit.
Yes, art is an escape, and even so the harsh realities of day to day life are often explored in mediums that are supposedly the “ultimate escapism,” but what happens when that escape is equal to flipping on the news everyday? Does it have the same effect, or have we all adopted the burnout of the commonly maligned Millennial generation? 24 25
So who are the “monsters” in our modern horror films? Who is our Frankenstein, Mummy, or Creature from the Black Lagoon? Well, arguably our monsters are the sadistic elites, such as the Domas’ from Ready or Not (2019), or the US government in The Purge (2013), ourselves in Us (2019), gaslighters and abusers in Midsommar (2019) or The Invisible Man (2020), overreaching religious zealotism in The Witch (2015), even our own disturbing family history in Hereditary (2018). Sense a theme here? Horror isn’t scary because of the grotesque nature of The Phantom of the Opera’s hidden face. Horror is scary because of how relatable the struggle of racism is to Chris in Get Out. Of course, this isn’t to say horror of decades past weren’t just as relevant -- John Carpenter essentially made the film of the time with They Live back in 1988 -- but surely these otherwise taboo concepts have a deeper effect on the lexicon now, than they did in during glimmer and glam of the better parts of the ‘80s or ‘90s. In a time where corruption and social injustice are just as common to see on the news as the weekend’s weather, modern horror has forced us not to react externally, with a startling jump in our seats, but the introspective postulation of just how real the dread on the silver screen is to the world around us.
We are at an odd intersection of several decades’ hardships in one. What defined the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and even the fairly recent 2000s are all assimilating into one malformed being with no original form like the creature in The Thing (1982). It almost seems as though the unresolved issues of those bygone eras are coming back to bite us, with a vengeance in the present time. Halloween (1978) is the simple tale of evil incarnate and its unquenched thirst for death for reasons unknown, 40 years later, and Halloween (2018) explores the emotional and mental effect of trauma, and how it not only hurts those inflicted by the past, but people surrounding them as well. The terror of Hereditary is watching helplessly as a family is taken over and consumed by a force too powerful, and too foul for us to comprehend, a path set by the deceased matriarch of the family. Helplessness is all too real in the current state of things. No wonder why a common joke is that The Purge will actually happen one day, because at this point, would anyone be at all surprised? The theme that many modern horror classics ask, is “How do you take back your own narrative?” and I can’t help but believe this is what much of the American public felt before 2016. How can we be Thomasin in The Witch and take back our individuality? How can we rise up against oppressive forces like in the underrated Spanish sci-fi/horror The Platform (2019)? How can we survive each other, like in It Comes At Night (2017)? Without the cinematic avatars attached to these ponderous questions, they are the exact queries we are asking ourselves now. That is inherently political, and their fumes may be more potent now than ever before.
Perhaps no stronger instance stands out to me more than the ending of Get Out. A packed theater in unison let out a collective “Oh no...” when the red and blue lights of the cop vehicle flashed in front of Chris’ face. In this moment, most people’s assumptions would be to expect Chris to be arrested, or simply shot on sight for the mere image of a black man hovering over a white woman on the ground asking for help. Of course, it turns out to be Rod saving Chris from the Armitages, but by this suspenseful moment alone, Jordan Peele put the final period at the end of the film’s thesis. The horrors of real life, and what is witnessed time and time again on the news of unarmed black men and women being brutalized, informed the audience’s perceptions of what would happen next in the story. If that is not a stark reflection of socio-politics in horror, and likewise, horror in socio-politics, then I don’t know what is. Politics is horror, and horror is politics.
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