Next week's highly contentious election and its confrontation between virulently opposing camps have cast a pall of fear over our culture, creating an atmosphere in which political terrors are outpacing cinematic versions. Why didn't someone make a slasher photo of volunteers going door to door at dusk?
This uneasy atmosphere has brought to the fore an inconvenient truth about horror films: how they often come with subtle political messages that aren't always subtle enough to obscure how they might vote in November. (To be clear, movies can't vote in presidential elections.) For example, one could easily argue that one of the most blatantly Republican horror films was The exorcistalong with the whole satanic possession genre. In Friedkin's 1972 original, science and modern medicine are completely powerless to make a dent in the demon that has possessed the innocent victim, leaving the patriarchal Catholic church to deal with Pazuzu (and forge its own Reaganomics).
The very concept of supernatural evil is itself socially conservative, as illustrated by films such as The Blair Witch Project AND The Ring, in which skeptical protagonists try to prove an occult legend to be false only to fall victim to its fateful reality. Likewise, the genre can have a hawkish bent. Let's take the common cliché of horror and action where ordinary efforts to neutralize some kind of horrible phenomenon lead nowhere and have to bring out the big guns (the most famous examples are monster films like King Kong, Godzilla, Them AND Jawswhose screenplay bore the influence of self-proclaimed “right-wing extremist” John Milius). And then there's the so-called queermonger subgenre made famous by films like psycho, Murderer, Dressed to kill, The Silence of the Lambs AND Basic instinct featuring LGBTQ characters as killers, a 60-year-old strategy that still fits perfectly into today's MAGA platform.
However, you can't cut the entire gender with the same right razor. For every horror film that relies on the tried-and-true menu of bogeymen and monsters, there's at least one other with a more nuanced message. There are films where the horror is represented by society itself, which terrorizes an individual, as seen in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's baby, Carrie, Go out AND Midsummer. And then there's the post-Jaws monster movies, where the macho act of bringing out the big shots doesn't work, as evidenced by alien, Independence Day, Cloverfield – and the monster must be faced only with ingenuity.
And even those films featuring endlessly reincarnating supernatural psychopath protagonists who stalk nubile schoolgirls aren't so easy to pigeonhole politically. As James Kendrick, associate professor of film and digital media at Baylor University, pointed out, “In many basic slasher films, the usual male-dominated support structures like the police or military often end up ineffective or killed – certainly not I want to be the boyfriend or the cop in a slasher movie, which usually leaves the woman alone to save herself.
And if there's a dominant model for horror today, it's the story of the “final girl” – as seen in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, THE Halloween franchising, the Alien franchising, the Cry franchising, the Resident Evil franchising, The Descent, Happy Death Day and of course The Last Girls – along with too many others to list. It's hard to say exactly what their politics would be, but, statistically speaking, they would probably vote for Kamala Harris.