It’s not just horror films. What are the existential threats the American heroes face in today’s movies? Who are the villains in today’s movies?
rajatsingh24k on
This is very lazily written. A few half baked thoughts put together.
cerberaspeedtwelve on
I’d say that a good horror movie is more like a blank slate for the audience to project whatever their fears are onto.
Case in point: Zombies. They’ve been around since the 1950s and have taken on different meanings, depending on the zeitgeist. In the 1950s, they represented the growing fear of communism, and the fear that your government could strip your humanity away and leave you as little more than a walking piece of meat. By the 1970s, they were being used as a metaphor for how TV and consumerism were reducing people to little more than mindless zombies shuffling around a shopping mall. Finally, in the 2010s, they rose in popularity again as a metaphor for our fear of each other: that if society collapsed, we would all be fighting off our former friends and neighbors with shotguns in a desperate battle for precious resources.
aliummilk on
Pre-film horror is where this should start. Dracula reflects a continued suspicion of elite classes like aristocracies (count) preying on the common people. The metaphor of need for fresh blood in ruling classes is pretty clear once you consider the Hapsburgs.
Since around Covid, ghost/haunting movies seem to be the popular representative of the genre. This may be less true now. I don’t keep up. Ghost/haunting=confrontation with the past.
How intentional these reflections are seems to vary.
4 Comments
It’s not just horror films. What are the existential threats the American heroes face in today’s movies? Who are the villains in today’s movies?
This is very lazily written. A few half baked thoughts put together.
I’d say that a good horror movie is more like a blank slate for the audience to project whatever their fears are onto.
Case in point: Zombies. They’ve been around since the 1950s and have taken on different meanings, depending on the zeitgeist. In the 1950s, they represented the growing fear of communism, and the fear that your government could strip your humanity away and leave you as little more than a walking piece of meat. By the 1970s, they were being used as a metaphor for how TV and consumerism were reducing people to little more than mindless zombies shuffling around a shopping mall. Finally, in the 2010s, they rose in popularity again as a metaphor for our fear of each other: that if society collapsed, we would all be fighting off our former friends and neighbors with shotguns in a desperate battle for precious resources.
Pre-film horror is where this should start. Dracula reflects a continued suspicion of elite classes like aristocracies (count) preying on the common people. The metaphor of need for fresh blood in ruling classes is pretty clear once you consider the Hapsburgs.
Since around Covid, ghost/haunting movies seem to be the popular representative of the genre. This may be less true now. I don’t keep up. Ghost/haunting=confrontation with the past.
How intentional these reflections are seems to vary.