AgitProp is a podcast discussing Marxist approaches to art and culture. The show is written and performed by James Bell. This episode covers the history of US horror film between 1974 and 1985, referred to as the ‘golden age of US horror film’. This decade saw the release of many of giants of the genre: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, Alien and The Shining to name but a few. Crucially, this period saw a sharp rise and fall in the use of horror as a form of political commentary. In this episode, we ask the question: “Why?”
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Contents
Introduction [00:00]
Part one: Horror as social fear [00:53]
Part two: Contextualising the golden age of US horror [08:20]
Part three: From social critique to servility [16:50]
Part four: The decline of political horror film [36:43]
[Square brackets indicate timestamps within the recording.]
You can also listen to the show on Bandcamp.
Introduction [00:00]
Part one: Horror as social fear [00:53]
Part two: Contextualising the golden age of US horror [08:20]
Part three: From social critique to servility [16:50]
Part four: The decline of political horror film [36:43]
[Square brackets indicate timestamps within the recording.]
You can also listen to the show on Bandcamp.
Sources and further reading
Ann Billson, Crash and squirm.
Harris Bomberguy, The Power of VHS | SCANLINE.
Naomi Merrit, Cannibalistic Capitalism and other American Delicacies.
Matthew Pridham, Underneath the Skin: John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and You.
Paul Bullock and David Yaffe, Inflation, the Crisis and the Post-War Boom.
Episode list
Episode one: US horror film and the capitalist crisis (1974–1985)
Episode two: Sergei Eisenstein’s October and the Bolshevik Revolution
Episode three: Propaganda, the state and Comrade Detective
Episode four: Digital monsters: Black Mirror in historical perspective
Episode five: Netflix, subscription fees and the future of streaming
Episode six: Review round-up
Episode seven: Cuba’s artistic revolution
Episode one: US horror film and the capitalist crisis (1974–1985)
Episode two: Sergei Eisenstein’s October and the Bolshevik Revolution
Episode three: Propaganda, the state and Comrade Detective
Episode four: Digital monsters: Black Mirror in historical perspective
Episode five: Netflix, subscription fees and the future of streaming
Episode six: Review round-up
Episode seven: Cuba’s artistic revolution
Script
Welcome to the first episode of Agitprop. I’m James Bell and today I’ll be discussing US horror film in the context of the capitalist crisis.
Before we get started I’d like to spend a quick moment introducing myself and the show. I am a communist and an artist, with experience largely in literature and poetry. The explicit purpose of Agitprop is to apply a Marxist analysis to art, particularly popular culture. It is part of a broader project to develop a practicable Marxist politics of art.
With that said, I want to keep the content I cover here a little more light-hearted than elsewhere. Whilst the topics I’m covering won’t exactly be silly, I think there’s a lot of fun to be had doing this kind of analysis. I hope this comes across in the tone of my writing and the topics I’ve chosen to cover. I’ve posted a list of episodes planned for the present series in the description. If you have any comments don’t to be afraid to post here, email me or contact me on Twitter. I hope we can get a discussion going.
Welcome to the first episode of Agitprop. I’m James Bell and today I’ll be discussing US horror film in the context of the capitalist crisis.
Before we get started I’d like to spend a quick moment introducing myself and the show. I am a communist and an artist, with experience largely in literature and poetry. The explicit purpose of Agitprop is to apply a Marxist analysis to art, particularly popular culture. It is part of a broader project to develop a practicable Marxist politics of art.
With that said, I want to keep the content I cover here a little more light-hearted than elsewhere. Whilst the topics I’m covering won’t exactly be silly, I think there’s a lot of fun to be had doing this kind of analysis. I hope this comes across in the tone of my writing and the topics I’ve chosen to cover. I’ve posted a list of episodes planned for the present series in the description. If you have any comments don’t to be afraid to post here, email me or contact me on Twitter. I hope we can get a discussion going.
Part one: Horror as social fear
Horror fiction can tell us a lot about our society. What we might call its “primary” purpose — that is, to horrify us — plays an important role in representing realities that other forms tend to ignore. Ultimately, horror can provide us with filmic, literary or tactile representations of social fears and, in doing so, helps us gain some emotional or intellectual understanding of them. As Robin Wood says, horror fiction represents ‘our collective nightmares’.
Granted, this is simplistic. There are many social functions for horror fiction. It can be funny, stupid or even simply offensive. All of these impacts are completely valid: there is no “true” form for a genre. The reason I highlight this “primary” purpose is because it provides us with a useful starting point. When we acknowledge that horror fiction reflects social fears then we can begin to contextualise it within historical and social processes.
To give you an idea of what I mean by this I’m going to talk briefly about Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The book is obviously well-known, heavily referenced and very well regarded. It’s where we tend to look when we consider the origin of vampires within Western cultural iconography. To be honest, this is somewhat ironic. On its release the book wasn’t enormously popular, despite overwhelmingly positive reviews. As Nina Auerbach and David Skal point out in their 1997 preface to the book, it wasn’t even really regarded as a “horror novel” in the way we now understand it. Rather, it was initially viewed as a fun, somewhat silly, adventure story. Dracula became the cultural phenomenon we know it as only in the 20th century, after it had been adapted to film.
What this tells us is that even one text can have multiple social functions. We can already identify three uses for Dracula: what Stoker intended, how his initial audience responded and how later audiences responded. Each of these uses mean and reflect different things.
I don’t want to by coy about this: the horror that Stoker injects into Dracula as an author is of a myopic, racist and homophobic character. It’s quite well-known that the novel indulges in a rather explicit colonial fantasy. The title character is modelled on Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, who is said to have killed between 40,000 to 100,000 European civilians between 1456 and 1462. In the novel Dracula himself is first “discovered” in the Carpathian mountains which border Transylvania. He then seems to invade England in pursuit of the book’s protagonists and there “conquers” English women through his transformation of Lucy into a vampire. This is fairly standard fare in colonial narratives, albeit expressed uniquely. The sexual politics of the book are even less subtle. Dracula impales both men and women with his teeth. He can also grant women the power to impale men or even each other, first demonstrated by the three women that confront Harker in Dracula’s castle. The fear is of the empire fighting back, subverting quote-unquote “normal” social and sexual relations in the process.
Whilst this reading and interpretation is definitely still within the film adaptations of Stoker’s novel, I want to suggest that real material changes in society paved the way for the story’s ultimate success. At the turn of the 20th century industrial capitalism had completely transformed itself into capitalist imperialism. The economic crisis which gripped the major imperialist nations — England, Germany, France, Japan and the United States — culminated in the first imperialist world war in 1914. In the US this was followed in 1929 by the Great Depression and in Britain a period of economic decline afflicted huge sections of the working class with unemployment. Over this period the novel was adapted to film several times, first in Hungary in 1921 and then again in 1922 with F. W. Murnau’s unofficial adaptation Nosferatu. The most commercially successful adaptation was released by Universal Pictures in 1931, just two years after the start of the Great Depression.
Although I want to careful not to implicate that Dracula’s success directly resulted from this period of economic stagnation, war and terror, there is a clear correlation. It seems to me that this suggests the mere iconography of vampirism within this period reflected a general sense that the population was being leached upon. Stoker’s personal agenda survives in the text, but its social impact reflects broader processes. The two uses exist not only in relation to each other, but also in relation to a backdrop of historical, economic and political considerations. The particularly metaphoric nature of horror fiction allows for this kind of relative interpretation. Horror reflects social fears. How these fears are communicated and received tells us something about the political character of those forces interpreting and communicating.
Horror fiction can tell us a lot about our society. What we might call its “primary” purpose — that is, to horrify us — plays an important role in representing realities that other forms tend to ignore. Ultimately, horror can provide us with filmic, literary or tactile representations of social fears and, in doing so, helps us gain some emotional or intellectual understanding of them. As Robin Wood says, horror fiction represents ‘our collective nightmares’.
Granted, this is simplistic. There are many social functions for horror fiction. It can be funny, stupid or even simply offensive. All of these impacts are completely valid: there is no “true” form for a genre. The reason I highlight this “primary” purpose is because it provides us with a useful starting point. When we acknowledge that horror fiction reflects social fears then we can begin to contextualise it within historical and social processes.
To give you an idea of what I mean by this I’m going to talk briefly about Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The book is obviously well-known, heavily referenced and very well regarded. It’s where we tend to look when we consider the origin of vampires within Western cultural iconography. To be honest, this is somewhat ironic. On its release the book wasn’t enormously popular, despite overwhelmingly positive reviews. As Nina Auerbach and David Skal point out in their 1997 preface to the book, it wasn’t even really regarded as a “horror novel” in the way we now understand it. Rather, it was initially viewed as a fun, somewhat silly, adventure story. Dracula became the cultural phenomenon we know it as only in the 20th century, after it had been adapted to film.
What this tells us is that even one text can have multiple social functions. We can already identify three uses for Dracula: what Stoker intended, how his initial audience responded and how later audiences responded. Each of these uses mean and reflect different things.
I don’t want to by coy about this: the horror that Stoker injects into Dracula as an author is of a myopic, racist and homophobic character. It’s quite well-known that the novel indulges in a rather explicit colonial fantasy. The title character is modelled on Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, who is said to have killed between 40,000 to 100,000 European civilians between 1456 and 1462. In the novel Dracula himself is first “discovered” in the Carpathian mountains which border Transylvania. He then seems to invade England in pursuit of the book’s protagonists and there “conquers” English women through his transformation of Lucy into a vampire. This is fairly standard fare in colonial narratives, albeit expressed uniquely. The sexual politics of the book are even less subtle. Dracula impales both men and women with his teeth. He can also grant women the power to impale men or even each other, first demonstrated by the three women that confront Harker in Dracula’s castle. The fear is of the empire fighting back, subverting quote-unquote “normal” social and sexual relations in the process.
Whilst this reading and interpretation is definitely still within the film adaptations of Stoker’s novel, I want to suggest that real material changes in society paved the way for the story’s ultimate success. At the turn of the 20th century industrial capitalism had completely transformed itself into capitalist imperialism. The economic crisis which gripped the major imperialist nations — England, Germany, France, Japan and the United States — culminated in the first imperialist world war in 1914. In the US this was followed in 1929 by the Great Depression and in Britain a period of economic decline afflicted huge sections of the working class with unemployment. Over this period the novel was adapted to film several times, first in Hungary in 1921 and then again in 1922 with F. W. Murnau’s unofficial adaptation Nosferatu. The most commercially successful adaptation was released by Universal Pictures in 1931, just two years after the start of the Great Depression.
Although I want to careful not to implicate that Dracula’s success directly resulted from this period of economic stagnation, war and terror, there is a clear correlation. It seems to me that this suggests the mere iconography of vampirism within this period reflected a general sense that the population was being leached upon. Stoker’s personal agenda survives in the text, but its social impact reflects broader processes. The two uses exist not only in relation to each other, but also in relation to a backdrop of historical, economic and political considerations. The particularly metaphoric nature of horror fiction allows for this kind of relative interpretation. Horror reflects social fears. How these fears are communicated and received tells us something about the political character of those forces interpreting and communicating.
Part two: Contextualising the golden age of US horror
Writing for The Guardian in 2008 the novelist Anne Billson argued that the ‘good news about the recession is that we can look forward to some great horror movies.’ Her argument is, essentially, that periods of economic crisis create more deeply affecting horror films. Society itself undergoes more horror and, thus, there is more to reflect. Although there is a trace of truth to this position, I think it needs to be considered critically.
The golden age of US horror film saw the release of many titles we now consider as staples of the genre. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, Alien, The Shining — these and several other classics were all released within roughly a decade, between 1974 and the mid 1980s. There is a clear correlation between economic, political phenomena and this period of horror film’s history. The economic crisis which began in 1973–1974 marked the end of the post-war boom and the exceptional economic circumstances that allowed for Keynesian social democracy; it signalled a return to the predatory, unstable conditions that characterised imperialism before the first world war.
Understanding this crisis is difficult. Whilst I will try my best to provide a solid basis, to discuss it in detail requires much more time than we have. I’ve provided some links to further reading in the description for anyone that’s interested.
The post war boom arose from very specific economic and political circumstances. The inter-imperialist rivalries that had arisen at the beginning of the 20th century had been resolved, but at an enormous cost. Two world wars, depression and fascism: these were the parents of the boom. The destruction that the war years brought to huge swathes of Europe and Japan provided an open field for investment and the devaluation of currencies during the war meant the money to do this was cheap. Where fascism had crushed working class movements during the war — notably in France and Germany — wages were low. Further, more efficient technologies that had been developed before or during the war could finally be implemented, raising productivity enormously.
This alone equated to a bonanza for the capitalist class. Cheap capital, cheap labour and rising productivity means profit — lots of it. However, it is important to note another factor that went into constructing the political character of the period: that is, the growing dominance of US imperialism. It is over this period that US built for itself an increasing control over world markets using a combination of Marshall Aid and capital exports. In doing so, it allowed a general increase in the amount of profit received relative to capital invested. This allowed national capitals to share out world wide profits according to their relative competitive positions and stands to explain the relative ‘peace’ between the imperialist nations.
Marx has a phrase which describes this situation perfectly. He says that ‘so long as things go well, competition effects an operating fraternity of the capitalist class’.
What should be clear is that things could not ‘go well’ forever. The conditions created by the war could not last forever and cannot be recreated without a similar period of mass destruction. Sure enough, by 1973 the conditions that allowed for the post war boom had evaporated and crisis reasserted itself. In 1974 Britain, the US and Japan all recorded negative GDP growth of -0.2%, -2.1% and -1.8% respectively. Thus began a period of economic downturn that persists into the present day. This process expressed itself politically with the advent of austerity and de-industrialisation in the US and Britain. The 1974–1979 Labour government in Britain slashed funding and introduced spending targets. It was followed by the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979 and Ronald Reagan as President in 1981. The state support and relatively secure employment that had been granted to the working class during the post war period came under attack. It is in this economic and political climate that the golden age of US horror emerges.
At first glance, this would seem to confirm the analysis offered by Billson. Potentially the most memorable period of horror film’s history coincides with the end of the post-war boom — an economic shift which brought about some of the most dramatic political moments in recent history. However, as I said at the start of this segment, I believe this is simplistic. Although the economic crisis certainly influenced the golden age of US horror film, other factors also served to shape this period of horror’s history.
An example of another such factor is the emergence and popularisation of VHS tapes. In a recent video, Harris “Bomberguy” discusses the impact that VHS had on horror film. You can find a link in the description. He makes a number of observations that are significant for our understanding. Prior to VHS horror had never done particularly well, at least relative to other genres. As Harris highlights, this is to due to the social impression that going to view a horror film at a cinema gives. It requires you to admit, openly, that you are interested in seeing disturbing or grotesque imagery and to be willing to sit with other people who share this quote-unquote perversity. The gaze of society dulls the appeal of horror, making it seem even repellent. VHS eliminated this problem.
Not only this, VHS provided a way for films to avoid the gaze of the censor. Harris gives a very striking example of this in his discussion of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. When the film was viewed by the British Board of Film Censors it was first considered that it should be cut. However, upon reviewing the footage, the censors could find no particular portion to cut. As such, the film was banned from theatrical screening. VHS provided a way to circumvent this problem and allowed the film to reach a British audience.
This ultimately led to the proliferation of an enormous market in direct-to-video horror films, allowing the genre a greater ability to filter into popular culture. This had long-term consequences for the genre that I’ll return to. For the present, however, I think I’ve illustrated my point. Whilst it is correct to say that the economic crisis can account for horror’s popularity over this period, it is equally true to say that VHS can account for that same popularity. To accredit horror’s popularity in this period to any one factor is to engage in historical simplism. This undermines Billson’s supposition that the 2008 economic crisis would lead to a reemergence of horror in the fashion seen during the 1970s and 80s.
At this point I want to turn to the classic films of the US’ golden age. There is a clear, identifiable transformation of horror as an artistic form over the period. To me, this represents a process of de-politicisation — a transformation of horror from a mode of metaphoric, but direct, social commentary into a more simplistic form of popular entertainment.
Part three: From social critique to servility
I’ll be focusing on a handful of films that serve to clearly illustrate my point and I think it’s important to be up-front about that. I am not suggesting that horror has become unable to operate as a mode of social critique at all. It can. Rather, I am arguing that the classics of the 1970s and 1980s underwent a gradual process of de-politicisation which has changed the way in which we approach the genre as a whole.
To that end, I’m going to talk about the about the period in two distinct blocks. First, I will discuss the “first wave” of the golden age, which begins in 1974 with the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and concludes after the release of Alien in 1979. Then, I will discuss the “second wave” of the period which occurs between 1980 and 1985. Between these periods I will discuss The Shining, released in 1980, which stands as a kind of transition film, emphasising the distinction between the horror of the first and second waves. I want to make clear that this is an analytical device based upon a political consideration. It does not refer to a conscious process of artistic innovation or consolidated schools of artistic thought.
At this point I must mention George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968. Although the film lies chronologically outside of the timeline I’ve given thus far, in many ways it belongs to its first wave. It is a landmark in political horror fiction and its influence cannot be ignored. Romero uses the archetype of a zombie infestation to tell a story about racism in the United States. He uses careful framing throughout the film to draw parallels between the fictional zombies and the very real threat of lynch mobs. At the story’s conclusion, Ben — the film’s protagonist — is murdered by the police in cold blood. The scene is shot in such a way as to make clear that the police could not have mistaken Ben for a zombie. He is murdered because he is black. The film’s closing shots show Ben’s body being burnt with all the others — a mass grave.
Romero’s film is direct and cutting. His use of zombies throughout the narrative is used to effectively demonstrate how racism dehumanises both its victims and its perpetrators. More than this, Romero does not shy away from intentionally illustrating the reality of this metaphor in his final scenes. The politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s — particularly the influence of the civil rights movement — is felt keenly in its final moments. One thing that I feel is often neglected about Romero’s film is that the situation is far from helpless. Throughout the story we see white characters work with and trust Ben in the fight against the zombie hordes. Ultimately, Night of the Living Dead is an allegory for the anti-racist movements of the 1960s. That our characters fail in their struggle does not indicate that it was doomed from the start, but reflects the decline of those movements.
What defines the films of the “first wave” is precisely this kind of explicitly political purpose. To illustrate this I’ll be talking about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead and Alien. I won’t be providing detail on their production or distribution, but simply illustrating what the films are saying.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is probably the most difficult of the three to interpret. Often credited as the original source for many tropes of the slasher film sub-genre, Chain Saw tells a small, focused story in which a group of five teenagers are — well — massacred. Before discussing the meat of the film, I want to highlight some comments made by the film’s director, Tobe Hooper. In a 2008 interview Hooper highlights his decision to advertise the film as a true story and the villain Leatherface’s use of a mask as keys to the film’s political meaning. He draws parallels between these devices and the duplicity of the US government, highlighting its actions in Vietnam, its handling of the Watergate scandal and — crucially — the 1973 oil crisis. Hooper’s film is embedded in the political climate of the early 1970s and draws its inspiration explicitly from the looming economic crisis.
This does not mean that Leatherface represents the US state or its lies. The mask adopted by our villain is intended to provide an ugly, inverted antagonist to the mask adopted the US state. Where one uses a mask to feign innocence, the other adopts a mask as a pretence to brutality. In this sense, Chain Saw is a film about the violence of capitalism. Robin Wood highlights that Leatherface and his family represent victims of capitalist society. They were workers in a slaughterhouse, jobs now rendered obsolete by technological advances. In an essay titled Cannibalistic Capitalism and other American Delicacies, Naomi Merrit argues that the film paints the picture of a US capitalism that is ‘metaphorically and literally devouring itself’. Her analysis is fantastic and I highly suggest that you read it if Chain Saw interests you. Again, I have provided a link in the description.
Before we move on, I want to highlight Merrit’s rooting of Chain Saw’s horror in what she describes as ‘the key… institutions of the family, the worker and capitalism.’ Whilst the perversity with which Chain Saw endows the worker and capitalism are specifically displayed through Leatherface’s identity and his affectation of a mask respectively, the horror of the family is depicted through more specific scenes. Particularly, this theme is communicated through the film’s handling of violence against women and the, once seen never forgotten, dinner scene. In Chain Saw, the family is frayed and distorted so that only its oppressive character remains visible. If we accept that Leatherface’s mask is a veil used to represent capitalism’s violence, his dressing as woman in the dinner scene is an equally intentional signifier. The purpose of both this scene and the infamous meat hook scene — in which Leatherface impales a young woman named Pam on a meat hook — is to communicate that the essential character of the bourgeois family is its oppression of women. There are a lot of criticisms to make of how the film depicts this and I think they’re valid. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to cover them here.
Chain Saw is complex because its horror is rooted in the crisis of capitalism itself. In the disintegration of the capitalist economy, signified by Leatherface and his family’s unemployment, the relations that hold such an economy together also disintegrate. In showing this disintegration, Chain Saw boils these relations down to their essential violence. Leatherface’s mask is intended as the true face of US capitalism.
Both Dawn of the Dead and Alien also take capitalist social relations as their object of critique. They are more pointed, focused films in their symbolism and, as such, there is less to say of them. This is particularly true of Dawn of the Dead, released in 1978 — a full decade after Romero’s first film. I think the film speaks to a broader problem in Romero’s writing and direction. The central theme is again expressed through the behaviour and framing of its zombies. After his spellbounding treatment of racism in Night of the Living Dead, Romero here turns his eye to a critique of consumerism. The film is set in a mall. As such, we are shown shots of the zombies metaphorically “shopping” — that is, wandering the mall in a vacant, blood-lusting daze. As in Night of the Living Dead, Romero reinforces this central theme by applying the same behaviour to our human characters. After they have cleared the mall of zombies our characters themselves engage in a delirious hedonism. This works but it is unnecessary. The critique of consumerism is made well enough by showing the zombies in the manner Romero does. Whilst this problem doesn’t massively detract from the film, it succeeds in transforming the piece’s subtext into literal text. Romero is arguing that the consumerism of US society is an ultimately numbing and violent process that culls rational human behaviour. In doing so, he rather ironically makes his film as easily consumable as possible.
Alien plays on two central themes throughout its run time. On the one hand, it is a film about literal sexual violence. On the other, it is a film about the relationship between workers and capital. These two themes are not separable but, rather, complement each other. The film’s protagonists are all working class, living in awful conditions for bad pay. They have no investment in their job aside from getting home at the end of each day. This is how the film introduces the relationship between capital and labour. Once they discover the face-huggers, one attaches to Kane and quite literally rapes him. This is something that Ridley Scott has said was intentional of the film’s design — phallic imagery being deployed consistently through the design of its set and its monsters. Sexual violence is followed by birth, subverting normal sexual relations by replacing the mother with Kane, a man.
Whilst the imagery and content used to depict sexual violence is intentionally crass and vulgar, it serves a wider purpose within the film’s structure. After introducing the concept of violent parasitism through Kane’s rape and the xenomorph’s birth, Alien returns to its handling of the relationship between the workers and capital. It is revealed that the company employing Alien’s cast has planted an android with different instructions to the crew on their ship, Nostromo. The android and the ship’s computer — Mother — have been told that the crew are expendable. All that matters is recovering the xenomorph. Here, Alien creates a metaphor for capital itself. What matters is not the well-being of the workers, but simply that profit is made from them. The parasitism exhibited by Kane’s rape serves as a metaphor for the extraction of profit from the working-class’ labour and the xenomorph serves as a metaphor for the violence that will be unleashed should they attempt to overcome such parasitism. Even the name of the ship — Nostromo — is a reference to a 1904 novel of the same name by Joseph Conrad. In the novel, Nostromo represses a revolution. Here, the xenomorph attempts to. The interrelation of these themes further suggests that sexual violence is itself dependent upon a social relation — that of misogyny.
For all of their flaws, the films of the “first wave” are ambitious, inventive and politically bold. These are works that explicitly address capitalism as a social form to be questioned, criticised and — in the case of Alien — even overcome. Unfortunately, this was not to last. In 1980 Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining signalled a transition away from this kind of political horror film.
It might be a controversial opinion, but I think The Shining is a remarkably hollow film. Kubrick’s film is still a masterpiece of visual storytelling and it does address some political themes. However, it tends to duck some of the more interesting questions it raises. The explicit horror of the film is that of the bourgeois family, particularly its relation to the patriarch. This is complimented by some quite abstract musing upon cyclical violence.
We follow Jack, Wendy and their son Danny as they spend winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel, located in the Colorado Rockies. As with all quote-unquote “meaningful” Stephen King stories, our hero Jack is a struggling writer. In this story, the archetype has taken a job as a winter caretaker — shutting him and his family off from the rest of the world. It is a testament to Kubrick’s ability as a filmmaker that he works this into his overarching themes. In King Jack’s profession is simply a retelling of the kind of narrative trope that every writer examines when they start writing. It’s a reflection of the sheer volume of content he creates and the strain this places upon crafting original ideas. In Kubrick, Jack’s abilities as a writer serve as a metaphor for the labour of building civilisation.
As the film progresses each family member is visited by disturbing visions. Eventually, we learn that a previous caretaker butchered his family whilst they stayed at the hotel. Sure, enough, Jack falls prey to the same madness and attempts to murder his family. The fragility of family relations is revealed as the dominant member of the family — the patriarch — becomes violent and hostile. At the end of the film, Jack is frozen to death, isolated from his family by madness — the relation that held them together destroyed. This is the horror that The Shining communicates through its plot and its characters.
Kubrick, however, never operates simply on the level of plot and character. Through set design and careful symbolism, The Shining discuss quite a different horror.
One of the most well-known symbols deployed by Kubrick here is the abundance of imagery referring to the colonisation of the Americas. In almost every scene of the film, you can see imagery that echoes that of, or directly refers to, the indigenous population of the US. Whilst the imagery is specific, I want to suggest that its meaning is not. The film quite consciously evokes the genocide of these peoples in order to build into itself a message about the cyclical nature of violence and the collapse of civilisation. This is reinforced by the plot itself — the last caretaker went mad and killed his family. The implication is that all caretakers will. Further to this, the specific nature of Jack’s illness is grounded in his work. When Wendy goes to find him she sees that all he has written on his typewriter are the words ‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy’. This is the moment that Jack’s violent desires are revealed to us. The labour of building civilisation itself is, in Kubrick’s film, a kind of madness that serves only to stem the violence at the heart of humanity. As all caretakers will go mad, all civilisations will collapse. The project of society itself is doomed.
The Shining is notoriously difficult to understand, with readings ranging from its meaning being something to do with the colonisation of the Americas to it being about the holocaust. The 2012 documentary Room 237 exhaustively documents these readings and, quite rightly, implicates that they are akin to conspiracy theories. It seems to me that the reason for this is that Kubrick’s film is not about a single violent event, a particular period or even a given social system. It is a rumination upon a supposed human nature. As such its critique of bourgeois family relations is secondary to a broader, far more abstract project. Politics is implied but, ultimately, removed from the equation.
The “second wave” films of the golden age continued and deepened this process of depoliticisation. For the sake of time, I will only discuss two films from the period: John Carpenter’s The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The Thing, released in 1982, is a remake of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World which, in turn, is based on a 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. It’s important to know the films director, John Carpenter, viewed The Thing as the first part in his Apocalypse Trilogy, followed by Prince of Darkness in 1987 and In the Mouth of Madness in 1994. Viewed alongside its sequels, The Thing is rendered as a form of cosmic horror, drawing heavily on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. As in Lovecraft, the fear represented in the film is that of the unknown, its enormity and the insignificance of man’s place in the universe. Throughout the film this is represented through the malleability of life and death, both states falling prey to the whims of its monster, quite literally a thing we cannot comprehend. The monster contorts flesh to its whim. It can control anybody and anything it comes into contact with, representing a power beyond our reckoning.
This is not to say that The Thing does not play upon more comprehensible social themes. A 2012 review of Carpenter’s opus by Matthew Pridham highlights the absence of any women in the film, something thrown into a stark light by the inclusion of female characters in the 2011 prequel. Pridham argues that the beast here has two potential social meanings. In one sense, it represents the fear of the other — that is, the notion that we cannot ever truly know another person. This is the application of cosmic horror to the psyche of individual beings and it has a resonance with existential philosophy. In a more literal reading, Pridham argues that the exclusively male cast are here terrorised by an unspeakable desire — that of homosexuality. Whilst both readings are useful and valid, painting Carpenter’s film as either a more concrete realisation of existential horror or a work of rather paranoiac homophobia, to me they can form only additives to the film’s central horror. The Thing all but rejects these kind of readings by the virtue of its beast’s incomprehensibility. It rejects politics in favour of Lovecraftian insignificance and body horror.
In The Shining and The Thing what we can see is a motion away from the political themes of the “first wave” films, in favour of more abstract, existential horror. Despite this, these films still have meaning and discuss important concepts. This is not so in the 1984 film, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Here, the political meaning of the slasher film — as emphasised by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — is reduced to insignificance. Instead, we are presented with well made, entertaining horror that draws upon narrower fears.
To me, Elm Street is about abuse and the end of innocence. Throughout the film our villain — Freddy Krueger — terrorises our protagonists through their dreams. Toward the end of the film, it is revealed that he lives only on fear — that if you are not afraid of him, then he cannot harm you. It’s well known that Krueger was originally intended to be a child molester, not a child murderer, and I think this gives an indication to the film’s meaning. In Elm Street, it is the silencing effect of fear which allows abuse to continue unimpeded. As Freddy will be killed if you do not fear him, so too can abuse be stopped if the abused speak out. This is a simplistic message and, frankly, lacks any political resonance.
As I have argued, the progression of the golden age of US horror film represents a continuous process of de-politicisation. The searing, heartfelt anti-capitalism of the “first wave” film fades into the background, first eclipsed by the more abstract horror of The Shining or The Thing, then ultimately fading into narrow themes that evade political critique. It is through the de-politicisation of horror in the 1980s that horror was able to become more respectable, more acceptable, to US society. All that remains to ask is why this process occurred. What were the material, artistic and ideological factors that drove this process?
I’ll be focusing on a handful of films that serve to clearly illustrate my point and I think it’s important to be up-front about that. I am not suggesting that horror has become unable to operate as a mode of social critique at all. It can. Rather, I am arguing that the classics of the 1970s and 1980s underwent a gradual process of de-politicisation which has changed the way in which we approach the genre as a whole.
To that end, I’m going to talk about the about the period in two distinct blocks. First, I will discuss the “first wave” of the golden age, which begins in 1974 with the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and concludes after the release of Alien in 1979. Then, I will discuss the “second wave” of the period which occurs between 1980 and 1985. Between these periods I will discuss The Shining, released in 1980, which stands as a kind of transition film, emphasising the distinction between the horror of the first and second waves. I want to make clear that this is an analytical device based upon a political consideration. It does not refer to a conscious process of artistic innovation or consolidated schools of artistic thought.
At this point I must mention George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968. Although the film lies chronologically outside of the timeline I’ve given thus far, in many ways it belongs to its first wave. It is a landmark in political horror fiction and its influence cannot be ignored. Romero uses the archetype of a zombie infestation to tell a story about racism in the United States. He uses careful framing throughout the film to draw parallels between the fictional zombies and the very real threat of lynch mobs. At the story’s conclusion, Ben — the film’s protagonist — is murdered by the police in cold blood. The scene is shot in such a way as to make clear that the police could not have mistaken Ben for a zombie. He is murdered because he is black. The film’s closing shots show Ben’s body being burnt with all the others — a mass grave.
Romero’s film is direct and cutting. His use of zombies throughout the narrative is used to effectively demonstrate how racism dehumanises both its victims and its perpetrators. More than this, Romero does not shy away from intentionally illustrating the reality of this metaphor in his final scenes. The politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s — particularly the influence of the civil rights movement — is felt keenly in its final moments. One thing that I feel is often neglected about Romero’s film is that the situation is far from helpless. Throughout the story we see white characters work with and trust Ben in the fight against the zombie hordes. Ultimately, Night of the Living Dead is an allegory for the anti-racist movements of the 1960s. That our characters fail in their struggle does not indicate that it was doomed from the start, but reflects the decline of those movements.
What defines the films of the “first wave” is precisely this kind of explicitly political purpose. To illustrate this I’ll be talking about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead and Alien. I won’t be providing detail on their production or distribution, but simply illustrating what the films are saying.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is probably the most difficult of the three to interpret. Often credited as the original source for many tropes of the slasher film sub-genre, Chain Saw tells a small, focused story in which a group of five teenagers are — well — massacred. Before discussing the meat of the film, I want to highlight some comments made by the film’s director, Tobe Hooper. In a 2008 interview Hooper highlights his decision to advertise the film as a true story and the villain Leatherface’s use of a mask as keys to the film’s political meaning. He draws parallels between these devices and the duplicity of the US government, highlighting its actions in Vietnam, its handling of the Watergate scandal and — crucially — the 1973 oil crisis. Hooper’s film is embedded in the political climate of the early 1970s and draws its inspiration explicitly from the looming economic crisis.
This does not mean that Leatherface represents the US state or its lies. The mask adopted by our villain is intended to provide an ugly, inverted antagonist to the mask adopted the US state. Where one uses a mask to feign innocence, the other adopts a mask as a pretence to brutality. In this sense, Chain Saw is a film about the violence of capitalism. Robin Wood highlights that Leatherface and his family represent victims of capitalist society. They were workers in a slaughterhouse, jobs now rendered obsolete by technological advances. In an essay titled Cannibalistic Capitalism and other American Delicacies, Naomi Merrit argues that the film paints the picture of a US capitalism that is ‘metaphorically and literally devouring itself’. Her analysis is fantastic and I highly suggest that you read it if Chain Saw interests you. Again, I have provided a link in the description.
Before we move on, I want to highlight Merrit’s rooting of Chain Saw’s horror in what she describes as ‘the key… institutions of the family, the worker and capitalism.’ Whilst the perversity with which Chain Saw endows the worker and capitalism are specifically displayed through Leatherface’s identity and his affectation of a mask respectively, the horror of the family is depicted through more specific scenes. Particularly, this theme is communicated through the film’s handling of violence against women and the, once seen never forgotten, dinner scene. In Chain Saw, the family is frayed and distorted so that only its oppressive character remains visible. If we accept that Leatherface’s mask is a veil used to represent capitalism’s violence, his dressing as woman in the dinner scene is an equally intentional signifier. The purpose of both this scene and the infamous meat hook scene — in which Leatherface impales a young woman named Pam on a meat hook — is to communicate that the essential character of the bourgeois family is its oppression of women. There are a lot of criticisms to make of how the film depicts this and I think they’re valid. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to cover them here.
Chain Saw is complex because its horror is rooted in the crisis of capitalism itself. In the disintegration of the capitalist economy, signified by Leatherface and his family’s unemployment, the relations that hold such an economy together also disintegrate. In showing this disintegration, Chain Saw boils these relations down to their essential violence. Leatherface’s mask is intended as the true face of US capitalism.
Both Dawn of the Dead and Alien also take capitalist social relations as their object of critique. They are more pointed, focused films in their symbolism and, as such, there is less to say of them. This is particularly true of Dawn of the Dead, released in 1978 — a full decade after Romero’s first film. I think the film speaks to a broader problem in Romero’s writing and direction. The central theme is again expressed through the behaviour and framing of its zombies. After his spellbounding treatment of racism in Night of the Living Dead, Romero here turns his eye to a critique of consumerism. The film is set in a mall. As such, we are shown shots of the zombies metaphorically “shopping” — that is, wandering the mall in a vacant, blood-lusting daze. As in Night of the Living Dead, Romero reinforces this central theme by applying the same behaviour to our human characters. After they have cleared the mall of zombies our characters themselves engage in a delirious hedonism. This works but it is unnecessary. The critique of consumerism is made well enough by showing the zombies in the manner Romero does. Whilst this problem doesn’t massively detract from the film, it succeeds in transforming the piece’s subtext into literal text. Romero is arguing that the consumerism of US society is an ultimately numbing and violent process that culls rational human behaviour. In doing so, he rather ironically makes his film as easily consumable as possible.
Alien plays on two central themes throughout its run time. On the one hand, it is a film about literal sexual violence. On the other, it is a film about the relationship between workers and capital. These two themes are not separable but, rather, complement each other. The film’s protagonists are all working class, living in awful conditions for bad pay. They have no investment in their job aside from getting home at the end of each day. This is how the film introduces the relationship between capital and labour. Once they discover the face-huggers, one attaches to Kane and quite literally rapes him. This is something that Ridley Scott has said was intentional of the film’s design — phallic imagery being deployed consistently through the design of its set and its monsters. Sexual violence is followed by birth, subverting normal sexual relations by replacing the mother with Kane, a man.
Whilst the imagery and content used to depict sexual violence is intentionally crass and vulgar, it serves a wider purpose within the film’s structure. After introducing the concept of violent parasitism through Kane’s rape and the xenomorph’s birth, Alien returns to its handling of the relationship between the workers and capital. It is revealed that the company employing Alien’s cast has planted an android with different instructions to the crew on their ship, Nostromo. The android and the ship’s computer — Mother — have been told that the crew are expendable. All that matters is recovering the xenomorph. Here, Alien creates a metaphor for capital itself. What matters is not the well-being of the workers, but simply that profit is made from them. The parasitism exhibited by Kane’s rape serves as a metaphor for the extraction of profit from the working-class’ labour and the xenomorph serves as a metaphor for the violence that will be unleashed should they attempt to overcome such parasitism. Even the name of the ship — Nostromo — is a reference to a 1904 novel of the same name by Joseph Conrad. In the novel, Nostromo represses a revolution. Here, the xenomorph attempts to. The interrelation of these themes further suggests that sexual violence is itself dependent upon a social relation — that of misogyny.
For all of their flaws, the films of the “first wave” are ambitious, inventive and politically bold. These are works that explicitly address capitalism as a social form to be questioned, criticised and — in the case of Alien — even overcome. Unfortunately, this was not to last. In 1980 Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining signalled a transition away from this kind of political horror film.
It might be a controversial opinion, but I think The Shining is a remarkably hollow film. Kubrick’s film is still a masterpiece of visual storytelling and it does address some political themes. However, it tends to duck some of the more interesting questions it raises. The explicit horror of the film is that of the bourgeois family, particularly its relation to the patriarch. This is complimented by some quite abstract musing upon cyclical violence.
We follow Jack, Wendy and their son Danny as they spend winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel, located in the Colorado Rockies. As with all quote-unquote “meaningful” Stephen King stories, our hero Jack is a struggling writer. In this story, the archetype has taken a job as a winter caretaker — shutting him and his family off from the rest of the world. It is a testament to Kubrick’s ability as a filmmaker that he works this into his overarching themes. In King Jack’s profession is simply a retelling of the kind of narrative trope that every writer examines when they start writing. It’s a reflection of the sheer volume of content he creates and the strain this places upon crafting original ideas. In Kubrick, Jack’s abilities as a writer serve as a metaphor for the labour of building civilisation.
As the film progresses each family member is visited by disturbing visions. Eventually, we learn that a previous caretaker butchered his family whilst they stayed at the hotel. Sure, enough, Jack falls prey to the same madness and attempts to murder his family. The fragility of family relations is revealed as the dominant member of the family — the patriarch — becomes violent and hostile. At the end of the film, Jack is frozen to death, isolated from his family by madness — the relation that held them together destroyed. This is the horror that The Shining communicates through its plot and its characters.
Kubrick, however, never operates simply on the level of plot and character. Through set design and careful symbolism, The Shining discuss quite a different horror.
One of the most well-known symbols deployed by Kubrick here is the abundance of imagery referring to the colonisation of the Americas. In almost every scene of the film, you can see imagery that echoes that of, or directly refers to, the indigenous population of the US. Whilst the imagery is specific, I want to suggest that its meaning is not. The film quite consciously evokes the genocide of these peoples in order to build into itself a message about the cyclical nature of violence and the collapse of civilisation. This is reinforced by the plot itself — the last caretaker went mad and killed his family. The implication is that all caretakers will. Further to this, the specific nature of Jack’s illness is grounded in his work. When Wendy goes to find him she sees that all he has written on his typewriter are the words ‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy’. This is the moment that Jack’s violent desires are revealed to us. The labour of building civilisation itself is, in Kubrick’s film, a kind of madness that serves only to stem the violence at the heart of humanity. As all caretakers will go mad, all civilisations will collapse. The project of society itself is doomed.
The Shining is notoriously difficult to understand, with readings ranging from its meaning being something to do with the colonisation of the Americas to it being about the holocaust. The 2012 documentary Room 237 exhaustively documents these readings and, quite rightly, implicates that they are akin to conspiracy theories. It seems to me that the reason for this is that Kubrick’s film is not about a single violent event, a particular period or even a given social system. It is a rumination upon a supposed human nature. As such its critique of bourgeois family relations is secondary to a broader, far more abstract project. Politics is implied but, ultimately, removed from the equation.
The “second wave” films of the golden age continued and deepened this process of depoliticisation. For the sake of time, I will only discuss two films from the period: John Carpenter’s The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The Thing, released in 1982, is a remake of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World which, in turn, is based on a 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. It’s important to know the films director, John Carpenter, viewed The Thing as the first part in his Apocalypse Trilogy, followed by Prince of Darkness in 1987 and In the Mouth of Madness in 1994. Viewed alongside its sequels, The Thing is rendered as a form of cosmic horror, drawing heavily on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. As in Lovecraft, the fear represented in the film is that of the unknown, its enormity and the insignificance of man’s place in the universe. Throughout the film this is represented through the malleability of life and death, both states falling prey to the whims of its monster, quite literally a thing we cannot comprehend. The monster contorts flesh to its whim. It can control anybody and anything it comes into contact with, representing a power beyond our reckoning.
This is not to say that The Thing does not play upon more comprehensible social themes. A 2012 review of Carpenter’s opus by Matthew Pridham highlights the absence of any women in the film, something thrown into a stark light by the inclusion of female characters in the 2011 prequel. Pridham argues that the beast here has two potential social meanings. In one sense, it represents the fear of the other — that is, the notion that we cannot ever truly know another person. This is the application of cosmic horror to the psyche of individual beings and it has a resonance with existential philosophy. In a more literal reading, Pridham argues that the exclusively male cast are here terrorised by an unspeakable desire — that of homosexuality. Whilst both readings are useful and valid, painting Carpenter’s film as either a more concrete realisation of existential horror or a work of rather paranoiac homophobia, to me they can form only additives to the film’s central horror. The Thing all but rejects these kind of readings by the virtue of its beast’s incomprehensibility. It rejects politics in favour of Lovecraftian insignificance and body horror.
In The Shining and The Thing what we can see is a motion away from the political themes of the “first wave” films, in favour of more abstract, existential horror. Despite this, these films still have meaning and discuss important concepts. This is not so in the 1984 film, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Here, the political meaning of the slasher film — as emphasised by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — is reduced to insignificance. Instead, we are presented with well made, entertaining horror that draws upon narrower fears.
To me, Elm Street is about abuse and the end of innocence. Throughout the film our villain — Freddy Krueger — terrorises our protagonists through their dreams. Toward the end of the film, it is revealed that he lives only on fear — that if you are not afraid of him, then he cannot harm you. It’s well known that Krueger was originally intended to be a child molester, not a child murderer, and I think this gives an indication to the film’s meaning. In Elm Street, it is the silencing effect of fear which allows abuse to continue unimpeded. As Freddy will be killed if you do not fear him, so too can abuse be stopped if the abused speak out. This is a simplistic message and, frankly, lacks any political resonance.
As I have argued, the progression of the golden age of US horror film represents a continuous process of de-politicisation. The searing, heartfelt anti-capitalism of the “first wave” film fades into the background, first eclipsed by the more abstract horror of The Shining or The Thing, then ultimately fading into narrow themes that evade political critique. It is through the de-politicisation of horror in the 1980s that horror was able to become more respectable, more acceptable, to US society. All that remains to ask is why this process occurred. What were the material, artistic and ideological factors that drove this process?
Part four: The decline of political horror film
In order to explain how political horror cinéma fell into decline through the mid to late 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, I want to return now to Harris’ video on VHS. Two of the observations that he makes on the impact of VHS on film are a prerequisite to gaining a real understanding of horror’s transformation. Firstly, the ability to view films at home has changed the way we approach the medium as a society. As Harris explains, when we go to the cinéma our entire attention is occupied by the film we watch. We have a direct and continuous relationship to its imagery, story and acting on a scale which makes it difficult to miss anything. The environment is such that we treat each moment as significant and, unless we leave in protest at the quality of a work or fall asleep, we see every moment of the film. With the introduction and popularisation of VHS tapes, this relationship changes. Whilst we still canview film in a similar manner to that experienced at the cinéma, having these films at our own, private disposal allows us to interact with them in new and complex ways. We can watch them with our family, chat over them. We can fall asleep during the climax of the film, rewind and watch it the next day. A behaviour particularly prevalent in relation to horror film is to hire or buy a film purely for the purpose of making fun of it with our friends. This creates a contradiction in our relationship to film as an art form. On the one hand, film is more integrated into ordinary social life and more intensive study of the medium becomes possible. On the other, the variety of new uses for the form estranges us from it as a medium.
The observation Harris has made here opens up immensely complex questions about how we relate to film in a mass-produced form. I’ll be returning to this question in episode five of this series — “Netflix, subscription fees and the future of streaming”. For the present, I simply want to highlight that this malleability in how we approach film has allowed new types of film to appear and succeed on the capitalist free market. If we approach film not as a singular unified product, but in the fragmented or ironic way in which this new way of viewing allows, then even films universally deemed to be bad can achieve profitable returns.
Marx’s observations on the historical character of art in Grundrisse are helpful here. Art is a field that constructs the ideological shape of reality. In this sense, it belongs to what Marx describes as the ideological superstructure of society in his 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This is not simply a reflective category, which can be suggested by Marx’s juxtaposition of the concept against what he calls the material or economic basis of society, ‘the real foundation’. Marx’s proposition in Grundrisse that art plays an active role in the production of society suggests a far more complex relation between the superstructure and base of society. In other words, art is not simply a reflection of material reality. It is an active process which shapes material reality within the constraints set by the economic relations of a given society.
If Marx’s theory seems a little dense to you, don’t worry. It can be demonstrated within the history of US horror’s decline as a political art form. Harris’ second observation provides us with the starting point for this analysis. The advent of VHS tapes brought about an enormous market in tape sales. This meant that films did not need to be successful at the cinéma in order to succeed financially and, in many ways, the new VHS market was more stable. As films can be sold for longer and unbroken periods of time, they behave more like an ordinary commodity. This market became lucrative and oversaturated. This created the context for new forms of film to emerge.
If a film doesn’t need to hold your attention for its entire run-time, it can have empty scenes, aimless divergences, shallow characters, plot holes or all of these things. It can create a striking moment with one scene then play out the rest of its run-time without any need to maintain or build upon itself. These kinds of films proliferated quickly, largely as they were cheap to produce. This is important for horror, where we see the emergence of a vast market of direct-to-video films and a black market in under-the-counter “video nasties”. As such, even those films constructed for cinéma came into competition with an enormous market of simplistic films. Production times needed to be shortened and the same structural changes to the medium began to permeate the mainstream of horror cinéma. The density of metaphor and imagery required to effectively raise horror to the level of political form is hopefully signposted by the analysis offered in the previous part of this episode. The kind of film structure that dominated the horror VHS market necessarily altered the structure of the films made by Hollywood monopolies as they attempted to appeal to an ever enlarging audience. This shift made political horror more unlikely to emerge.
What this demonstrates is how art and the capitalist economy interacted in shaping social phenomena. The advent of VHS — a material change —altered both economics and film itself. The new markets created by VHS became as enormous as they did only because of the new ways of viewing film VHS allowed. This shift in artistic sensibilities allowed films of a lower quality to be produced cheaply and still achieve a profit. This allowed new film-makers to come onto the scene, using very small budgets. Economically, these represented competitive threats to the dominance of the Hollywood monopolies. Another artistic shift — this time in the production of mainstream filmic art — was required in order for them to compete. As a consequence of the need to produce films that tried to strike a balance between how we view them at the cinéma and how we view them at home, the dense imagery required to render horror politically incisive became less and less frequent. The decline of political horror was at least partly achieved as a by-product of more complex changes in the social structure of US society.
There is, of course, another factor that we must take into account. By the early 1990s our attitude to horror was so dramatically changed that the films popular in this period border on parody. We can see this in the Friday the Thirteenth and Elm Street franchises, which stoop to asking us to consider their villains as absurd protagonists. The longer these franchises went on the more they came to resemble a kind of blood-sport, with audiences maintained through increasing absurd murder scenarios. By 2001 this process achieved its zenith in the outright farcical Jason X. In this, the lumbering giant kills people in space. It’s an outright mockery of our villain or even the idea of fear and really emphasises the position that horror occupied in US society over this period. This relates to the historical development of the capitalist crisis.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened up enormous territories for imperialist investment. Imperialism began to redivided the world. The economic crisis that had begun over 1973 and 1974 was held off by an enormous extension of credit and an enormous increase in capital exports from the major imperialist nations. These societies got drunk on the unstable, parasitic capital gained from gambling and super-exploitation. The cultural atmosphere was that of the “go-go” ’90s. Horror that threatened such a culture with the notion of its dark underbelly could not find a place. Over the last two decades Western imperialist society’s attitude to horror has been largely ironic. The only genres that have survived have been those that use horror as a form of blood-sport — something we can see in the Saw franchise — , films that use jump-scares and tension to drag their audience along a rollercoaster and those that mock themselves. Only rarely does any meaningful work punctuate the modern form of horror.
I don’t disagree with Billson’s essential assumption. The capitalist crisis definitely does condition the way we produce and view horror fiction. However, the history of the golden age of US horror film tells us that her conclusion that the present crisis will produce excellent horror fiction is flawed. There are more complex social processes that condition horror than simply whether or not the horror of our moment will achieve anything of the resonance achieved by that produced in the 1970s and 80s.
Here is the central question I’m trying to get at. On the one, our historical moment is ripe for a new political horror. Even as I’ve been writing this episode, the world has taken a step closer to nuclear war, with tensions between US imperialism and the DPRK mounting each day. The conditions that the working class are being asked to live in, even in the imperialist nations, are intolerable. I’ve been doing some reading about housing recently and I think a single statistic can illustrate the depth of this. Over one million people in Britain presently face homelessness.
Yet, on the other hand we are burdened by this cultural shift, this change in how we use, produce and perceive film. The change that VHS brought to our relationship with film as an art form cannot simply be undone. It has fundamentally altered this part of artistic life. This is even more complex when we consider the shift in viewing habits brought about by on-demand TV and streaming services.
This comes down to us. A political horror is possible, useful and even necessary. If it is to be done, then it must be done mindfully, drawing on the history of this form in a far more detailed and knowledgeable way than I’ve been able to here. All of this is needed to answer two crucial questions. Can we make political horror and will we take it seriously?
Art, writing, editing and performance by James Bell.
Recording by Alex Bushell.
Reproduced with full permission and thanks to the author. Originally posted on his Medium account.
In order to explain how political horror cinéma fell into decline through the mid to late 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, I want to return now to Harris’ video on VHS. Two of the observations that he makes on the impact of VHS on film are a prerequisite to gaining a real understanding of horror’s transformation. Firstly, the ability to view films at home has changed the way we approach the medium as a society. As Harris explains, when we go to the cinéma our entire attention is occupied by the film we watch. We have a direct and continuous relationship to its imagery, story and acting on a scale which makes it difficult to miss anything. The environment is such that we treat each moment as significant and, unless we leave in protest at the quality of a work or fall asleep, we see every moment of the film. With the introduction and popularisation of VHS tapes, this relationship changes. Whilst we still canview film in a similar manner to that experienced at the cinéma, having these films at our own, private disposal allows us to interact with them in new and complex ways. We can watch them with our family, chat over them. We can fall asleep during the climax of the film, rewind and watch it the next day. A behaviour particularly prevalent in relation to horror film is to hire or buy a film purely for the purpose of making fun of it with our friends. This creates a contradiction in our relationship to film as an art form. On the one hand, film is more integrated into ordinary social life and more intensive study of the medium becomes possible. On the other, the variety of new uses for the form estranges us from it as a medium.
The observation Harris has made here opens up immensely complex questions about how we relate to film in a mass-produced form. I’ll be returning to this question in episode five of this series — “Netflix, subscription fees and the future of streaming”. For the present, I simply want to highlight that this malleability in how we approach film has allowed new types of film to appear and succeed on the capitalist free market. If we approach film not as a singular unified product, but in the fragmented or ironic way in which this new way of viewing allows, then even films universally deemed to be bad can achieve profitable returns.
Marx’s observations on the historical character of art in Grundrisse are helpful here. Art is a field that constructs the ideological shape of reality. In this sense, it belongs to what Marx describes as the ideological superstructure of society in his 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This is not simply a reflective category, which can be suggested by Marx’s juxtaposition of the concept against what he calls the material or economic basis of society, ‘the real foundation’. Marx’s proposition in Grundrisse that art plays an active role in the production of society suggests a far more complex relation between the superstructure and base of society. In other words, art is not simply a reflection of material reality. It is an active process which shapes material reality within the constraints set by the economic relations of a given society.
If Marx’s theory seems a little dense to you, don’t worry. It can be demonstrated within the history of US horror’s decline as a political art form. Harris’ second observation provides us with the starting point for this analysis. The advent of VHS tapes brought about an enormous market in tape sales. This meant that films did not need to be successful at the cinéma in order to succeed financially and, in many ways, the new VHS market was more stable. As films can be sold for longer and unbroken periods of time, they behave more like an ordinary commodity. This market became lucrative and oversaturated. This created the context for new forms of film to emerge.
If a film doesn’t need to hold your attention for its entire run-time, it can have empty scenes, aimless divergences, shallow characters, plot holes or all of these things. It can create a striking moment with one scene then play out the rest of its run-time without any need to maintain or build upon itself. These kinds of films proliferated quickly, largely as they were cheap to produce. This is important for horror, where we see the emergence of a vast market of direct-to-video films and a black market in under-the-counter “video nasties”. As such, even those films constructed for cinéma came into competition with an enormous market of simplistic films. Production times needed to be shortened and the same structural changes to the medium began to permeate the mainstream of horror cinéma. The density of metaphor and imagery required to effectively raise horror to the level of political form is hopefully signposted by the analysis offered in the previous part of this episode. The kind of film structure that dominated the horror VHS market necessarily altered the structure of the films made by Hollywood monopolies as they attempted to appeal to an ever enlarging audience. This shift made political horror more unlikely to emerge.
What this demonstrates is how art and the capitalist economy interacted in shaping social phenomena. The advent of VHS — a material change —altered both economics and film itself. The new markets created by VHS became as enormous as they did only because of the new ways of viewing film VHS allowed. This shift in artistic sensibilities allowed films of a lower quality to be produced cheaply and still achieve a profit. This allowed new film-makers to come onto the scene, using very small budgets. Economically, these represented competitive threats to the dominance of the Hollywood monopolies. Another artistic shift — this time in the production of mainstream filmic art — was required in order for them to compete. As a consequence of the need to produce films that tried to strike a balance between how we view them at the cinéma and how we view them at home, the dense imagery required to render horror politically incisive became less and less frequent. The decline of political horror was at least partly achieved as a by-product of more complex changes in the social structure of US society.
There is, of course, another factor that we must take into account. By the early 1990s our attitude to horror was so dramatically changed that the films popular in this period border on parody. We can see this in the Friday the Thirteenth and Elm Street franchises, which stoop to asking us to consider their villains as absurd protagonists. The longer these franchises went on the more they came to resemble a kind of blood-sport, with audiences maintained through increasing absurd murder scenarios. By 2001 this process achieved its zenith in the outright farcical Jason X. In this, the lumbering giant kills people in space. It’s an outright mockery of our villain or even the idea of fear and really emphasises the position that horror occupied in US society over this period. This relates to the historical development of the capitalist crisis.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened up enormous territories for imperialist investment. Imperialism began to redivided the world. The economic crisis that had begun over 1973 and 1974 was held off by an enormous extension of credit and an enormous increase in capital exports from the major imperialist nations. These societies got drunk on the unstable, parasitic capital gained from gambling and super-exploitation. The cultural atmosphere was that of the “go-go” ’90s. Horror that threatened such a culture with the notion of its dark underbelly could not find a place. Over the last two decades Western imperialist society’s attitude to horror has been largely ironic. The only genres that have survived have been those that use horror as a form of blood-sport — something we can see in the Saw franchise — , films that use jump-scares and tension to drag their audience along a rollercoaster and those that mock themselves. Only rarely does any meaningful work punctuate the modern form of horror.
I don’t disagree with Billson’s essential assumption. The capitalist crisis definitely does condition the way we produce and view horror fiction. However, the history of the golden age of US horror film tells us that her conclusion that the present crisis will produce excellent horror fiction is flawed. There are more complex social processes that condition horror than simply whether or not the horror of our moment will achieve anything of the resonance achieved by that produced in the 1970s and 80s.
Here is the central question I’m trying to get at. On the one, our historical moment is ripe for a new political horror. Even as I’ve been writing this episode, the world has taken a step closer to nuclear war, with tensions between US imperialism and the DPRK mounting each day. The conditions that the working class are being asked to live in, even in the imperialist nations, are intolerable. I’ve been doing some reading about housing recently and I think a single statistic can illustrate the depth of this. Over one million people in Britain presently face homelessness.
Yet, on the other hand we are burdened by this cultural shift, this change in how we use, produce and perceive film. The change that VHS brought to our relationship with film as an art form cannot simply be undone. It has fundamentally altered this part of artistic life. This is even more complex when we consider the shift in viewing habits brought about by on-demand TV and streaming services.
This comes down to us. A political horror is possible, useful and even necessary. If it is to be done, then it must be done mindfully, drawing on the history of this form in a far more detailed and knowledgeable way than I’ve been able to here. All of this is needed to answer two crucial questions. Can we make political horror and will we take it seriously?
Art, writing, editing and performance by James Bell.
Recording by Alex Bushell.
Reproduced with full permission and thanks to the author. Originally posted on his Medium account.
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