This is the sixth part of a series on the cultural moment of horror
Horror can be used politically in any way you want.
In a time when shoehorning in political statements is all the rage (even at the expense of things like plot, consistency, and profitability), horror is a genre that uniquely lends itself to political grandstanding–or refusing to politically grandstand.
This makes sense when we remember, as I said in an earlier post, the core of horror is always a monster. That is super easy to tie to a political theme–or to leave ambiguous. Don’t like conservatives? Tie the monster to tradition, the past, and order. (In Texas Chainsaw Massacre the bad guys literally lived in a white house and the head of the family looked a lot like Nixon.) Don’t like liberals? Make the monster all about chaos and pursuing individual autonomy to its logical conclusion in defiance of norms and traditions (Poltergeist is a fun one to kick around here).
Want to leave things nice and non-political? Just make the monster scary and let the rest sort itself out. Old Country, the focus of this particular series, strikes an interesting balance. It very much wants to be edgy and contemporary in its ethic, but the insistence that respect for the rites and the past is the only way to deal with the angry spirit is, well, it’s an interesting approach. The book is mostly nonpolitical, but it is still wrestling with issues of tradition and freedom and rights, and trying hard to handle these issues well. (There’s a reason I picked this book to focus on!)
Overall, horror is on the rise in this moment because anyone who wants to make a statement can pick up horror as a genre and run with it; as can anyone who just wants to tell a story and doesn’t care about making a statement at all. I tend to prefer the latter, but we can’t say there’s no place for the former.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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