Goodbye Ghosts and Killers. Hello Politics and Commentary: Horror in the 2020s
Spoiler Warning for Get Out, Candyman and Squid Games. Some spoilers refer to racial tensions and attacks/murders.
What is it about horror that draws so many people to it? What fears shown in horror scare people the most? Expected answers would involve getting to watch dumb teens get slashed one by one or unworldly forces terrorising a family during the night. The horror genre has given a lot of different scares over the years-vampires in gothic castles to evil computers in a teen girl’s bedroom-all chilling audiences to the bone. As time goes on and external factors change, the genre may fully delve into something a little too realistic to get some fresh scares. Recently, the contextual background of our own political climate has been inspiring horror screenwriters’ imaginations and has been bleeding onto our screens. Rather than masked knife-wielding maniacs making us jump, the 2020s may be the decade that sees the torch handed to ghastly representations of political figures and events.
Films, similar to most mediums, can be documentation of current events. Our culture is always influencing creatives and horror is beginning to demonstrate this. Each era or trope of horror can be tied to a decade or two. The 70s brought us chilling supernatural stories and exploitation films, the 80s and 90s gave killers Jason and Ghostface the spotlight, and the 2000s to 2010s concerned themselves with torture porn. Now, social allegories are looking to be the latest craze, with recent horror exposing societal ills in metaphors. Writers and directors are utilising their stories and mise-en-scene as tools to execute social commentary. It’s important to note that while these political metaphors are only now becoming popular, the genre has dipped into this before. Profound directors such as Romero and Carpenter steered some films to critique societal issues: Romero’s Night of the Living Dead attacked ideas of civilisation while They Live was Carpenter’s disapproval of excessive materialism. But now politics is heavily and frequently reaching the visual arts in correlation with an influx of widely absorbed social justice.
One figure who can be credited with springboarding socio-political horror is Jordan Peele, whose award-winning screenplay and complemented direction in Get Out (2017) referred to racial issues in society. The film received accolades and praise for exploring and performing the psychological horror of racism in America. In turn, it generated not only an intense emotional reaction as horror does but also a display of critical evaluation among audiences in their reflections. Get Out’s terror didn’t reside in something shallow and familiar in horror, but instead something powerful and familiar in societal structures and attitudes. Chris becoming a victim of a psychological hijacking as a means of exploiting his traits was Peele’s outlet to communicate the disgusting culture vulture mistreatment that black people experience. There was also a critique on white liberalism and pandering to black people shown in the white family, lacing the film with some painfully true aspects.
Peele contributed to another racial allegory featured in the horror genre, as he wrote and produced alongside director Nia DeCosta in her re-telling of Candyman (2021). This film told a story of a cursed killer breaking through the gap of life and death to get his victims, but also a story of racial injustice and tribute to the victims. Candyman’s origin displays prejudice and unfairness, as he was murdered by a white mob after being accused of harming a white girl, not proven to, accused. This echoes the devastating murders black people fall victim to at the hands of police once those officers decide they’re a threat over nothing. The hook (pardon the sudden pun) of Candyman’s curse is that you have to say his name. As Candyman had a pushed back release due to the Covid pandemic, it came after the murder of George Floyd and the BLM marches that followed-where Say Their Name is a verbal signal of acknowledging the victims of racially charged murders. The story reflects the Black Lives Matter movement in its events and characterisation, further cementing horror blending with political landscapes and social critiques which serve as the backdrop for its stories.
Presidential campaign debates and elections can be harrowing events to maintain track of. The sheer hypocrisy and inconsistencies one has to endure when watching the televised debates always proves to be a challenge and concern for America’s future. If this is the case, surely you would switch the TV off and turn over to a film as a means of escapism instead? Not if you choose to watch The Purge franchise, as the sequels to the original 2013 flick are a hyperbolic presentation of American political leaders and climate. These films follow an annual night of all legalised crime, justified by an alleged claim of “purging” civilians’ negative emotions, however, the sequels show how this is a false cover-up. The elite population take this night as an opportunity to murder minorities; the lower class, POC, basically anyone who does not suit their narrow-minded manifesto. The government see the purge as an opportunity for population control and a sick case of natural selection to keep America “great”. The third instalment, Election Year, came out during one of the most controversial and discussed presidential elections- Trump v Clinton. Since Trump’s unfortunate win, The Purge sequels that followed only became more on-the-nose and extreme with their political satirical commentary, paving the way for more representations of politics in horror that, given the current political climate, will stop seeming so over the top.
What does torture horror have to say on the matter? Darren Lynn Bousman and Josh Stolberg provided an answer to this with Spiral: From The Book Of Saw, a spin-off to the Saw franchise. Despite the misplaced classification of the previous films as shock value, buckets of gore driven torture porn, the franchise has always held political and philosophical undertones (the whole sixth film is a massive f you to the American health care system for being heavily commodified), however, this spin-off was less under and more overtone. Chris Rock plays a cop who finds himself in a web of a Jigsaw copycat’s sick games, where seedy corrupted officers are murdered for shooting innocent POC and the witnesses who can get their jobs taken away. The traps aren’t testing the officers but instead simply punishing them for abusing their power in such vile manners. Likewise to Candyman, this film got pushed back a year due to the pandemic and so viewers watched it with George Floyd in their minds, something that gave the twist ending an unforeseen kick in the stomach of realism.
If you spent any time on Twitter in the last couple of months, it’s safe to say you know what Squid Games is, even if you didn’t watch it. The smash-hit and record-breaking Netflix original series constructed a gripping horror story using class inequality as a value. A group of players crippled by debt compete in childhood games with a deadly twist in order to win a mass sum of cash. The situation is a literal matter of life and death, correlating with the metaphorical one debt creates. The show’s scare factor was distributed between the “loser’s” deaths and the uncomfortable but powerful portrayal of class division influencing concepts of humanity. The death scenes in the games are of course chilling, but that cannot compare to the horror of the players killing one another to get rid of too much competition. Squid Games held a mirror to our capital mad society and its detrimental flaws, in turn, displaying how horror is employing social commentary in the 2020s.
Social commentary horror doesn’t appear to be letting up any time soon as we move into the new decade, with the Covid pandemic possibly sparking new ideas for horror stories of infections destroying civilization. A strong chance of a new wave of zombie movies that are more hard-hitting given the context is therefore on the cards. Peele is also returning to our screens with his mysterious feature Nope and a remake of capitalism satire The People Under The Stairs, so it looks as if the 2020s will be brimming with horror grounded in political discourse.