While movies are generally seen as being meant for escapism and entertainment, they are capable of providing so much more than that. Films can provide important messages and lessons for the audience to learn through the use of themes and imagery in the story. For many viewers, it can be hard to see these other “political” ideas embedded into the cinematic stories – especially in certain genres like horror.
Most people see horror as a genre just meant to give you a good scare. They make you face your fears and sometimes even unlock new paranoias, but that’s all that horror is, right? In reality, horror movies have always been a tool for sharing political andimportant messageswith audience members. Through metaphors, themes, and haunting imagery, they can convey so many important ideas.
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Conversation of Government and Race
Horror movies have been used as areflection of the state of governmentand society. The 1956 horror filmInvasion of the Body Snatchersis one that is scary enough on the surface, but has a much deeper meaning when looked at through the lens of its era. The story is about alien plant spores falling to earth and growing into pods, which have the capability to make an identical copy of a human to replace them. Soon, it’s unclear who can and can’t be trusted. The only notable difference is that the pod-people are emotionless. Viewers at the time saw it as a reflection of society in the clutches of McCarthyism and communism, where people felt that their government was being infiltrated by outsider ideals, and that they had no influence or impact on it. They felt their voices were taken and everyone was stuck in an unwanted conformity.
Horror movies also had messages centered around race long before Jordan Peele came into the spooky scene. Moviegoers might remember therelease ofCandymanthis past year, which is a follow-up to the original horror movie from 1992. The originalCandymanfocuses on a college student doing a thesis on urban legends and how she discovers and angers the titular villain. The character of the Candyman himself is a black man from the early 1900s who fell in love and had a child with a wealthy white woman, only for her father to send a lynch-mob after him. They cut off his hand, attached honeycomb to him, and let him get swarmed by and stung to death by bees. Even though he had been successful and well-off when he was alive, the fact that he was black still made him an enemy to the wealthy whites. The film shows racism as the true and cruel horror that it is, and creates an urban legend of a black man coming back even more powerful than before in the name of vengeance.
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Conversation of Sex and Gender
In addition to those themes, horror is also big on exploring ideas of sex and gender. The filmRosemary’s Babyis a prime example of this. In the movie, Rosemary is seen as a doting housewife and a classic “perfect” wife. She is in anera of outdated idealswhere women are objectified and lack an identity away from their husband and family. Even though they had planned on having a baby at some point, her husband sexually assaults her when she’s passed out and forces her to get pregnant; meanwhile the neighbors in their building are all snooping into her business and life, coaxing her and lying to her in order to have her and her baby as part of their sinister occult plan. The movie focuses on Rosemary’s struggles with her neighbors, husband, and herself as she grows increasingly isolated and paranoid. It deals with a lot of the expectations forced on women (both back then, as well as now) and the trauma that they suffer in order to keep themselves going.
Feminism andqueerness are also exploredin the more recent movie,Bit. The story revolves around Laurel, a transgender girl trying to start a new life as her true self after graduating high school. She is swept into a powerful all-female coven of vampires who kill and feed off of malicious and abusive men. Laurel falls in love with one of her fellow vampiresses but finds her morals and identity in question as their leader pushes her to do more and more ruthless things. By the end of it, Laurel has overthrown their hypocritical leader and become the new head of the coven, working to create equality in power among the girls in the coven. The film has a more unique and diverse take on feminism not just because it explores womanhood through the eyes of a trans woman, but also because it explores the idea of women being powerful andtaking back their liveswithout being as cruel as the men who wronged them.
Even though nearly every film can be enjoyed just as an interesting story, and every horror movie can be entertaining just for some good scares, the important messages within them can’t be ignored. More and more horror movies are exploring impactful themes and lessons to show audiences. Some movies make these themes more obvious than others, but a political reflection in horror is nothing new. Horror has always reflected the world around us.
